As one who waits to Xmas eve to start shopping, I will be doing my part to turn this around Nation's Retailers Have Glum Weekend ] Dec 22, 10:04 AM (ET) By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO NEW YORK (AP) - The critical last weekend before Christmas didn't deliver the sale bonanza merchants were hoping for, with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announcing Monday that last-minute buying showed "some improvement," but was not enough to offset weak business in the early part of the month. The world's largest retailer said that December same-store sales growth was still tracking at the low end of its projected 3 percent to 5 percent range. For the second week in a row, traffic was down from year-ago levels for the week ended Friday, the company said on its pre-recorded conference call. Target Corp. is expected to report same-store sales - sales at stores opened at least a year - later in the day. Same-store sales are considered the best indicator of a retailer's health. The federal government's raised terror alert status, announced Sunday, is also seen as a headache for merchants, which are now counting on heavy shopping this week to meet their goals. Said C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America's Research Group, based in Charleston, S.C.: The threat "could reduce retailers' ability to have a huge business on Monday and Tuesday, and the week after Christmas. It may likely make people who are close to being done decide they've purchased enough." Some representatives of retail firms and organizations disagreed. "Consumers learned to be vigilant, and I don't think this will have an effect" on their shopping, said Karen MacDonald, a spokeswoman at Taubman Centers Inc., which owns and manages 31 shopping centers in 13 states. Ellen Tolley, a spokeswoman at the National Retail Federation, agreed, saying that "since Sept. 11, consumers have learned to go on with their lives," and she doesn't foresee traffic being hurt. Discounters and luxury stores fared the best this past weekend, according to Beemer. But at mid-priced department stores and mall-based apparel chains, which deepened price cuts on sweaters, jewelry and other items, sales were uneven, continuing the trend seen throughout the season, Beemer said Sunday. "I think it was a very strong weekend, but I don't think it was as big as retailers needed," said Beemer, based on interviews with retail clients. He added that consumers "were looking at the lowest price in each category of merchandise." At the Valley West Mall in West Des Moines, Iowa, Connie Ferree, was shopping with her mother for 50 to 60 gifts for her relatives, but she said she's spending far less this December. "The job situation is bad," said Ferree, who has been struggling to find a job in Ames, Iowa. She said she had begun her shopping last week, and was hunting discounted items. Despite a recovering economy, merchants struggled with modest sales throughout the season and were counting even more for a sales surge this past weekend after two weekends of Northeast snowstorms. Retailers also are holding out hope that the last-minute spending in the three days before Christmas will help merchants meet their sales goals. "Traffic was about the same as last year, and stores were very busy," said Tolley. "And if some stores were a little short of their goal, there's plenty of time for that to change." She noted that the National Retail Federation is still sticking to its holiday forecast for a 5.7 percent gain in total sales from a year ago. In the past few years, the Saturday before Christmas has been the busiest day of the season. Last year, the Monday before Christmas was the second biggest sales day. In 2002, the last week before Christmas accounted for 41 percent of holiday sales, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. This year, consumers appear to be waiting longer. According to the association's survey, conducted from Dec. 4-10, 10 percent of the approximate 6,800 consumers polled had completed their shopping, compared with 15 percent during the same time a year ago. Many stores, particularly department stores and apparel stores, had refrained from aggressive discounting earlier in the season, hoping consumers would be willing to pay full price, but the strategy appeared to have backfired. And plenty of stores added "unplanned broad-based discounts" this weekend, according to Tom Filandro, senior retail analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group. Limited Inc.'s Express, for example, offered 40 percent off on all sweaters in the stores. Of course, that's good news for consumers like Margo Whisman, who started her shopping on Friday. "We're just procrastinators, and that's why we get the sales," said Whisman, who was at the Mall St. Matthews in Louisville, Ky., on Saturday at JC Penney Co. Nikeya Merriweather, who was dragging three bags stuffed with gifts, at the Gallery mall in downtown Philadelphia, said she had been Christmas shopping since Dec. 1, but had plenty to buy Saturday. And not until then could she find a good bargain. Merriweather found a "Baby I Know" doll for her baby, discounted to $14.99, from $29.99.
