Tag Archives: jobs

An Instructive Graph

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This one is from the Census Bureau’s Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013. The headline of the report is that American household median income stagnated for the second straight year and remains, in real terms, 8% lower than it was in the last year before the Panic of 2008. The graph below reflects that.2013MedianHouseholdIncome

What interests me about this graph, though, is not the end result snapshot, but the slopes of the graph’s separate lines, the changing levels of median incomes, as we come out of recessions and panics over the last 50 years.

Notice: coming out of nearly every one those dislocations, either immediately after it was over or shortly after, the slopes are up. Median household income recovered quickly for all groups indicated. To be sure, there were some significant lags in this—blacks often, Hispanics coming out of the 1990 mini-recession, for instance. However, even coming out of the 2000 dot-com bust, incomes “merely” stagnated overall (although with that one, incomes didn’t fall very much, either).

But coming out of the Panic, this administration’s policies have set a new record for holding back a recovery—incomes have not stagnated (would that we’d done that well); they’ve been pushed down.

In Which a Judge Gets It Right

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…but is forced to rule wrongly.

The SEIU sued University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, alleging “unfair” labor practices in that, claimed the union, UPMC management interfered with employees’ right to organize. In connection with that suit, the NLRB issued three subpoenas demanding “highly confidential and proprietary information” be released from UPMC to the union.

Federal District Judge Arthur Schwab found the NLRB’s subpoenas, among other things, over broad and unfocused, and so illegitimate. He also found the subpoenas fundamentally irrelevant to the underlying case (which itself would have rendered the subpoenas inappropriate). He went further. In noting that the NLRB itself made no serious effort to argue the relevance of its subpoenas, he wrote [emphasis added]

The Court does not see how these requests have any legitimate relationship or relevance to the underlying alleged unfair labor practices; instead, the requests seek highly confidential and proprietary information…and, the requests seek information that a union would not be entitled to receive as part of a normal organization effort. Indeed, the scope and nature of the requests, coupled with the NLRB’s efforts to obtain said documents for, and on behalf of, the SEIU, arguably moves the NLRB from its investigatory function and enforcer of federal labor law, to serving as the litigation arm of the Union, and a co-participant in the ongoing organization effort of the Union.

But he was forced to the wrong outcome and to uphold the subpoenas; although he stayed his upholding pending appeal.

However, the practical effect of case law as to enforcement of subpoenas of federal government agencies is that this Court is constrained to essentially “rubber stamp” the enforcement of the Subpoenas at hand.

The Third Circuit, the appellate court for Schwab’s district, can overrule Schwab and strike down the subpoenas. The appellate level is the normal place where Federal agency subpoenas get struck. Schwab also, though, has given the Third an out.

If the practical effect of this legal predicament is to be altered, it is not the District Court’s role to do so, but the role of the appellate court. The Court is at a loss of how to adequately address the above issues of whether the matter under investigation serves legitimate purposes, whether the inquiry is relevant to that purpose, and not unduly broad or burdensome, while still conforming to the extremely narrow and limited nature of the proceedings at hand. If the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit finds that the District Court has the authority to conduct a meaningful and/or thorough review of the three (3) Subpoena[s] at issue here, the Court is prepared to do so.

Schwab’s opinion can be read here.

Scottish Independence

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The view of a poor, dumb colonial.

Suppose the Scottish referendum next week goes in favor of independence. What would be next for Scotland?

Among the complexities of separation is the matter of pensions provided by employers. Most such pensions are not fully funded; although, most such pension providers have apparently viable plans for curing the shortfall, over some number of years. However, the EU (and we’ll assume Scotland succeeds in joining the EU for this bit) requires all pension funds with members in two or more countries to be fully paid up. Moreover, funds that are not have only two years to get fully paid up. There are quite a number of large-ish UK companies, employing thousands each, whose pension funds have members in both countries, and whose pension funds are on one of those “some number of years to fund” plans.

