As the economic recovery continues its slow march, and the unemployment slowly stops increasing (hopefully), consider what kind of jobs are emerging in this brave new world that we are building.  The jobs are mostly in the service sector, and many are temporary.

As demand rose after the last two recessions, in the early 1990s and in 2001, employers moved more quickly. They added temps for only two or three months before stepping up the hiring of permanent workers. Now temp hiring has risen for four months, the economy is growing, and still corporate managers have been reluctant to shift to hiring permanent workers, relying instead on temps and other casual labor easily shed if demand slows again. (New York Times)

Workers are disposable in this brave new economy. In fact, many companies are trying to get employees that they laid off to come back as temps.  Sure, you’ve got a job, the same one you had before, but now you are making less money with few, if any, benefits.

In California, this practice is particularly dangerous for a couple of reasons. First, as companies are less attached  to their workers, they are less attached to their locations. Temporary workers tend to be cheaper in the low-rent towns of Nevada, so why not go migrant?

The other concerning point for the state is that we have already had a pretty strong temporary work culture. For those farmers who hire legal labor, they are still generally hiring temporary labor.  For a state that already has a big problem with both employment and the numbers of uninsured.  

The only true force opposing the complete temporary-ification of our work force is the labor movement. As unionization rates go down, so do benefits and wages as more and more workers become part-time.

So, how do we increase employer-sponsored health insurance rates (which it appears we are for the time being) and increase full time employment? Besides an additional stimulus bill, the obvious answer would be the Employee Free Choice Act.

In my last post, I cited a New York Times story that indicated that most economists think the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is helping to create jobs and stimulate our economy. Earlier this week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed the economists’ findings.  

According to the CBO, in the third quarter of this year alone, 600 thousand to 1.6 million jobs were directly created or saved by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, reducing our country’s unemployment rate by 0.3 to 0.9 percent. This is an especially important finding for my home state of California, which at 12.3 percent, suffers from the third worst unemployment rate in the nation.

Indeed, it’s worth noting that the CBO report does not measure indirect job creation. Jobs created through most sub-contractors and vendors are not included in the report nor are the jobs created at local businesses when 1.6 million Americans have sufficient wages to put their money back into the economy.

They say all politics is local, and that may or may not be true, but it’s certainly the case that all jobs are local. When I talk to constituents, I hear from understandably frustrated people who think the stimulus has been ineffective. I understand that 1.6 million jobs created is just a statistic when you are still unemployed, when your family is still struggling, when your phone is ringing off the hook from relentless creditors, when you’re falling behind in your rent or mortgage payments.

More solutions over the flip…

Even for these individuals, the stimulus passed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats back in February has improved things. When 1.6 million more people are gainfully employed, the challenging job climate for those still unemployed is a little bit easier. When 1.6 million more people are able to put food on the table from their own wages, the reduced usage of government and non-profit assistance means more resources are available for families still struggling in this difficult economy. When half the stimulus package has yet to be distributed, many families are not yet aware that help is on the way.

Nevertheless, when 15.7 million Americans are unemployed, including well over 30,000 people in the 10th Congressional District, I know our work in Congress is far from done. Yesterday, I joined my Democratic colleagues on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to highlight the findings of a report by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) that identified 9,500 “ready-to-go” highway, bridge, transit, port, rail, and aviation projects worth more than $69 billion that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs if we funded them in Congress.

We know that in an economic downturn, governments are well advised to invest in their infrastructure, employing people in the present to lay down the building blocks for future economic growth. In California, AASHTO identified 120 projects worth more than $4 billion that, with federal approval, would get thousands of newly employed boots on the ground in 120 days or fewer.

Crumbling roads throughout my home state are delaying commutes, slowing down freight traffic, impeding the attractiveness of bus travel, and discouraging area residents from engaging in commerce. A more robust investment in our public transportation networks would also do much to reduce congestion, better integrate public transit, and help us reach our carbon emission goals. In the three town halls I will be hosting this Saturday in my district, I know the deteriorating status of our region’s transportation infrastructure will be a frequent topic of discussion from constituents.

Today, President Obama holds his jobs summit, and based on public reports, the importance of more investment in transportation will not go unnoticed. My Democratic colleagues in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee have alerted the President of our desire to move ahead with many of AASHTO’s recommendations. Working together, we will produce a number of bills in the coming months that will continue our important work rebuilding an economy left in shatters following eight years of neglect and misguided priorities.