Good column and some very interesting points... As good as anything I've read recently... __________ Un-American Recovery By Harold Meyerson Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A15 Why is the Bush recovery different from all other recoveries? A slump is a slump is a slump, but it's during recoveries that the distinctive features of a changing economy become apparent. And our current recovery differs so radically from every other bounce-back since World War II that you have to wonder whether we're really talking about the same country. After inching along imperceptibly for quarter after quarter, the economy is, by some measures, roaring back. The annual growth rate last quarter topped 8 percent, while productivity increased by more than 9 percent. To be sure, employment is still down by 2.4 million jobs since Bush took office, but it's finally begun to rise a bit. And there are some indices that make even the productivity increases pale by comparison. Corporations have been having a bang-up recovery all along, it turns out; they are about to experience their seventh straight quarter of profit growth. The operating earnings of the 500 companies on the Standard and Poor's index, researchers at Thomas First Call in Boston estimate, will rise by 21.9 percent over last year. Who could ask for anything more? Well, the American people, for one. Since July the average hourly wage increase for the 85 million Americans who work in non-supervisory jobs in offices and factories is a flat 3 cents. Wages are up just 2.1 percent since November 2002 -- the slowest wage growth we've experienced in 40 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute have been comparing recoveries of late, looking into the growth in corporate-sector income in each of the nine recoveries the United States has gone through since the end of World War II. In the preceding eight, the share of the corporate income growth going to profits averaged 26 percent, and never exceeded 32 percent. In the current recovery, however, profits come to 46 percent of the corporations' additional income. Conversely, labor compensation averaged 61 percent of the total income growth in the preceding recoveries, and was never lower than 55 percent. In the Bush recovery, it's just 29 percent of the new income coming in to the corporations. Someone with an antiquarian vocabulary might rightly note that this is a recovery for capital, not labor; indeed, that it's a recovery for capital at the expense of labor. But we are none of us antiquarians, so let's just proceed. There are only a couple of ways to explain how the capacity of U.S. workers to claim their accustomed share of the nation's income has so stunningly collapsed. Outsourcing is certainly a big part of the picture. As Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, has noted, private-sector hiring in the current recovery is roughly 7 million jobs shy of what would have been the norm in previous recoveries, and U.S. corporations, high-tech as well as low-tech, are busily hiring employees from lower-wage nations instead of from our own. The jobless rate among U.S. software engineers, for instance, has doubled over the past three years. In Bangalore, India, where American companies are on a huge hiring spree for the kind of talent they used to scoop up in Silicon Valley, the starting annual salary for top electrical engineering graduates, says Business Week, is $10,000 -- compared with $80,000 here in the States. Tell that to a software writer in Palo Alto and she's not likely to hit up her boss for a raise. That software writer certainly doesn't belong to a union, either. Indeed, the current recovery is not only the first to take place in an economy in which global wage rates are a factor, but the first since before the New Deal to take place in an economy in which the rate of private-sector unionization is in single digits -- just 8.5 percent of the workforce. In short, what we have here resembles a pre-New Deal recovery more than it does any period of prosperity between the presidencies of the second Roosevelt and the second Bush. The great balancing act of the New Deal -- the fostering of vibrant unions, the legislation of minimum wages and such, in a conscious effort to spread prosperity and boost consumption -- has come undone. (The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 1997.) And the problem with pre-new deal recoveries is that they never created lasting prosperity. The current administration is not responsible for the broad contours of this miserably misshapen recovery, but its every action merely increases the imbalance of power between America's employers and employees. But the Democrats' prescriptions for more broadly shared prosperity need some tweaking, too. With the globalization of high-end professions, no Democrat can assert quite so confidently the line that Bill Clinton used so often: What you earn is a result of what you learn. This year's crop of presidential candidates is taking more seriously the importance of labor standards in trade accords, and the right of workers to organize. But they've got a way to go to make the issue of stagnating incomes into the kind of battle cry it should be in the campaign against Bush. If they're not up to it, I say we outsource 'em all and bring in some pols from Bangalore.
