Got To Work
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Got To Work
How the Obama jobs program will really affect women workers.
Posted Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - 8:42pm
Put another way, they need the money. So even though women who are already working didn't lose jobs as fast as already-working men did, that's hardly the problem. The real problem is unemployment: people looking for work who can't find jobs. Here's an easy way to think about it: If 1,000 Martians came into the job market looking for work, and the market created 100 Martian jobs, that wouldn't mean the Martians were in good shape because more of them were employed. It would mean the Martians had a 90 percent unemployment rate.
I don't know why the report minimizes the current recession's impact on women, although it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the authors would like to mollify their critics, who are, after all, 54 percent of the American electorate. Of course, they would not need to minimize the recession's gendered impact if their job program were actually as good for women as they say.
I will be surprised, however, if the stimulus turns out to create nearly as many jobs for women as Bernstein and Romer are predicting. Their forecasts include the rosy predictions that the stimulus will create 600,000 "retail" and 500,000 "leisure and hospitality" jobs by the end of next year. Women are heavily represented in retail and leisure and hospitality jobs in general, and that's why the Romer/Bernstein numbers look so good. But if all the government is really doing is building roads and bridges, the retail work they'll generate, for example, is more likely to be at the hardware store than at Nieman's. There's a reason the Ace worker in those commercials wasn't called the "Helpful Hardware Woman." (In fairness, Bernstein and Romer admit that they may be wrong in generalizing from such large categories—"retail"—but they then go on to do it anyway.) Regardless of how you measure it, most of those promised female jobs are only the projection into next year of "indirect" results of government spending this year. By contrast, the report recognizes that the jobs the program creates directly and immediately are overwhelmingly concentrated in the male categories of energy and infrastructure. So watch out for the guys who promise to take you to Nieman's. Maybe next year.
Happily, now that the Bob the Builder jig is up, there are numerous good ideas out there for ways to achieve agreed-to ends without creating an all-male job program. There is, for instance, a lot of well-meaning talk about trying to force the construction trades to take on women in greater numbers. Some such efforts go back to the Carter administration, others only to 1992. But despite all these programs, the BLS reports that only 3 percent of construction jobs are filled by women. Given the sorry history of such efforts, I'm partial to human infrastructure solutions like this appeal from the American Library Association for money to keep the libraries open. In the downturn, libraries are often people's only source of computers, places to look for work or draft their résumés, and, as it happens, librarians are overwhelmingly female. Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich also had an interesting suggestion on his blog yesterday for creating a green job corps to call on homeowners and advise them about how to insulate. Sort of like a visiting nurses program. But none of this will get the political attention it deserves unless the Obama people start using real numbers to describe the economy.
Either the Obama administration plans to stimulate the economy by directing government money primarily to male industries, or they know something about numbers that the rest of us don't. Either way, it's time we had a jobs programs that recognized immediately that most jobs do not come with a hard hat and that infrastructure means more than just roads.
Comments
Civilian Labor Force in The US . . .
Linda: Both you and JS do yourselves and women a disservice by not looking at the base rate for unemployment at the end of 2007 which was supposedly when this recession began??? I am also amazed that one of you admitted to being too lazy to research the numbers. Taken from here:
, it would be 4.8% for women (2007). At the end of 2008, it is 6.4% This is Unemployment Rate for women 16 and over which is the traditional point at which BLS starts to measure. The increase was 1.6% or an ~ 33% increase. Looking at men, the Unemployment Rate at the end of 2007 was 5% and at the end of 2008 it was 7.9% or 2.9% points or a 58% increase.
