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October 17, 2018 03:35 pm PDT

Unpacking the US's "low unemployment": stagnant wages, bad jobs, high incarceration, discouraged workers back in school

The Trump administration is very proud of the US's historically low unemployment figures (lowest in 50 years), but statistics are deceiving, especially labor statistics.

The most obvious fact about the low unemployment numbers is that employment statistics exclude "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for work; the number of discouraged workers is higher than it's been since the 1980s.

The jobs that remain are often not good ones. Wages are stagnant, despite low unemployment (which usually drives wage increases), because trade unions have been weakened and "free trade" deals means that US employers can seek cheaper labor in other countries.

This has driven a large slice of the US workforce back to university in the hopes of getting a better job (even as US tuitions have hit a record highs, and the wage prospects for workers with advanced degrees is declining), exempting them from the workforce participation statistics and artificially inflating the employment numbers.

Finally, America puts people in prison like crazy: the millions of Americans rotting in prison are also not counted in the labor statistics.

This is Trumpian full employment: millions of people chasing precarious, work with starvation wages; millions more in prison, and the rest incurring lifelong student debts from "universities," including outright scams like Trump University.

Of course, Trump can't really take credit for this: as Obama has been at pains to point out, the rise of precarious work and the exit of discourage people from the workforce took part largely on the watch of the Democratic establishment, whose shift from protecting workers to protecting bankers has been a multi-decade, accelerating process. Read the rest


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