In my last post I wrote about the April jobs report. I noted that the sector of the economy reporting the largest job growth (57,000) was retail. I went on to point out that McDonald’s last month said it was hiring 50,000 workers, and that this accounted for most of April’s retail job increases.
I sent out a variant of this post to a number of leading columnists. One was kind enough to check out what I sent him. He found that since the McDonald’s hiring was on the 19th of last month, and the government did its job figuring before that date, the 50,000 (or whatever) new jobs at McDonald’s won’t get into a government jobs report until next month.
To which I respond. Sorry about that. But so what?
Most jobs in retailing, as I pointed out previously, are low wage, few if any benefits jobs. Does it really matter if these retail jobs are at McDonald’s or Burger King, or a department store counter, or the neighborhood pizza shop? They are still mostly law wage jobs with few if any benefits. Most of the other new jobs reported last month were also in generally low paid and little or no benefit sectors of the economy. Not nearly enough of new jobs were in better compensated manufacturing or construction. And there were actual cutbacks in better paid government work.
Is financial reporting supposed to be just batting around raw numbers. Mine are bigger (or smaller) than yours, so things are getting better (or worse). Do we live in a reality that Mark Twain described as “lies, damn lies and statistics?” Or do we look more closely at the numbers to see what they REALLY mean?
At the same time all these lousy jobs were being created, another report detailed soaring CEO pay, surpassing record 2007 levels. And of course there are all those mega-bonuses on Wall Street
This is not where our country is supposed to be heading. Every poll shows most Americans know this. Perhaps someone ought to tell the people in Washington.
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