FAST FOOD FACTORIES

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered.

In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy.

Counting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal.

But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs "is not straightforward." The White House drew a box around the section so it would stand out among the 417 pages of statistics.

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It's funny because it's true...

Obviously, this is a thinly veiled attempt by the Bush administration to fudge the statistics on US manufacturing jobs which have been hemorrhaging all over the third world for some years now--in fact, the loss of these jobs have been a tremendous drag on the economic recovery and have also squeezed the ranks of the middle class down to ever smaller numbers. What's shocking is that the White House still has the balls to attempt to pull a stunt like this: fast food jobs are crap jobs, "McJobs," with low wages and no benefits; manufacturing jobs are usually the opposite.

If Bush was really serious about helping working Americans, he would try to stop the long decline in the manufacturing job sector, or, at least, create some kind of safety net with lots of job training programs. Of course, Bush isn't really serious about helping working Americans.

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