Northwest Indiana Discussion

The number of American workers collecting federal disability payments climbed to yet another record high of 8,830,026 in January, up from 8,827,795 in December, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.

This is the 192nd straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments has increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. That month the number of workers taking disability dropped by 249 people—from 4,385,623 in December 1996 to 4,385,374 in January 1997.

As the overall number of Americans collecting disability has increased, the ratio of full-time workers to disability beneficiaries has decreased.

A congressional report finds that the economic recovery hasn’t solved problems faced by the black community, including “disproportionately high unemployment rates.”

Blacks account for 12 percent of the labor force, according to the U.S. Joint Economic Committee, but suffered from a 13.8 percent jobless rate in January 2013 and make up 25 percent of workers who have been unemployed for longer than 99 weeks.

Furthermore, the number of black workers looking for work has fallen by almost 300,000 since 2011, and there are nearly 2.6 million black workers who want to work but can’t find a job.

In April the EEOC unveiled its “Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records,” which declares that “criminal record exclusions have a disparate impact based on race and national origin.”

The impetus for this “guidance” is that black men are nearly seven times more likely than white men to serve time in prison, and therefore refusals to hire convicts disproportionally impact blacks, according to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by James Bovard, a libertarian author and lecturer whose books include “Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen.”

Most businesses perform background checks on potential employees, but the EEOC frowns on these checks and “creates legal tripwires that could spark federal lawsuits,” Bovard observes.

An EEOC commissioner who opposed the new policy, Constance Baker, said in April that the new guidelines will scare businesses from conducting background checks.

The number of Americans not in the labor force increased by 296,000 in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs report.

According to the report, there were a total of 89.3 million people not in the labor force, up from 89 million in January.

BLS labels people who are unemployed and no longer looking for work as “not in the labor force,” including people who have retired on schedule, taken early retirement, or simply given up looking for work.

The increase marks the second month in a row, after rising in January from 88.8 million in December. Those not in the labor force had declined in December from 88.9 million in November.

The nation’s unemployment rate decreased to 7.7 percent in February, down from 7.9 percent in January. Overall unemployment “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” the Labor Department s

Over one-third of the 9.1 million full-time jobs among America’s diverse business franchises could be cut back or eliminated by Obamacare as small businesses struggle to maintain profitability while coughing up money to pay for Washington-mandated health care coverage, according to the International Franchise Association.

The threat of hitting 3.2 million full-time workers as the Affordable Care Act takes effect next year is prompting the owners of fast food restaurants, service companies and other franchises to urge Congress to make significant changes in Obamacare.

To help their cause, the association on Friday released a new state-by-state breakdown on the potential impact on jobs in the bull’s eye of Obamacare, which declares that a 30-hour week is full-time, not the industry accepted 40 hours. That 10-hour difference has thousands of franchise owners scrambling to either fund healthcare for those working 30 hours, or cut hours back to below 30 hours.

The Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that the U.S. economy will never achieve full employment during the eight years Barack Obama serves as president.

That would make Obama the only American president during the post-World War II era who never presided over a year in which the U.S. economy offered full employment to the American people.

The CBO defines “full employment” to be when the national unemployment rate is at or below what it calls the “natural unemployment rate.”

The natural unemployment rate, according to CBO, is the “rate of unemployment arising from all sources except fluctuations in aggregate demand. Those sources include frictional unemployment, which is associated with normal turnover of jobs, and structural unemployment, which includes unemployment caused by mismatches between the skills of available workers and the skills necessary to fill vacant positions and unemployment caused when wages exceed their market-clearing levels because of institutional factors, such as legal minimum wages, the presence of unions, social conventions, or wage-setting practices by employers that are intended to increase workers’ morale and effort.”

The ADP National Employment Report revealed Wednesday that private employers hired 158,000 workers in March -- the smallest gain in five months and below economists' forecasts of around 200,000.

