Oct. 8—With just three weeks to go until the election and on the eve of the second presidential debate, new jobs numbers released today show President George W. Bush is nearly 7 million jobs short of the job predictions his economic advisers made in February 2002 when Bush pushed through his tax cuts.
The 96,000 jobs created in September were less than two-thirds the jobs needed just to keep up with population growth—and far from the 306,000 new jobs Bush promised to create each month, according to an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis of September unemployment figures by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
“Today’s employment report amplifies the drumbeat of bad news for America’s workers,” says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “For the laid-off high-tech employee in Ohio and the unemployed mill worker in Maine, this is an unexpectedly painful report.”
While the U.S. economy continues to lose good jobs, Bush is responding with the same failed economic polices, says Sweeney. As good jobs are going overseas, Bush has given giant corporations tax incentives for shipping American jobs abroad. In contrast, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry says as president, he will close corporate tax loopholes that reward companies for exporting jobs and will cut corporate tax rates to encourage companies to create more U.S. jobs.
Nation Lost More Manufacturing and Information Jobs
The economy lost 18,000 manufacturing jobs and 12,000 information jobs in September—jobs that pay well and provide benefits. Meanwhile, temporary, low-wage jobs rose by 33,000. Since Bush became president, the U.S. economy has lost more than 2.7 million manufacturing jobs and 558,000 information jobs and Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover in the Depression to end his term with a net job loss.
“September’s job growth of 96,000 indicates a weak economy and is substandard by any reasonable benchmark,” says EPI President Larry Mishel.
Nearly 13 million people are unemployed or under-employed, a figure that barely has budged throughout 2004. More than 220,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month, while the share of the workforce composed of workers holding two or more jobs has increased. And the number of workers who have been unemployed for at least six months rose again in September, to 1.7 million. Fully one in five unemployed workers has been unemployed for at least six months. These statistics combine to show how difficult it is for workers to find full-time, family-supporting jobs.
In September, the number of jobs employers planned to cut reached an eight-month high, according to the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Employers announced nearly 108,000 layoffs in September, a 41 percent increase from a year earlier. And the announcements keep coming in: Just yesterday, AT&T said it will cut 7,000 more jobs than it had originally announced, and Bank of America reported it will slash 4,500 jobs.
New Jobs Offer Low Wages, Little or No Health Coverage
Many of the new jobs are low-wage, temporary positions with no health care benefits. Cleveland high school teacher Tippa Carter was laid off from her job in the spring—only to be rehired this fall as a substitute teacher getting paid $8,000 less and no longer receiving health insurance.
“Our recession has not ended,” says Carter. “Steel companies are laying people off. As people aren’t working, they are not paying property taxes,” which fund the schools. “It’s a spiral,” says Carter, a member of the Cleveland Teachers Union/AFT 279.
Carter is among millions of U.S. workers whose access to health care coverage has been blocked by the nation’s jobs crisis. The decline in employer-sponsored health care coverage has resulted in a 5.1 percent increase in uninsured Americans younger than 65 between 2000 and 2003, according to The Economic Downturn and Changes in Health Insurance Coverage, 2000–2003 from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
Even as low-wage jobs replace family-supporting jobs, inflation has eaten up all of the value of the 1997 increase in the minimum wage, according to a group of 562 economists—including four Nobel Prize winners—who are calling for increasing the minimum to $7 an hour. The economists signed a statement released Oct. 6 by EPI.
President Bush said his tax cuts for the wealthy would stimulate the economy, but they have contributed to turning the $5.6 trillion surplus Bush inherited into a huge $415 billion deficit and increasing poverty, says Sweeney. Kerry plans to cut taxes for the middle class while rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
More
View the Economic Policy Institute statement on raising the minimum wage.