If the *real* unemployment rate now is 9.7, what was it at other points in history? http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs29dec29,1,6261515.story?coll=la-home-headlines Jobless Count Skips Millions The rate hits 9.7% when the underemployed and those who have given up the hunt are added. By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer SAN FRANCISCO — Lisa Gluskin has had a tough three years. She works almost as hard as she did during the dot-com boom, for about 20% of the income. When Gluskin's writing and editing business cratered in 2001, she slashed her rates, began studying for a graduate degree and started teaching part time at a Lake Tahoe community college for a meager wage. It's been a fragmented, hand-to-mouth life, one that she sees mirrored by friends and colleagues who are waiting tables or delivering packages. In the late '90s, the 35-year-old Gluskin says, "we had careers. We had trajectories. Now we have complicated lives. We're not unemployed, but we're underemployed." The nation's official jobless rate is 5.9%, a relatively benign level by historical standards. But economists say that figure paints only a partial — and artificially rosy — picture of the labor market. To begin with, there are the 8.7 million unemployed, defined as those without a job who are actively looking for work. But lurking behind that group are 4.9 million part-time workers such as Gluskin who say they would rather be working full time — the highest number in a decade. There are also the 1.5 million people who want a job but didn't look for one in the last month. Nearly a third of this group say they stopped the search because they were too depressed about the prospect of finding anything. Officially termed "discouraged," their number has surged 20% in a year. Add these three groups together and the jobless total for the U.S. hits 9.7%, up from 9.4% a year ago. No wonder the Democratic presidential candidates have seized on jobs as a potentially powerful weapon. Howard Dean criticized President Bush for "the worst job creation record in over 60 years." Richard Gephardt said that "I have three goals for my presidency: jobs, jobs, jobs." John Kerry said "the first thing" he'd do as president would be to fight his "heart out" to bring back the jobs that have disappeared in recent years. Bush, meanwhile, is quick to seize credit where he can. When the unemployment rate for November fell one-tenth of a point, he went out immediately to give a speech at a Home Depot in Maryland. "More workers are going to work, over 380,000 have joined the workforce in the last couple of months," Bush said. "We've overcome a lot." A number of economists say it's a mistake to evaluate the job market solely by talking about the official unemployment rate. It's a blunt instrument for assessing a condition that is growing ever more vague. "There's certainly an arbitrariness to the official rate," says Princeton University economics professor Alan Krueger. "It irks me that it's not put in proper perspective." On Jan. 9, when the rate for December is announced, both Republicans and Democrats will assuredly again maneuver for advantage — precisely because the number isn't expected to change much. "At this point, where we don't know which way it's going but it isn't likely to be going far, both sides will try to use it," says Michael Lewis-Beck, a political scientist at the University of Iowa. In every election since 1960, the party in the White House lost when the unemployment rate deteriorated during the first half of the year. If the rate improved, the party in the White House won. That's not a coincidence, says Lewis-Beck, who has edited several volumes on how economic conditions determine elections. "People see the president as the chief executive of the economy," he says. "They punish him if things are deteriorating and reward him if things are improving." By any normal standard, things should have been improving on the employment front long before this point. More than 2 million jobs have been lost in the last three years, a period that encompassed a brief, nasty recession and a recovery that was anemic until recently. Even in the best-case scenario, Bush will end this term with a net job loss. That hasn't happened to a president since Herbert Hoover at the beginning of the Depression. Many economists are mystified about why a suddenly booming economy is producing so few jobs. "We're all sitting there and saying, 'When are they going to return?' " says Richard B. Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. "It's looking a little better, but we don't understand why it isn't looking a lot better. Why shouldn't Bush be sitting there saying, 'Man, I'm sitting pretty. This is a great boom'?" One statistic proving particularly perplexing is the percentage of the adult population that is employed. This number rises during good times, as people are lured into the workforce, and falls during recessions as companies falter. True to form, the percentage of adult Americans with jobs dropped from a high of 64.8% in April 2000, just as the stock market was cresting, to 62% in September — the lowest level in a decade. If past recessions are any guide, those 5 million people who found themselves jobless should have driven the unemployment rate up to about 8%. Instead, the rate never went much above 6%. "More than half of the additional people who would have reported themselves as unemployed in a previous big recessionary period ... aren't," a puzzled UC Berkeley economist, Brad DeLong, wrote on his website. "They're reporting themselves as out of the labor force instead." "Out of the labor force" means you're not working for even one hour a week and don't want to, either. It's the traditional category for students, married women with young children, flush retirees and idle millionaires. A new way that people seem to be joining this category is by getting themselves declared disabled. This designation makes them eligible for government payments while removing them from the unemployment rolls. From 1983 to 2000, economists David Autor and Mark Duggan wrote in a recent study, the number of non-elderly adults receiving