Many of these new jobs are in low-paying sectors such as retail, food services and health care. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in February that retailers hired 252,000 new workers over the past 12 months and the industry overall has recovered 723,000 jobs since reaching a low in December 2009. In comparison, the construction industry has added just 349,000 new jobs since reaching its employment low in January 2011.
The U.S. economy overall has increased payrolls by 355,000 since the beginning of the year and more than 1.8 million in 2012. This Friday the BLS will give its latest snapshot of the domestic labor market. Economists are expecting an average gain of 200,000 jobs in March.
Thirty consecutive months of job growth has helped the U.S. economy recover from its darkest days in 2009, but the national unemployment rate still remains high at 7.7%. According to Robin Harding, U.S. economics editor at the Financial Times, the U.S. has shed nearly two million clerical jobs since 2007 while creating just 387,000 managerial positions, setting up a polarization in the labor market.
“We’re seeing this ongoing structural change as well as a cyclical change” in the economy, Harding says. “Someone finding a job in this economy may not be finding the kind of job they’d like to.”
Harding says the shift to low-wage jobs from “good, middle-class” jobs such as construction workers, bookkeepers, typists, bank tellers and data entry employees, has led to growing income inequality. These positions have been replaced by modern IT systems that companies are using to cut costs and increase their bottom lines.
“Companies are finding ways to automate these office processes,” Harding says, and this leads “to a lot fewer of the steady office jobs that the middle class has been relying on since the second world war.”
Harding analyzed salaries for fast-growing occupations over the past year. He found that the average wage for a clerical job in 2012 was $34,410. But the positions that are being created in this economy – like a personal care aid – paid on average of $24,550.
This downward trend in salary does not apply to every industry, Harding notes. Computer programmers, for example, can command high salaries because that industry faces a shortage of qualified workers. Policy makers in Washington have been trying for decades to stem the losses of living wage middle-class jobs, Harding says, but improvements in education and job training require a lot of investment – which the government may not be inclined to pursue these days.

The initial jobless claims number is out, and it’s ugly.

Initial jobless claims have spiked by 28K week over week to 385K.

Analysts had expected 353K.

This is the second weak datapoint in a row.

Yesterday we got an ADP report that missed notably.

Although many economists this morning blamed the expiration of the payroll tax cut as a reason for unexpectedly poor employment numbers, the White House decided to blame the bad report on sequestration.

“It is important to bear in mind that the March household and payroll surveys are the first monthly surveys to look at employment since the beginning of sequestration,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan B. Krueger explained in a statement this morning. “While the recovery was gaining traction before sequestration took effect, these arbitrary and unnecessary cuts to government services will be a headwind in the months to come, and will cut key investments in the Nation’s future competitiveness.”

The nation’s largest movie theater chain has cut the hours of thousands of employees, saying in a company memo that ObamaCare requirements are to blame.

Regal Entertainment Group, which operates more than 500 theaters in 38 states, last month rolled back shifts for non-salaried workers to 30 hours per week, putting them under the threshold at which employers are required to provide health insurance. The Nashville-based company said in a letter to managers that the move was a direct result of ObamaCare.

“In addition, some managers have requested guidance on what they should tell those employees negatively impacted and, at your discretion, we suggest the following,” read the memo obtained by FoxNews.com. “To comply with the Affordable Care Act, Regal had to increase our health care budget to cover those newly deemed eligible based on the law’s definition of a full-time employee.”

(Reuters) – More than 40 percent of recent U.S. college graduates are underemployed or need more training to get on a career track, a poll released on Tuesday showed.

The online survey of 1,050 workers who finished school in the past two years and 1,010 who will receive their degree in 2013 also found that many graduates, some heavily in debt because of the cost of their education, say they are in jobs that do not require a college degree.

Thirty-four percent said they had student loans of $30,000 or less, while 17 percent owed between $30,000 to $50,000.

“For our nation’s youngest workers, as well as for the workforce at large, there is a real need for employers to reexamine how they hire, train and develop their employees,” said Katherine Lavelle, of the global management consulting firm Accenture, which conducted the survey.

Nearly half, 42 percent, of recent graduates expect they will need an advanced degree to further their career and almost a quarter are already planning to take graduate courses.

Despite the Obama administration’s generous support for green energy, job creation in the sector has both lagged and come at a hefty cost to taxpayers, according to a new report.

According to the Institute for Energy Research, the Department of Energy has spent nearly $26 billion since 2009 on its Section 1703 and 1705 loan programs. However, these two programs only yielded 2,308 permanent jobs — meaning the cost to taxpayers was $11.25 million per job.

“Clearly, in terms of ‘bang for the buck,” government programs that coddle renewable energy are losers,” according to IER. “In terms of jobs, the losers are the American workers who would otherwise be gainfully employed but for the tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars on the administration’s obsession with “green energy.’”

Small business owners’ fear of the effect of the new health-care reform law on their bottom line is prompting many to hold off on hiring and even to shed jobs in some cases, a recent poll found.

“We were startled because we know that employers were concerned about the Affordable Care Act and the effects it would have on their business, but we didn’t realize the extent they were concerned, or that the businesses were being proactive to make sure the effects of the ACA actually were minimized,” said attorney Steven Friedman of Littler Mendelson. His firm, which specializes in employment law, commissioned the Gallup poll.

“If the small businesses’ fears are reasonable, then it could mean that the small business sector grows slower than what economic conditions otherwise would indicate. And small businesses have been a growth engine in the economy,” Friedman told CNBC.

Forty-one percent of the businesses surveyed have frozen hiring because of the health-care law known as Obamacare. And almost one-fifth—19 percent— answered “yes” when asked if they had “reduced the number of employees you have in your business as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act.”