There’s some chatter in the UK about splitting the pensions in two, one for the UK and one for Scotland, as a means of ducking this problem. I see a possibility of splitting the companies themselves in two, each with its own pension scheme. Either course, though, is fraught with complexity.

A larger complication is the UK national debt, some £1 trillion ($1.62 trillion): how would this be divided, and based on what criteria? I’ll elide whether the new Scottish economy could handle its new debt.

That sort of thing is trivial, though, compared with a couple of larger questions. Scotland has some serious economic problems, including that debt, a risk of sharp inflation, lack of clarity on what it would use as a currency, what sort of trade arrangements a settled-on currency would imply, and so on.

The economic problems will have their impact on independent Scotland’s near- and mid-term stability.

Too, accession to the EU requires a unanimous vote of the existing members, and that’s not a done deal. Which means Scotland would not be able to count, soon, on any EU…assistance.

Frankly, I think Scotland would be better off outside the EU than in it (recall the EU’s treatment of Ireland and Iceland), but this is a move Scotland has to make, and properly so, without my sage advice.

Regardless of EU membership and those “larger problems” just mentioned, though, independent Scotland will need to broaden its economy. 80% of its national income is from North Sea Oil which, aside from questions of how to divide that with the UK, is a declining asset value [sic], and the bulk of the remaining 20% is from tourism. A self-sustaining independent Scotland will need a more broadly based economy in order to function without the UK subsidies it currently gets.

Finally, I don’t know that Scotland would be better off independent from the UK. Certainly, there are advantages for a nation that’s free to chart its own course without having to say, “Mother, may I” to a higher-up. I think, though, given Scotland’s socialism and those subsidies, the UK would be better off with an independent Scotland.

The aftermath also will be fun to watch. Northern Ireland? Catalonia? Basque Country? Sicily?

Jobs

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According to Friday’s jobs report, the headline number, the unemployment rate, dropped a skosh to 6.1%. But there’s more to it than that.

  • the long-term unemployed dropped to 3 million, but they’re still over 30% of all of US unemployed
  • the employment-population ratio was 59% for the third consecutive month

and

  • the civilian noninstitutional population was 248,229,000, up 206,000 from July, but
  • the civilian labor force was 155,959,000, down 64,000 from July

Then there’re these data:

  • nonfarm employment was up 142,000, against economists’ expectations of an increase of around 225,000 jobs
  • revisions to earlier estimates for June and July showed that the economy added 28,000 fewer jobs than initially reported
  • government figures still offer little evidence that workers are seeing higher wages or that people who left the labor force during the recession are returning in large numbers
  • the measure of unemployment that includes those working part-time but who would like full-time jobs remained at/above 12%

And

  • labor-force participation rate dropped to 62.8% to reach, again, 40-year lows

Now think again about those economic “gains” about which our Progressive President bragged just a bit ago.

Economic Gains

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President [Barack] Obama used Labor Day to tout the country’s economic gains under his leadership….

Let’s look at those gains.

  • he’s increased the national debt in his six years by 70%—it stood at $10 trillion at the end of 2008; it’s now over $17 trillion
  • median income has fallen—it stands now at $53,900 compared with $56,700 in December 2007 at the start of the current economic dislocation
  • job creation is only just back to pre-Panic levels, 6 years into his administration, compared with normal economic recovery needing only 2-3 years to get to this point
  • unemployment rate now stands at 6.2%, dropping 1.1 points over the past year—still 20% above full employment, and again years behind schedule
  • labor force participation rate is at an historic low
  • GDP growth remains anemic at 1.5%-2.5% year on year (with this year’s growth rate projected to be in the 2.5% range) compared to a normal economic recovery growth rate in the 4.5%-6.5% range.

And this graph sums it all up:RecoveryComparison_Cox

Obama, in the same appearance, also claimed that “higher wages and other progress for workers can only be achieved through a Democrat-controlled Congress.”

Really? Can our country afford more of this Progressive progress?