Again we have taken the 16 years and over as the benchmark for men. Would it be fair to say that unemployment for men rose at almost twice the rate of women? I believe it would be fair to say such by looking at the percentage of increases and the percenatge points. I am not sure if these links work; but, you can find the data retrieval tables at the BLS and it is called "Historical News Release Tables" at the bottom of here http://www.bls.gov/cps/ and it is Household data. ************** Another factor that has to be calculated into this is Participation Rate. By looking at Participation Rate one can get a feel for the percentage of people from the NonInstitutional Civilian Population that are a part of the Civilian Labor Force. This is important to look at because the trend of an increasing Participation rate was reversed in 2001 after ~40 years of increases. It stands at 65.7% today which has not been seen since the late eighties. U3 is measured against a smaller Civilian Labor Force which tends to create a lower unemployment rate than what is real. The rest not counted in the Civilian Labor Force can be found in Not In Labor Force. So lets recreate the same as above for Participation Rate 2007-2008. For women 16 years and over, Particpation Rate was 59.4% in 2007 and 59.5% in 2008. In 2001, it was 59.7%. Civilian Labor Force dropped from 68.02MM to 67.491MM (MM = Million). In 2001, it was 63.289MM. For men 16 years and older, Participation Rate was 73% in 2007 and 72.4% in 2008. In 2001 it was 74.3%. Civilian Labor Force dropped from dropped from 78.275MM to 75.847MM. In 2001, it was 72.758MM. It does not take much of a rocket scientist or a statitician to see that women have been gaining in the share of the Civilian Labor Force as opposed to men. Fewer women dropped out of the overall Civilian Labor Force between 2007 and 2008 or ~530M as opposed to men at 2.43MM or almost 5 times as many men . . . 75.3 MM men as compared to 67.5 MM women in 2008 for totals. ************* "women are pouring into the workplace at least in part because their spouses' incomes cannot support the family anymore." Anyone hear Dr. Elizabeth Warren's "The Coming Collapse of The Middle Class?" Take the 57 minutes necessary and listen to it as she is enlighteming as to your statement above.
Here is a boiled down answer to your statement (Linda) as to why: "Changes in the employment makeup have taken place over the last 30 years having no parallel in the history of the US work force. From 1970 onwards, millions of mothers joined the full time work force and families went from being a one income household to two income households. While the attitude of women with preteen children in 1970 was to stay at home and care for the family, this fifties attitude changed to where women in 2000 were returning to the work force full time and leaving a six month old child in daycare. Also occurring during this time period, women would go on to get better education and increase their salaries beyond what their mothers or grandmothers made. The expected logical outcome of this income increase should have been wealthier families, increased savings, more vacations, and families living closer to work or in cities; but, it did not quite turn out that way. What really took place during this time period was quite the opposite. Income for married couples and families went up and income for males and married males remained stagnant. Fully employed males make less in 2005 than what their fathers made a generation ago when comparing median incomes adjusted for inflation. Total family income went up only because women entered the work force. During the same time period, changes in savings and debt were also experienced. Savings, which was at 11% of annual income in 1970 for families, dropped to a negative 8 tenths of 1% by 2005 and debt which was 1.4% of annual income in 1970 increased to 15% in 2005. In the end, every bit of mom's additional family income was spent, plus the savings and the family unit of mom, dad and two kids dropped into debt by 15%." "Politics, Economics, and The Middle Class" This is the boiled down version if you do not care to spend 57 minutes of quality time listening to a "kick-ass" women who is also leading the charge on examining TARP. Anyone remember Brooksley Born? Why not her for Treasurer? She identified the derivatives issue in 1998 and went up against Greenspin, Summers, Cox, Rubin, and Gramm. She lost; but, she was correct in her fears and reasons to regulate. The real problem is not unemployment as it will always be there. The real problem is that we have not recouped the number of jobs that were lost since the end of the 2001 recession in October 2001 when Participation Rate was at 66.7%. Today Linda, the Participation Rate is at 65.7%, the lowest since 1988. In order to do so, we would have to add 2.1MM people to the Civilian Labor Force just to get even to Oct 2001 with a Participation Rate of 66.7% which was experienced immediately AFTER the 2001 recession. Job growth has not been increasing faster than population growth and the best we have been doing is keeping even. Obama's plan is too "light." We need the 2 million jobs plus the growth in population. ************* I make a terrible feminist; but, I am one hell of an ally . . . ask Dawn Coyote, topazz, rundeep, IWonder, Pace, etc. I am not female and I do not understand nuance. I do understand numbers and am learning to understand Sjoberg. The vast majority (99%) of all single parent families living in poverty are women. One out of every 9 black males is in prison with a prison population of ~1% of the total US population with males making up the majority. The tie to much of this is poverty, education, healthcare, environment, etc. (Hertz, "Mobilty in America"). Job creation is terribly important across the board. I do not wish to demean the need to put more women into the work force; but, I believe I have demonstrated a reason that males need to be given a degree of emphasis while income for women is still a major need. What you are addressing is super critical to the nation at this point. It is not just women; it is also children and men caught up in this downward spiral. If you can not find the data I have linked, please let me know and I will find it for you.