by justinb
2. December 2009 12:19
The latest dose of mainstream BS regarding the job market is that job cuts are down for the fourth straight month, but who cares since the same is true with hiring. In fact, the hiring or job growth picture has been stagnant for much longer than four months but then who's counting the job growth numbers? This ongoing attempt to highlight every tidbit of data that, when dressed up with spin, could be perceived as good news on the job market front is nothing more than deflection from what's really going on. So what's really going on? Nothing that's what. On a grand scale the hiring numbers just aren't there.
When you look at the big picture the facts become crystal clear. The big picture is that job cuts to date, in the amount of 1.24 million, exceed the 1.22 million job cuts for the entire year of 2008. Moreover, since we have just under a month to go before year end, more job cut announcements will simply pile on top of the current 1.24 million figure. Second, and perhaps most important is that no where in the mainstream gibberish are there ever any stats, to point to, with respect to hiring. Why? Quite simply - they don't know. It wasn't until about a year ago when large corporations were "quasi required" to report new employee hiring figures back to the Government. It is quasi given the guidelines for who is required to do so and under what circumstances. So, since small businesses account for over 50% of the workforce, no one really knows what the hiring scene looks like. Instead, the pundits and spin doctors refer to unemployment data as a way of inferring that hiring must be up if unemployment claims are down. That, of course, sounds like the same type of faulty logic that attributed to the current housing bubble bust. In any event, unemployment figures aren't reliable, since unemployment data excludes those who have fallen off the radar due to being discouraged, exhausting unemployment benefits or failing to live in a state that is considered a high unemployment state.
So yea OK, on one end any real account of slowing in the job cuts column is welcomed news. On the other hand, just where exactly are the jobs? That means the large scale hiring versus one or two here and there. That's the million dollar question that apparently has no answer. Instead the hope is that the public will bite the hasty generalization bait that job cuts are down which must mean that hiring is up. Wrong. So until we can hear real reports on job growth, so what job cuts are down because so too is hiring. In fact, hiring is way way way down. So tell us something we don't know like how the $787 Billion Stimulus package was spent. Better yet, how the Feds are going to fix this mess, since the private sector has too much emphasis on self interest to do anything about it. 