government disability payments doubled from 3.8 million to 7.7 million. The scholars present a case that the sharp increase isn't because the workplace suddenly became more dangerous. Instead, it has been prompted by liberalized screening policies, which make it possible to claim disabled status for, say, several small impairments as opposed to one big injury. Government examinations also have been downplayed in favor of the disabled's own medical records and the pain he or she claims to be experiencing. At the same time, benefits have been sweetened. As a result, millions of low-income individuals who lost jobs now have an attractive — and permanent — alternative to searching for work. Autor and Duggan concluded that if disability payments weren't so appealing, many more people would be unemployed, boosting the unemployment rate two-thirds of a point. Another way in which people forgo an appearance on the unemployment rolls is if they decide to go into business for themselves. There are 9.6 million people who say they are self-employed full time, a number that rose 118,000 last month. Without the recent increase in self-employed, the jobless number would look much worse. Many others may be working for themselves part time, temporarily, as a way to get food on the table in the absence of better options. Take Steve Fahringer, who until recently was working for a Bay Area marketing agency that cut 20% of its employees and trimmed the wages of the remainder by 20%. Fahringer didn't particularly like his job. Because the recession supposedly was history, he thought he could find a new position. The 34-year-old didn't think it would be easy, but he thought it possible. So he quit. "I left July 1," he says. "I haven't found a new job yet." It's a common problem. The segment of the labor force that has been jobless for more than 15 weeks has risen nearly 150% since 2000. The current level is the highest since the recession of the early 1990s. Nearly one-quarter of the jobless have been unemployed for longer than six months. In Fahringer's case, he spent some time aggressively looking for a job, which made him part of the official July unemployment rate of 6.2%. Then he stopped looking, which meant that he was one small reason the rate started going down. Instead of unemployed, Fahringer was classified as "discouraged." A little more than 8% of the people who want a job in the Bay Area are estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be discouraged, slightly higher than Los Angeles/Long Beach but lower than the battered technology center of San Jose. Discouraged workers have never been included in unemployment rates, although they came close the last time a commission met to reform the system, a quarter of a century ago. "It was a very hot issue," remembers Glen Cain, a retired economist who was a commission member. He says the conservatives on the panel, who felt that anyone who really wanted a job should be out there hustling no matter what, prevailed. Fahringer found an alternative way to earn a bit of money. He did some acrylic paintings, which he sold for a total of $1,000. He calls himself "a hobbyist," which means for a while he moved out of the labor force entirely. Now he's a temp, assigned by his agency to a nonprofit office. For the first time in six months, he's working 40 hours a week. By the government's accounting, he has once again joined the ranks of the employed. But from the standpoint of his wallet, Fahringer is worse off: He's earning less money, with no paid holidays, no sick leave, no pension plan, no health insurance, no future. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank, says Fahringer's situation is in many ways typical. The industries that were expanding in the late '90s, including computer and professional services, paid well. Those industries are in retreat. So is manufacturing, a traditional source of high wages. On the rise, meanwhile, are lower-paying service jobs. During the boom, it was easy to trade up. Now it's just as easy to trade down. Fahringer's solution: Opt out. "I'm thinking of going back to school," he says. "I'd take out a loan." That would put him out of the labor force again. In some eyes, a nation of burger flippers, temps and Wal-Mart clerks isn't the worst scenario for the economy. The worst is that companies continue to eliminate jobs faster than they create them, setting up a game of musical chairs for the labor force. That prospect alarms Erica Groshen, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "If you plot job losses versus gains on a chart, it's shocking," she says. Losses are running at about the same rate they were in 1997 and 1998, two good years for the economy. But job creation in the first quarter of 2003 — the most recent period available—was only 7.4 million, the lowest since 1993. "If this goes on too long, you'd have to worry there's something fundamentally wrong," Groshen says. And although the economy has picked up since March, "so far I haven't seen anything that suggests job creation is picking up." That bodes poorly for Ian Golder. His last full-time job was with a start-up publication that wrote about venture capital. Two years ago, Golder was laid off. It was the first time since he graduated from UC Berkeley 14 years earlier that he didn't have steady work. Golder looked for a while, gave up for a while, landed a contracting gig with no benefits proofreading for a chip maker. When that ran out, he worked 20 hours a month on a financial services newsletter. His wife, Heather, a recent graduate in English from UC Davis, also was without a job. They thought about selling their house in Sacramento and moving, but prospects didn't look any better anywhere else. To make ends meet, they took in two boarders. At the beginning of December, things seemed to improve a bit. Golder got a job in the document-control department of a medical devices company. The department, he was told, used to have 20 full-time people. Now it has five, plus four temps. The job will last two months. After that, who knows? "Optimists say things will be better then," Golder says. "But a full-time position with benefits seems pretty remote."