While you may not agree with every bill passed by Congress or every decision made by the President, when I say that we take our responsibility as incubators of a better economy seriously, I hope you’ll take me at my word. If not, the proof is in the pudding of the lunches of the 600 thousand to 1.6 million people now employed because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Congressman John Garamendi (D-Walnut Creek) represents California’s 10th Congressional District. You can follow Congressman John Garamendi on his new Twitter and Facebook accounts.

After an exciting week in Washington, I returned to the 10th Congressional District this week to host my first town hall as a Congressman. More than 100 constituents were in attendance for the event, where we emphasized economic development and job creation opportunities in Livermore. “It’s about jobs, and that’s what I really want to focus on here,” I told the assembled crowd.

California has a 12.2 percent unemployment rate (up from 7.8 percent this time last year), and there are many opportunities to create new jobs at the national labs and through the federal stimulus package and local transportation and clean technology investments. But while I would estimate that two-thirds of the crowd was interested in the job creation discussion and supportive of my actions as a Congressman to date, a minority of the crowd was more interested in using the opportunity to criticize my vote on the House health care bill.

Lisa Vorderbrueggen of the Contra Costa Times and Randy Shandobil of KTVU 2 have good coverage of the event, including partial video. While there was a brief moment where the crowd got a little rowdy, once I respectfully asked everyone to stop shouting and clapping, we were able to continue with a constructive back-and-forth dialogue.

More of the town hall’s health care discussion over the flip…

I wanted to share with you what I told the audience after a gentleman made the claim that the House health care reform bill is somehow a threat to our economy (video by Lisa Vorderbrueggen):

“What’s happening to the American economy? You take the American economy and look at how we are spending our money. We spend a vast amount on war. We also spend an even larger amount on health care.

In 1991, when I become Insurance Commissioner for the State of California, we were spending about 10 percent of our total wealth, of our GDP, on health care. The inflation rate in health care was at that time running about twice the general inflation rate.

In the intervening years, 19 years of them now, we have seen the inflation rate in health care running at about two or three times the general inflation rate of the economy. The result of which is we now spend over 17 percent of all of our wealth on health care. The result of that is the money we need for education, for transportation, for research, for economic development in manufacturing or sales or any of the other activities, is crowded out, pushed aside by the health care sector.

And the unfortunate fact is that the more we spend, the worse the result. The more we spend, the more uninsured we have, because people can’t afford it. And simultaneously, the results are not good.

The status of American health care, population health care, the number of our children that die at an early age, the morbidity of the general population, the illnesses that occur in the state of California and across the nation would rank the United States at the very bottom of all the industrialized nations of the world, and in fact, rank us below the country of Columbia in our health care status. So it turns out that the more we spend, the worse our results. This has to change. It simply cannot continue. I had the privilege of voting on Saturday, and I voted yes on that reform proposal.

[crowd cheers, claps, boos, and jeers]

Now that everybody has had an opportunity to express their opinion on both sides of this issue, let’s not do it again. Otherwise we’ll just develop into an unfortunate and a rather useless waste of our time. So if you can accommodate that, we’ll let everybody state their view at the podium, and we’ll hold clapping and cheering on either side of this question, and move along, hopefully with an exchange of information.

Now let me just complete this point. The health care reform proposal that did pass Congress has many elements in it. There are essentially three parts to those reform proposals, one of which is the reform of the insurance system itself. I’ve spent eight years as your representative as Insurance Commissioner, and during that period of time, I had as my task the regulation of the insurance companies.

And there are numerous problems in the private health insurance system today. Things such as what we call cherry-picking. If you have an illness or if you happen to be at the age of 55, you don’t get insurance, because you have a pre-existing condition or you might become ill and expensive. There’s such a thing as post-event underwriting, so if you present yourself at a doctor or hospital and the insurance company comes back later and says, “Oh my, we can’t cover that because you didn’t fill out the form properly and didn’t tell us you had acne when you were a teenager.” Now that happens to be a real story, a real fact.

There are numerous other ways the insurance industry makes it really tough on people. Like not paying claims. PacifiCare, one of the major companies in California, denied 39.6 percent of all the claims they received in the first six months of 2009. There are very real problems.”

