MCJOBS

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

As the economic recovery gains steam, the retail industry is expected to be one of the strongest for job growth this decade. But the quality of jobs selling clothes, computers and other goods has declined in recent years to the point where few can be classified as careers.

Erratic part-time hours often make a second job impossible and complicate the work-life juggle. Pay has shrunk. And the recession created hordes of overqualified job seekers, leaving existing staff with little power to demand better conditions.

With unemployment still high at 8.8 percent, many people feel fortunate to land any job. But not all jobs contribute the same to economic growth. Employers may be hiring more, but they are hiring disproportionately in retail and other service-sector positions with low wages and few benefits.

High-paying fields like real estate and finance accounted for 40 percent of the 8.8 million jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 14 percent of the jobs created in the year that followed. Lower-paying industries like retail constituted 23 percent of jobs lost but almost half of the recent growth.

This shift "could make it much harder for workers to find family-supporting jobs," says Annette Bernhardt of the National Employment Law Project, who analyzed the data. Even in the "jobless recovery" after the 2001 recession, high-paying industries accounted for nearly one-third of new jobs in the year after the recession ended.

More here.

This just trumps up what is most maddening to me about what currently passes for public discourse on the economy. If it's not straight-up lies, such as "tax cuts always grow the economy" or "we need to slash the budget so businesses don't have to deal with 'uncertainty'," it's distortion and cherry-picking of accurate information, you know, like talking about job growth but failing to mention that all these new jobs are tantamount to flipping burgers.

At least this AP piece is honest, to some extent, in that it notices the writing on the wall with American job creation. But it still dances around the reality: what the article doesn't say is that this is a trend that has been around for at least a couple of decades, if not more. That is, we're all being slowly herded into no-future, low wage, no-benefit McJobs. And what was previously slow is now picking up the pace.

I guess in some ways I'm cool with this. If this is the work that needs to be done, then that's what we need to do. But if our leaders continue to ignore that these jobs are designed for teenagers and uneducated young twentysomethings who don't have to pay rent or bills, but increasingly filled by grownups with college degrees, we, the nation, will have completely devolved into third world status by 2020 or 2030. That is, if we have to do shit work, then so be it, but this shit work really needs to pay, or we're all fucked. Indeed, capitalists will fuck themselves by driving the consumers who buy their products out of the market for lack of disposable income.

This is bad, bad, bad. And the politicians just smile and talk about "job growth" as though that were somehow meaningful. Rome burns while Nero plays...

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