Will We Follow Bush to Wal-Mart America? By David J. Sirota, AlterNet December 30, 2003 Political strategist James Carville once said that elections are about "the economy, stupid." And one year away from the next election, it certainly appears the economy will be a major factor in deciding who will be the next President. The problem is trying to figure out what's really going on. We see President Bush telling us how good things now are, but we also suspect that we're not being told the whole story. We see stock brokers-c*m-CNBC-analysts telling us things are getting better, yet we are still feeling the pinch of a recession. So what's the story? To parrot Ronald Reagan, are we really better off now than we were four years ago? Let's take a look at the concrete numbers. Since Bush took office, the economy has shed more than 2 million jobs. Poverty has increased two years in a row, the first time that has happened in at least a decade. Twenty-five major American cities saw a 19 percent increase in demand for emergency food for the hungry. Health care costs are skyrocketing, with a new study showing more and more employers forcing workers to pick up the tab. In other words, for millions of Americans, the answer is a flat out no, we are not better off. Still, the White House is pointing to recent macro-economic indicators that show the economy may be coming back to life. Job losses have slowed, at least temporarily. GDP showed healthy growth for the first quarter in a long time. Seeking political advantage, the President is pointing to that data and taking credit for a full-blown recovery and boom. Earlier this month, for instance, he told a Michigan audience that the state's economy "looks pretty good." The problem for Bush is two-fold: first and foremost, the economy is still hurting, and there is no guarantee that these macro-economic indicators will continue improving. In Michigan, for instance, Bush forgot to mention that the state's 7.6 percent unemployment rate is the worst in the country, and that the state had lost 180,000 jobs since he took office. Secondly, even if the overall unemployment and growth numbers do improve, they do not represent day-to-day reality. While the total number of jobs may increase, and corporate profits may fuel growth, it is the kinds of jobs, the level of wages, and the amount of benefits that really indicate whether people are "better off." And if the latest research is any indication, Americans under Bush are having a tougher and tougher time getting by. According to a study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, new jobs created during the 2004-05 period are forecast to pay an average of $35,855 – far lower than the $43,629 average pay of those jobs lost between 2001-03. Increasingly, companies are shipping well-paying manufacturing and white-collar jobs overseas. At the same time, the productivity gains we gloat about are just code for the fact that companies are squeezing more and more work out of fewer and fewer workers. That means the jobs that are exported are either not replaced, or replaced with other ones in lower-paying sectors of the economy. The result is what Business Week calls the "Wal-Martization of America": an economy dependent on "hiring temps and part-timers [with no benefits], dismantling internal career ladders, and outsourcing to lower-paying contractors at home and abroad." All told, "More than a quarter of the labor force, about 34 million workers, are trapped in low-wage, often dead-end jobs." The President has tried to say that the economic downturn was inevitable because of the attacks on 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. But the argument holds no water, and even invoking such a specious rationale dishonors the citizens who died that day and the soldiers who are serving overseas. The fact is, the President had two economic paths to choose from. He could have chosen policies that put more money into the hands of working families, helping folks through the tough time while stimulating the economy. An expansion of tax credits for education and health care, extension of unemployment benefits, an increase in the minimum wage – any such policy could have helped. Instead, he went to bat for his wealthiest contributors – the corporate executives, old money fat cats, slick lobbyists, and country clubbers he has been surrounded with since his umbilical cord was cut. He chose tax cuts for the highest-income Americans. He chose new laws that allow companies to avoid having to pay workers overtime. He chose to terminate unemployment benefits, and loosen laws that protect worker pensions. He chose a "free" trade policy that encourages corporations to troll the world's most repressive countries for the cheapest labor. He chose his path carefully. The question is – will America now follow? David J. Sirota is the Director of Strategic Communications for the Center for American Progress.
Oh, you liberals... Always posting the facts so that you can be negative! I say facts are un-American. They are less than unpatriotic: facts are traitors!
