U.S. Employers Shed 93,000 Jobs in August

Despite signs the U.S. economy is gathering a strong head of steam, the number of payroll jobs fell by another 93,000 last month, bringing the total job loss since January to almost 600,000, the Labor Department reported today.

"The jobs report is just awful," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston. "Businesses across the board are figuring out ways to do more with fewer people. Practically every sector of the economy got rid of jobs in August."

Cheney also voiced a concern shared some analysts that if employment does not begin to increase substantially, the strong economic growth now expected for the rest of this year might begin to wane in 2004.
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High-tech firms importing cheap labor

U.S. high-tech companies are flooding the labor market with foreign workers who are willing to work more cheaply than Americans, according to a report released yesterday by the Federation of American Immigration Reform.

The report says the industry is importing overseas workers as it lays off U.S. personnel and sidesteps American computer programmers, electronics engineers, mathematicians and other professionals who are already out of work.

"Cheap labor has become the holy grail of many in American industry, and access to foreign workers is viewed as an inalienable right," FAIR Executive Director Dan Stein said.
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All Sweat, No Equity

Bush has fought unemployment by creating a job: “a new post of Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing to work on bringing jobs back to the hard-hit sector.”

Meanwhile back in the real world, MSNBC reports:

“The New York Fed economists conclude this is a new kind of recovery, driven not by job gains, but by productivity increases. That productivity is great for employers, but may be costing some workers their jobs.”

“Productivity increase” is a highly technical term used by economists to describe the performance formerly known as “sweating the worker.”
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It’s the Paycheck, Stupid!

And of course wages are indeed the central problem in today’s troubled economy, however much the conservatives of both parties ignore that fact as they blather on about taxes and deregulation and tort reform and government spending.

Reagan’s first act in office was to fire the striking air traffic controllers, which I can assure you would not have occurred had Jimmy Carter won reelection.

The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (I was an assistant adminstrator) planned to rehire the controllers after the courts declared their union’s strike to be illegal.

He knew that a new union would reemerge (as it has) after the old one collapsed. And he welcomed that inevitability, on the theory that a good union works to the benefit of both labor and management.

But Reagan, once a union president himself, wanted to destroy organized labor. In this he had, of course, the enthusiastic help of big business. Bush I carried on the great work, and Bush II has greatly intensified it. The latter even soiled himself by twisting 9/11 into a tool to bust government employee unions.

The carefully-planned result of this decades-long campaign is everywhere around us.
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The U.S. continues it's slide towards becoming a third world country.