STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 16 March 2012

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37. recovery for the 1%, recession for the rest

http://www.nationofchange.org/recovery-1-recession-rest-1331826118

Re­cov­ery [ri-kuhv-uh-ree] noun: term used by the 1% to char­ac­ter­ize the 99%’s en­dur­ing re­ces­sion.

Some­time last No­vem­ber I lis­tened to a lec­ture given by econ­o­mist Richard Wolff. Dur­ing the Q&A por­tion of his pre­sen­ta­tion Dr. Wolff re­sponded to a ques­tion posed by a crest­fallen col­lege stu­dent con­cern­ing the du­ra­tion of the great re­ces­sion. Dr. Wolff gra­ciously ac­knowl­edged the stu­dent’s un­ease and then re­sponded by re­fram­ing her orig­i­nal in­quiry. He gen­tly of­fered the fol­low­ing provo­ca­tion: “We must not ask whether we will sur­face from this cri­sis, for we surely will, but rather on whose terms will we emerge?”

The most re­cent Em­ploy­ment Sit­u­a­tion Sum­mary is­sued by the Bu­reau of Labor Sta­tis­tics (BLS) last week un­der­scores the wor­ries ex­pressed pre­sciently by Dr. Wolff more than six months ago. The BLS noted that al­though the United States added 227,000 jobs last month, the av­er­age weekly wage only in­creased by 0.1%. How could this be? Well, nearly 160,000 of the newly cre­ated jobs were cat­e­go­rized by the BLS as "low-wage," pay­ing no more than 200% of the poverty in­come rate for an in­di­vid­ual (up to $21,000 an­nu­ally). Fur­ther, part-time work (with­out med­ical in­sur­ance or a pen­sion) in­creased to a record 28 mil­lion jobs dur­ing Feb­ru­ary and now ac­counts for roughly 20% of total em­ploy­ment.