Jobs, with Caveats

The latest glowing report is misleading.

MSM rejoiced when the government’s January jobs report came out.  The word was that the U.S. economy had added some 517,000 jobs over the previous month, a number that was several times the predicted figure.  Moreover, a large majority of those jobs didn’t end after the Christmas season.  The news was so good that the Federal Reserve started making noises about raising interest rates again, to curb inflation resulting from all of those generous wages (even though the inflation increase had pretty much nothing to do with jobs and wages).

But not mentioned in that report was the failure to account for the hidden people.  Those people include the newly-graduated and the newly-18, for starters.  These categories represent new job seekers, who don’t yet show up on the radar, because they can’t collect unemployment [the jobs report is based on unemployment claims].  Neither does the jobs report count those who have fallen off the unemployment rolls because they’ve reached the end of their benefits.  Likewise, there’s no mention of those who have simply given up job hunting, out of sheer discouragement.  Nor does that rosy report list those who are under-employed:  former white-collar workers who’ve been relegated to minimum-wage positions, after having searched in vain for postings commensurate with their former positions.  Or, if they can secure office/middle-management work, their salaries have been cut by a third or even half.  Former full-time workers who’ve had to become part-time or gig workers also remain off the radar.  There’s another missing category, too:  people who aren’t officially disabled, who could work, say, office jobs, as they used to do, but who can’t take the physical demands of plentiful server or line worker jobs.  I have no idea how many individuals fit the descriptions in this paragraph, but my scientific wild-ass guess is that there are at least several million.  If that’s even remotely close, and if these individuals were recognized, it still wouldn’t move the needle much on the unemployment gauge, as the numbers overall are so large.  Nevertheless, NOT counting all of these marginalized people allows a much more optimistic picture of employment in this country than is the real story.

And what about the people who have the famous new “jobs?”  Yes, there are undoubtedly many thousands of recently hired employees who will receive all the standard benefits:  health insurance, paid time off, life insurance, 401(k) participation, maybe even pension plans and other perks.  But companies, especially smaller ones, are decreasingly offering the value-added parts of employment that people have counted on for decades.  This trend has been showing up for the better part of a decade.  It’s especially prevalent in the hospitality industry, as restaurants try to keep as many workers on a part-time status as possible.  Some of the bigger chains, however, have grudgingly been forced to add benefits post-pandemic, as the scarcity of willing workers continues to hurt their businesses. 

So, what is an unemployed person to do if the only job he or she can land is one without health insurance?  The only choice is paying out-of-pocket, and even ACA premiums are steep—and ever-increasing—unless one is destitute, or nearly so.  And if there’s no PTO, what happens if there is a need to take off work?  Loss of wages is what happens.  Depending on the company, loss of the job might also be what happens. 

Then there are the supposedly part-time positions that are actually essentially full-time, in terms of commitment.  In my survey of job postings, I’ve come across quite a number of them that require on-site presence from, say, 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM, five days a week.  Add in the commuting time, and the usual practice of employees to come in a bit before clock-in time and stay a little late to finish up tasks, and the result is full-time work.  Because the jobs don’t formally require 40 hours a week, though, the companies don’t have to offer benefits.  I recently checked into one of those positions, an office situation, and was told that, of the benefits available to full-time employees, the “part-time” employees were only able to participate in the 401(k), with no company match.  The requirement was for 37.5 hours a week, with a fairly high skill level necessary, yet there would be no promotions or lateral moves permitted, and zero practical benefits.  Who wouldn’t jump at that?  Not surprisingly, the company was having difficulty finding a suitable candidate. 

Another subset of job openings I’ve investigated involves remote work.  At-home data entry clerks, virtual assistants, office coordinators, and the like are what I mean here, although there are many other types of remote work.  I’ve discovered an entire cottage industry that demands high-level skills and years of experience; requires extensive time commitments; and then actually provides minimal paid work.  In the typical example, the worker (sometimes contract, sometimes formally employed) must be available from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM (or even longer, or unusual hours), Monday through Friday.  That is, he/she must be able to respond to messages and begin tasks as soon as they come in.  But there might only be five, ten, or fifteen hours’ worth of actual work in a given week.  The rest of the time, the person is sitting by the computer, phone and email at the ready, waiting for assignments.  He/she is paid only for the hours spent on specific tasks.  All the time spent waiting doesn’t count, even though the person can’t be doing something else during the work day, lest he/she be slow to respond.  It sounds crazy, and it seems as if no one would want a job like that (of course, there are no benefits attached), but it’s not at all rare for there to be a thousand or more applicants for such positions.  I’m guessing that those applicants are people who are trying to string together multiple such opportunities, and who therefore would be at their computers all day, anyway.  They’re desperate enough to try to juggle several commitments simultaneously, and just hope timelines could be fudged for conflicting assignments.

Gig workers have made news recently for trying to organize and demand rights and benefits.  While there was a process for them to collect unemployment during the pandemic, Uber drivers and Doordash couriers still don’t have the benefits that stay-in-one-place employees do.  Nor can they automatically expect set schedules.  These factors mean that gig employers have only a fraction of the responsibility and accountability that brick-and-mortar businesses do.  In essence, gig workers have the least stability and the most individual burden to perform efficiently and meet deadlines.  Great for those who don’t like dealing with ossified corporate structures, but such a job would be sheer hell for anyone who finds it difficult to be constantly on the move, on a clock every minute of the working day (of course, positions at fulfillment centers such as Amazon warehouses are also notoriously time-demanding, with few breaks, but Amazon does offer some benefits, and wages have increased there since the pandemic began). 

Setting aside the unemployment numbers for a moment, there’s another disturbing practice that’s become more and more prevalent over the last ten years or so.  That tactic involves those who make fairly good salaries and have decent benefits, but who are expected to work 50, 60, or more hours a week to meet “productivity” goals.  Who are required to respond to emails on weekends and on vacations, and to take client calls at 9:00 PM, but who are still considered to be worker bees, without the privileges of the C-suite crowd.  A variant of this last group are people who work on an hourly basis, so do get paid overtime, but who are forced to work any hours the employer demands, or face termination.  Businesses who insist on that kind of access to employees’ time are effectively instituting a modern version of slavery.

The bottom line is that officially having a job doesn’t mean what it used to back in the good old days, a few decades ago.  It doesn’t guarantee security in any form, doesn’t automatically afford a work/life balance, doesn’t mean having traditional benefits or increases, doesn’t mean being valued for dedication, experience, and competence.  In short, all the publicity in the last couple of years about how much power workers now have is just hype.  In some cases, service employers, for instance, have had to make some concessions, but if my informal research is any yardstick, those concessions are the exceptions, and surely will be clawed back as soon as the labor pool stabilizes.  I don’t see any indications that workers suddenly have more leverage, in general.  It’s outwardly a positive sign that jobs have been added to the economy, but a look behind the curtain shows that those jobs aren’t all desirable, and many people are taking them because they have no choice.  In a world where workers aren’t valued, those latest statistics are nothing to brag about.