It was announced Friday that the economy lost 345,000 jobs in May. That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Minneapolis, Minn. becoming unemployed in a single month.
In these times, that is a is a good sign. In the first three months of 2009, the economy lost an average of 700,000 jobs each month, according to the New York Times. This has pushed the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent.
There are a lot of numbers that describe the economy. The Dow Jones average, the S&P average, the interbank lending rate, and the interest rate for treasury bonds. Some people like NYT columnist Bob Herbert have long been arguing that jobs are the only thing to care about in this economy.
Don’t tell me about the stock market. Don’t tell me about the banks and their perpetual flimflammery. Tell me whether poor and middle-income families can find work. If they can’t, the country’s in trouble.
Herbert has been taking this same approach, that he doesn’t care about the troubles of banks and Wall Street and is more concerned with the troubles of the already troubled, for a while.
An April 27 column about the positive news on Wall Street pressed home the same point.
I’m sure everyone is thrilled to know that the high rollers on Wall Street are bouncing back. With profits on the rebound, the big shots at the biggest institutions are on track, as The Times reported Sunday, to make as much money this year as they were hauling in before the mega-recession began.
The growing legions of the unemployed can be forgiven for not shouting hallelujah. It’s a little like watching the drunken driver who plowed into your family car and caused untold havoc and heartache, suddenly pulling up one morning, no worse for the wear, in a sparkling new vehicle.
Later in the column, Herbert wrote:
Wall Street can swallow all the Champagne it wants, and the market fanatics can obsess until their brains lock over the daily gyrations of the Dow. The simple fact is that working men and women are being squeezed in the ever-tightening jaws of a catastrophe.
A lot of attention has been focused on the daily fluctuation of the Dow Jones as a way to interpret the health of the economy. Though some reporters like NPR’s Planet Money have pointed out the narrow nature of the Dow Jones, and they have pointed to a couple other numbers to track as more accurate indicators of the economy. But those indicators are still about the world of big business and giant financial institutions.
The emphasis on job loss, and therefore job creation, as the biggest factor for taking the vitals of the economy is an important one. Jobs are tangible and last longer than the daily fluctuations of any stock index. For those hurt most by the economy and for those that have long been on the bottom of the economic ladder, the homeless, job creation is almost all that matters. Transitional housing programs, social service funding and job training can all help the homeless, but without a way for them to make wages that can sustain them there is little chance they will be able to get off the street.
In normal economic times, the homeless face a wide range of boundaries to getting a job. The practical hurdle of finding clean clothes for interviews, getting a phone number and an address for job applications and the cost of transportation to a job are more than many people can overcome. On top of that many homeless don’t have adequate identification for jobs. That means complicated and time consuming requests for birth certificates, state ID cards and social security cards. And those are the difficulties that are easy to see. The prejudice against the homeless and the stigma against hiring the homeless are a frequent underlying barrier.
As the economy hemmorages jobs, the homeless slip further down the list of desirable employess and the frequent response to homelessness of “just get a job” becomes less and less tenable.