I continue to intently watch events unfold in the Senate, and I know you do too. I encourage the Senate to think big and pass a comprehensive health care reform bill that includes a robust public option. I also strongly encourage them to make it explicitly clear in their legislation that women’s reproductive health coverage will not be taken away. If the Senate approves a bill, it will go into conference to be merged with the House bill, and we want to make sure that the pieces that form the final puzzle are as comprehensive and effective as possible. I stand by my pledge to vote against any health care bill that does not include a public option.

I will be hosting four additional town halls in the month of December, and at least one will be virtual. We will continue to promote these open forums as opportunities for the public to ask questions and offer suggestions on economic development and job creation. There are many opportunities in the 10th Congressional District and neighboring communities to work with research labs, colleges and universities, and private sector employers to create good jobs for people of all levels of educational achievement. I’m ready to rebuild our economy, and I remain proud to say that I cast one of the decisive votes for health care reform. Indeed, health care reform makes rebuilding our economy all the more possible.

Late last week we learned that California’s unemployment rate dropped 0.1% in September, from 12.3% to 12.2%. That stat obscures far more than it reveals, including the fact that the 12.3% rate for August was an upward revision of the earlier reported number.

More significantly, the stat is not an accurate reflection of the job market in California. We actually lost 39,000 jobs in September. The only reason the rate appears to have dropped is that a significant number of the long-term unemployed have stopped looking for work and are no longer counted as “unemployed.

Nearly 1/3 of those lost jobs came from the public sector, as Steven Levy explained:

The state’s job losses were especially pronounced in construction, which lost 14,100 jobs over the month, and government, which lost 12,700.

Cutbacks in government employment, which includes public schools, are partly to blame for the state’s lackluster performance this month, said Stephen Levy of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy.

“We are disproportionately hit in the government sector because our state and local governments are having worse budget shortfalls than in other states,” he said. (LA Times, 10/17/09)

As Atrios said, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Government needs to be the employer of last resort, especially in a state that has the highest unemployment levels in 60 years. When 12,700 government employees lose their jobs, that translates into less consumer spending, which in turn means pressure to lay off more workers, all of which results in less tax revenue for the state, which merely exacerbates the vicious circle.

Yet Arnold Schwarzenegger simply doesn’t care about the unemployment crisis. Instead of working to create private sector jobs through the preservation and expansion of public sector jobs, Arnold has engaged in a right-wing shock doctrine attack on the basic services of the state, an attack that was never going to succeed before the recession hit.

Once upon a time conservative Republicans claimed job creation was their #1 task, and that we had to give corporations whatever they wanted to create jobs – tax cuts, regulation cuts, etc. California did so – and as a result we have a far larger recession and unemployment numbers than we’ve ever had when Big Government supposedly ruled our political economy.

Today, you’ll hear nary a peep out of the Republican Party about jobs. Sure, the Cal Chamber will publish its list of “job killer” bills, but that’s only the public excuse to give Arnold the reason he needs to veto bills he’d have vetoed anyway. Instead you have a party that simply does not care about unemployment and the jobless. Instead, to hear Chuck DeVore tell it, the unemployed should just leave California.

California Republicans see unemployment as an unalloyed good, something to be embraced as a tool to destroy what remains of the New Deal and create a working class utterly dependent upon and unable to resist corporate power. California’s economic policy has become nothing short of kleptocracy, justified by a constant media drumbeat demanding greater spending cuts, apparently for their own sake.

It is up to Democrats and progressives, then, to make the case to California that jobs matter, that jobs are what this state desperately needs, and that Republicans have not just given up on providing jobs, but are actively cheerleading  unemployment and attacking the jobless.

Of course, we don’t need jobs for their own sake. We need quality jobs, jobs that pay a living wage, jobs that are sustainable and not dependent on the latest asset bubble Ponzi scheme. And just as we learned in the 1930s, we need government to step in and provide them – instead of actively destroying them.

SB14, which would set a first-in-the-nation standard that utilities must receive 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, passed the Legislature late last night.

“Increased development of renewable energy in California has tremendous potential as an economic development tool. These are clean, green jobs that belong in California. SB 14 sets a clear target with a real deadline, and then makes it as easy as possible to bring renewable energy on line.

