US economy's latest output: better jobs

Newest job numbers show that businesses are expanding opportunities in high-wage fields.
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By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The US economy isn't just producing jobs these days, it's also producing good jobs. Alongside the ads for jobs handling a cash register or a spatula are these new opportunities:

• In St. Louis, AFB International is enlisting both technicians, paid $30,000 to $40,000, and PhD scientists, offered $80,000 to $100,000, in its quest for the perfect pet food.

• In Delaware, Honeywell plans to hire people at $40,000 to $100,000 to work in a data-storage center.

• In southern California, some of the latest openings involve working on the railroad, for $35,000 to $70,000 a year. Union Pacific plans to add 2,000 employees altogether.

These reports in the past month symbolize a welcome trend during an economic expansion that at first offered only tepid job gains, both in quantity and quality.

This good news about the breadth of job creation comes against a backdrop of labor-market anxiety that has persisted despite the economy's solid overall footing. Competition from imported goods, the threat of outsourcing services abroad, and a controversial influx of illegal laborers are just some of the forces that make many workers worried about their future.

Creating good jobs - the kinds that can keep American living standards rising - appears likely to remain a challenge. But the current employment picture at least indicates movement in a positive direction.

"We're creating lots of all kinds of jobs, across many industries, occupations, and pay scales," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. But he adds: "If your skill sets are rusty, or at the low end of the skill range, you're going to have a tougher time."

The economy added 211,000 jobs in March, according to a Labor Department report Friday - a solid showing about on par with expectations. The unemployment rate fell a notch, to 4.7 percent.

The new jobs still include plenty at the low end: An analysis by Merrill Lynch finds that some 40 percent of the net gain in March came in two areas known for low pay: retail services and leisure/hospitality, which includes restaurants.

But this is just part of a broader tapestry. Management and professional occupations are employing 1.2 million more people this month than a year ago - or about 1 in 3 new jobs in America. This is the highest-paying of five broad categories tracked by the Labor Department. Not all of them are CEOs or engineers, but the median paycheck for full-time workers in this category is $937 a week, far above the US median of $651.

The construction industry continues to hammer out more than its share of new jobs. It accounts for about 6.4 percent of US jobs, but has provided 14.4 percent of the past year's job growth. The quality of construction jobs is mixed - often offering higher hourly pay than the US median but with lower benefits.

Even the manufacturing sector, which has long offered blue-collar workers a measure of middle-class prosperity, appears to be stabilizing after a period of heavy job losses. Despite downsizing in the automotive industry, 175,000 more people are employed in production occupations today than a year ago.

"As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun adding jobs fairly broadly," says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington.

EPI tracks the weighting of higher- versus lower-paying jobs that are being added to the economy. For much of the current expansion, which began at the end of 2001, that indicator has been negative.

In the past year, however, it has turned positive, meaning that the new jobs in the economy are the kind that tend to pull average wages up, not down.

Beyond professional services, one example may be construction. The housing market is cooling, but commercial building is heating up.

"More of the work will be in nonresidential construction," predicts Michael Carliner, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders. That could mean demand for higher skills, such as equipment operation, that boost pay.

The question, however, is how much of today's strengthening labor market represents cyclical trends, rather than long-term gains.

At this point, perhaps midway into an expansion phase, it's not unusual to see the job mix improve and pay to rise in new and existing jobs alike. "I would expect wages and compensation to increase faster," says Rae Hederman of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

How long that pattern lasts will depend in some measure on the Federal Reserve, which is now trying to decide whether to raise interest rates further. Setting rates too high, some experts warn, could slow the economy and dampen job growth.

The labor market's gains are beginning to take on the shape of a barbell, with growth weighted heavily at the two ends of the pay scale. During the current expansion, the bulk of new jobs have come in either the highest-paid of five broad occupational categories - management and professional - or the lowest-paid, services. Together the two sectors now account for more than half of all jobs. (The other three major categories are sales and office work, construction and natural resources, and production/transportation.)

The economy's overall share of jobs with strong pay and benefits has failed to grow during the past quarter century, even though workers today have higher skills and more technology to make them productive, says John Schmitt, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research institute in Washington. That's a break with the past, he says, when "wages typically tracked closely with productivity."

i heard about the new economic indicators on air america......

"technicians, paid $30,000 to $40,000, and PhD scientists, offered $80,000 to $100,000"

You'd think a PhD would pay a bit more.

