CHAPTER10

Aftershock Jobs and Businesses

The economic cheerleaders want us to believe that if we will just be patient and wait a little longer, strong job growth will soon return. While we have had good job growth in 2012 and 2013, it has not been of good jobs. As pointed out in Chapter 1, most new hires have been for part-time jobs, and many people who lost and would like to return to full-time jobs have been forced to work part time.

If you lost one good-paying, quality job and replaced it with two lower-paying, lousy jobs, the government statistics still counts that as two new jobs. But it isn't much improvement for you. Quality matters. That's why average household income is still 6 percent lower than in 2008.

As of this writing in January 2014, overall new job creation has been less than impressive: averaging about 200,000 jobs per month. That sounds pretty good, until you realize that we need to add at least 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So we have not made up for all the 7.5 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.

How many of the 200,000 new jobs per month we are creating are good jobs? Only about 5,000 per month are manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The picture is a bit brighter for jobs in construction and real estate, which are growing at about 12,000 per month, at least for now. Jobs related to oil and gas account for only about 800 per month.

Even in health care, our best job sector, which has increased ...

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