In light of the state’s ambitious new carbon emission targets, SB 14 will give energy agencies the flexibility they need in order to meet those goals. Current law “caps” the amount of renewable energy that the Public Utilities Commission may order utilities to buy or build at 20 percent. This bill would remove this cap and require utilities to acquire 33 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020.”

This would make California’s renewable energy standard one of the most aggressive in the world.  The Governor, feted in magazines and national media as an environmental leader, has vocally backed the 33% standard in the past.  But power plant generators have pressured Schwarzenegger to veto the bill.  And according to the LA Times, he will.

The Senate did manage to pass the energy bill, which would raise to 33% the amount of energy the utilities must get from renewable sources. Final approval by the Assembly of some minor amendments was expected.

However, a high-ranking administration official said late Friday that the governor may not sign the bill, SB 14 by Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), because of provisions limiting the amount of energy that could come from outside California. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the bills were not yet on the governor’s desk.

That would really be the icing on the cake to the worst Governorship in California history.  The one issue on which he staked his legacy, and he is likely to veto the bill most likely to drive the lowering of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly because it would keep too many jobs in the state.  Adding a renewable energy standard and mandating a majority of that energy be generated in state, is probably the only bill passed this year that looks to expand the local economy.  And because of that, Schwarzenegger will veto it.

And the same magazines will put him on the cover with the slogan “The Greenenator” and talk up his environmental credentials.

Something bad happened in the past 10 years to young workers in this country: Since 1999, more of them now have lower-paying jobs, if they can get a job at all; health care is a rare luxury and retirement security is something for their parents, not them. In fact, many-younger than 35-still live at home with their parents because they can’t afford to be on their own.

These are the findings of a new report, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade.” Conducted in July 2009 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and our community affiliate Working America, the nationwide survey of 1,156 people follows up on a similar survey the AFL-CIO conducted in 1999. The deterioration of young workers’ economic situation in those 10 years is alarming.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)

Nate Scherer, 31, is among today’s young workers. Scherer lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares a home with his wife, his parents, brother and his partner.  He spoke at a media conference at the AFL-CIO today to discuss the report.

After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we’d never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We’d like to have children, but we just can’t manage the expense of it right now…so we’re putting it off till we’re in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.

During yesterday’s press briefing, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka summed up the report’s findings this way:

We’re calling the report “A Lost Decade” because we’re seeing 10 years of opportunity lost as young workers across the board are struggling to keep their heads above water and often not succeeding. They’ve put off adulthood-put off having kids, put off education-and a full 34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons.

Just last week we learned that about 1.7 million fewer teenagers and young adults were employed in July than a year before, hitting a record low of 51.4 percent.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said:  

Young workers in particular must be given the tools to lead the next generation to prosperity. The national survey we’re releasing today shows just how broken our economy is for our young people…and what’s at stake if we don’t fix it.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• 31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it.
• Strikingly, one in three young workers are currently living at home with their parents.
• Only 31 percent say they make enough money to cover their bills and put some money aside-22 percentage points fewer than in 1999-while 24 percent cannot even pay their monthly bills.
• A third cannot pay their bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.
• 37 percent have put off education or professional development because they can’t afford it.
• When asked who is most responsible for the country’s economic woes, close to 50 percent of young workers place the blame on Wall Street and banks or corporate CEOs. And young workers say greed by corporations and CEOs is the factor most to blame for in the current financial downturn.
• By a 22-point margin, young workers favor expanding public investment over reducing the budget deficit. Young workers rank conservative economic approaches such as reducing taxes, government spending and regulation on business among the five lowest of 16 long-term priorities for Congress and the president.
• Thirty-five percent say they voted for the first time in 2008, and nearly three-quarters now keep tabs on government and public affairs, even when there’s not an election going on.
• The majority of young workers and nearly 70 percent of first-time voters are confident that Obama will take the country in the right direction.

Trumka, who is running for AFL-CIO president without announced opposition at our convention later this month, is making union outreach to young people a top priority. He said one of the report’s conclusions is especially striking:

Young people want to be involved but they’re rarely asked. Their priorities are even more progressive than the priorities of the older generation of working people, yet they aren’t engaged by co-workers or friends to get involved in the economic debate.

