Tag: employment

Letter to the President

This is how you are perceived:

Even before his unemployment checks ended, Dwight Michael Frazee’s days were filled with the pursuit of any idea that could earn him a buck. But few are working out, and now his nights are filled with dread.

[…]

Frazee, who is married and has a 5-year-old daughter, is in a financial free fall with no safety net.

“My life has been total stress. I sleep maybe four hours a night, worrying about money,” he said. “I understood the president and Congress had to stabilize the banks, get Wall Street going. I figured something would be done for middle-class Americans, that they couldn’t abandon us. But I was wrong.”

“President Obama talks a lot about making the victims of the gulf disaster whole, but what about the victims of this economic disaster?” Frazee said. “Nowadays, he seems mostly concerned with image. Now, he doesn’t want to be seen as a big spender. But people need help.

Please do note that at no point does Mr. Frazee mention the Republicans, "the party of No,” filibusters, Code Brown, and even deficits only come up tangentially.
When you lose control of the House come November, your advisers will most likely hide behind a lot of nonsensical crap along the lines of “the facts are on our side.” If you believe them, even for a second, then this is why you will fail. The facts do not matter; perception is everything.

You needed to be out there every day for over a year now framing the GOP as the obstruction to economic progress and primary engine of pain and suffering in the streets of America. That the GOP wants Mr. Frazee and everyone like him to Go Die in the Streets. Everyone in your party needs to be doing the same thing. None of you are, even now. None of you even seem vaguely aware of the issue in the abstract. This is why you fail.

The Unemployed can Go Die in the Streets

In which thebroadermarket summarizes a theoretical, GOP-derived wonderland that we here at Lemkin refer to as “Go Die in the Streets”:

Thus, one is left with a situation in which the unemployed would find few opportunities for work, while simultaneously seeing their social safety net dry up. Meanwhile, the lucky employed would see the security of their labor jeopardized at the expense of allowing the financial marketplace to continue to operate relatively uninhibited. I am not one prone to hyperbole, but this just seems like a raw deal.

Read the whole thing

I am prone to hyperbole. But that would be shrill.

southpol:

The Third Depression:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

I’d agree with all that Krugman says above (and in the editorial), but take small issue with this part:

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery.

I think the GOP leadership realizes all too well that not enough has been done. They have chosen to use the crisis for short-term political gain. There is no other explanation for the withdrawal of unemployment benefits. None. They just want to maximize pain to the citizens out there that may be inclined to vote come 2010 and, more urgently from the GOP perspective, in the 2012 follow-on when they could well be poised to take power in both branches.

Then, of course, they’ll fix it all with a rigorous program of tax cuts for the wealthy. Which is touched on in the closer:

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Yep.

All About the Benefits

TNR reports on the firing of Hyatt’s Boston-area housekeepers, noting:

The housekeepers, some of whom had worked for Hyatt for over twenty years, were making between $14 and $16 an hour plus health, dental, and 401(k) benefits. Their replacements were to make $8 an hour with no health benefits.

It’s unclear to me why, within the context of the current debate about healthcare, the benefits angle to this story has received zero attention. Instead, everyone rushes to the $16/hr to $8/hr change in gross-pay. Sure, Hyatt is now paying half as much and these replacements are, apparently, pretty much all there on guest-worker visas (and so are, by definition, short-term, damned near cash basis day workers).

The key fact, though, is all that stuff that comes after the mention of base pay. These folks that have been fired were getting health, dental, and 401k benefits. That’s a vaguely astounding contract they had; seemingly unprecedented, actually. I’d wager Hyatt cut their expenses on employing these workers by four to five fold just by dropping benefits. Tacking on the pay cut was just gravy; something they did because they could. Based on some back-of-envelope calculations using these figures to get ballpark estimates for provisioning the insurance coverage, to provide the health benefits (forgetting dental and 401k for now) Hyatt was paying these workers the equivalent of $23/hr. Add in the rest and you’re up to $30/hr easily. Probably well beyond it.

So, we have workers’ jobs cut specifically to save on the (presumably) outrageous expense of providing them with healthcare; these firings have subsequently gone national for a variety of completely unrelated reasons. During the biggest healthcare debate of my lifetime. What does the media focus on with absolute uniformity? An $8/hr pay differential. As if nothing else is going on here. Do we mention that these uninsured guest workers still create a cost on healthcare in this country? Do we mention that Hyatt has effectively shifted some of its healthcare expenses from Hyatt to you, the US Taxpayer? Do we mention that this is yet another clear-cut case of spiraling health coverage costs measurably and indisputably claiming jobs, all the while adding to the rolls of the unemployed (and uncovered) in this country? Of course not. Keep walking. That sort of thing just isn’t said.