Old news Rory. Drive the economy into the toilet and any up tick looks golden. We won't "recover" from Bush for decades if ever.

Bush had good reason to believe there were WMD in Iraq

Bush may have been misled by the information he had, but he did not lie.

By John Hughes

SALT LAKE CITY - Among the allegations leveled at President Bush by his critics, probably the most serious is that he took the United States to war in Iraq on false pretenses. He told the American people that Saddam Hussein had a collection of dangerous weapons of mass destruction when Mr. Hussein did not.

In retrospect it is clear that the weapons did not exist, although they had in the past, and Hussein had used them against his enemies. But hat is also clear from captured documents now coming to light is that Mr. Bush had every reason to believe they still existed at the time he launched the military campaign in Iraq. Not only did US and allied intelligence agencies assert that the weapons were there, but Hussein himself played a dangerous game of convincing enemies such as Iran, and even his own generals, that he had such weapons, while protesting to United Nations inspectors that he did not.

While Bush may have been badly misled by his own intelligence and other sources, he did not lie. He believed, and had good reason to believe, that the weapons existed.

From thousands of official Iraqi documents captured by American forces, and dozens of interviews with captured senior military and political leaders, a picture is now emerging of the world of delusion in which Hussein lived when he was in power. It is being chronicled in magazines such as the Weekly Standard and a forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs and books such as "Cobra II." Written by New York Times reporter Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor, the book is being hailed as one of the most comprehensive accounts of the war in Iraq.

Hussein was much more concerned about an internal coup, or a rebellion by dissident Shiites, or even an attack by Iran (with which he had fought a long war), than he was with an invasion by the US. Though he had largely disposed of his stocks of chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s, he encouraged the Iranians to believe he might have a hidden cache of them, a strategy called "deterrence by doubt." He did not take seriously a military threat from the US because he believed France and Russia would block the US diplomatically at the UN, and that in any event the Americans had little stomach for taking heavy casualties.

The Americans, however, took seriously the probability of confronting Hussein's WMD. When the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had close ties with Hussein, told Vice President Cheney that Hussein did not want war but would use chemical weapons if attacked, Mr. Cheney did not blink. The Americans, said Cheney, would deal with them.

Bush ordered that, when the US assault started and the anticipated stockpiles of WMD were seized, they must be publicized. Gen. Tommy Franks, his military commander, arranged for specially trained public affairs camera crews to document the discoveries.

Initially it was planned that seized samples of WMD would be shipped to Kuwait for analysis, but when Kuwait balked at this, the 75th Field Artillery Brigade headquarters at Fort Sill, Okla., was assigned the task.

Messrs Gordon and Trainor say in their book that German agents in Baghdad tipped the American military to Hussein's plan for defending his capital. Concentric rings were to be manned by Iraqi units of varying trustworthiness. One of the circles was called the "red line." This was to be the final barrier, manned by Hussein's elite and most reliable troops. US military intelligence reasoned that as American troops reached this defense line they would be met by poison gas or germ weapons.

But within Hussein's war council, the story was very different. In December 2002, Hussein called his generals together for a surprising announcement: Iraq did not possess WMD. The generals were stunned. They had long assumed that they could count on a hidden cache of chemical or biological weapons. Iraq had used such weapons in the war with Iran. Hussein had convinced his generals that it was the threat of WMD that had enabled him to stop the Americans moving on Baghdad after the 1991 war.

According to "Cobra II," Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, told American interrogators after the 2003 war that Hussein's stunning admission to the generals "sent morale plummeting."

The Bush critics can argue that the president was too gullible in accepting the conclusion of his intelligence agencies. But the evidence does not suggest that he knowingly lied to the American public about the existence of WMD.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0412/p09s02-cojh.html

What they fail to mention is that those companies are BASED in those locations, but outsourcing the jobs elsewhere.

Another factor to figure is that most of the positions mentioned are TEMPORARY project or seasonal positions that offer no benefits or permanancy.

Its like a couple years back when Shrub announced the creation of 100,000 jobs. He announced it on the opening day of baseball remember? Someone has to sell tickets, sweep bleachers, and fling hotdogs.
Only a ***** like Shrub would try and take credit for it though.


Rory, ever heard of the Downing Street memo?

remember as well that the bush admin re-classified fast food jobs as manufacturing.....

"
J-ust
O-ver
B-roke
"