Currently, 18-to-35-year-olds make up a quarter of union membership. And at the AFL-CIO Convention, we will ask Convention delegates to approve plans for broad recruitment of young workers, as well as plans for training and leadership of young workers who are currently union members. And that’s just the beginning of a broad push towards talking and mobilizing young workers in the coming months and years.

According to the report, more than half of young workers say employees are more successful getting problems resolved as a group rather than as individuals, and employees who have a union are better off than employees in similar jobs who do not.

Read the full report here.

Dan Walters had a funny column a few days back, excoriating anyone who use “numbers” and “projections” to theorize about the impacts of budget cuts.  As if it’s some kind of novel idea that an economy dominated by government spending would rise or fall based on the amount of that spending.  Mr. Walters, 1937 called and wants a word with you.

Anyway, let’s look at the heart of Walters’ complaint.  First he says that we must have a hefty budget reserve because the economy is likely to go south, and because it will signal to bankers that “we’re solvent so they’ll buy our short-term notes.”  As I noted earlier, this is nonsense given the clear Constitutional duty to repay debt before practically everything else.  Then he says this:

Democrats and Republicans are equally guilty, meanwhile, of emitting self-important nonsense about the impacts of their actions on the state’s recession-wracked economy. While Democrats claim that cutting “safety net” programs and/or public payrolls will worsen the recession by taking money out of circulation, Republicans claim that raising taxes will retard recovery by discouraging investment and/or consumer spending.

Both practice voodoo economics. The entire deficit on which they are working, $24.3 billion including Schwarzenegger’s desired reserve, is well under 2 percent of the state’s economy. The lesser cuts and taxes they are debating would merely shift relatively small amounts of money from one form of spending to another, all within the state’s economy, so the macro economic impact would probably be nil, no matter what they do.

That’s a strange opinion, especially because in the next sentence, he argued that a budget filled with gimmicks would threaten our economic future, even though such gimmickry would effect the same small amount of cash, from a macroeconomic perspective.  But to his main point – cutting spending for state services, cutting jobs, cutting salaries for public employees and their related vendors, has a multiplier effect that in fact does weaken the prospects for economic recovery.  You don’t have to take my word for it.  John Myers ran a story on this just today.

“It’s hard to see how the country recovers if California does not,” says U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). Lofgren says she thinks congressional authorization of loan guarantees for any state will happen. But no one thinks it’ll happen in time for California, which needs to go to market — assuming a budget deficit deal is agreed to in the state Capitol — early next month.

Lofgren says she’s particularly troubled that the national stimulus and recovery programs… which are expected to benefit California by as much as $80 billion… could be drained of their help by the cuts needed to balance the state budget. “It is contrary to the efforts that we’re making,” she says.

This is a fact neglected by Walters, the very real possibility that certain spending cuts would result in the forfeiture of stimulus funds as well as regular funding, multiplying the effect of the cuts.  Many of the programs that Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate, like Healthy Families,  CalWorks and Medi-Cal, have their funding matched by the federal government.  Clearly any dollar cut there would mean $2 in practical cuts to Californians.  And losing out on stimulus dollars could number in the tens of billions.

This UCLA Anderson Report also speaks to the impact of state spending on California and the nation at large.

According to UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg, there is nothing happening in California that will help pull the state out of recession in advance of the nation.

“California,” Nickelsburg writes, “is in for a continued rough ride for the balance of 2009 and is not going to see economic growth return until the end of the year, shortly after the U.S. economy begins to grow.”

The dire conditions surrounding the state budget will contribute to prolonging tough conditions in California, according to the report.

In his essay, Nickelsburg notes that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is attempting to close the state’s $24 billion budget gap with a combination of fee increases, forced borrowing from local government, the sale of state assets and, primarily, budget cuts.

Yet that the real risk for California, Nickelsburg writes, is the possibility that there will be no budget agreement at all and that the chaotic and inefficient spending cuts that would likely follow would have an even more severe impact on the ability of California to stem the downturn in economic activity this year.

The rhetoric has risen to the extent where a prolonged stalemate, like every year given our broken governmental structure, is possible.  But clearly, Nickelsburg is demonstrating that state spending does have an impact on the economic picture at large, especially at a time when there’s 11.5% unemployment and a growing dependence on state services.

That one of the top political reporters in the state would deny this economic reality is just baffling.