April 2—Working families faced a mixed bag of economic news today as the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced 308,000 new jobs were created in March, while unemployment rose to 5.7 percent, up slightly from 5.6 percent in February.
Despite last month’s net increase in jobs, the economy still has lost 1.8 million jobs since January 2001, and long-term unemployment actually rose in March. Nearly 2 million workers have been unemployed for six months or longer, more than at any time this year or even a year ago.
Between late December and the end of March, a record 1.1 million jobless workers exhausted their regular unemployment benefits without receiving additional aid, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. After this week, workers no longer will receive long-term emergency unemployment insurance because the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress have refused to renew the Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation (TEUC) program. TEUC provided additional weeks of federal unemployment benefits to jobless workers who have run out of regular state benefits.
Can’t Support a Family on the New Jobs Being Created
Yet workers cannot support their families with many of the new jobs being created, says Pat, who was laid off more than a year ago from her job at a data consulting firm in Orlando, Fla. “The number of part-time jobs rose by 300,000. A lot of the jobs created are service-level jobs, paying barely above minimum wage. It takes six service-level jobs to make up for the loss of one hi-tech job. I can’t work six jobs.” According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the average wage in industries that are adding jobs is 21 percent less than in industries that are losing jobs.
Pat was one of 51 workers—one from each state and the District of Columbia—who took part in the March 24–31 Show Us the Jobs™ tour, which traveled to eight states in the nation’s heartland to spotlight the impact of the jobs crisis on families and communities. The tour visited such communities as Youngstown, Ohio, where 11,000 homes have been sold in foreclosures in the past five years, and Minnesota, where statewide demand for help from food pantries has grown by 10 percent in one year.
Earlier this week, EPI reported that BLS statistics show 49 states failed to meet the Bush administration’s projections for jobs creation after tax cuts were approved. The administration predicted the “Jobs and Growth” tax cut would add 5.5 million more jobs by the end of 2004. But EPI reports the administration’s economic plan failed to meet projections in all but one state (Hawaii), with 13 states actually losing jobs since the implementation of the Bush “job growth” plan. Nationally, the job growth shortfall is more than 2 million jobs since July 2003, when the tax cut went into effect.
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Track the Bush administration’s job promises at the Economic Policy Institute’s
JobWatch website.
