Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The latest employment report sucks, of course. We're in yellow-flag time here at the North American job speedway and maze. Lots of rigs are in the pits changing tires, so to speak, and yup, some ain't comin' back out onto the track.

I like to avoid the monthly sermonette about just how bad it is out there -- as if people didn't see what's right in front of their eyes. Especially now, since this Baby Huey of a contraction a few months back gave way to what? The long goodbye of stagnation?

But let's look again -- or maybe for the first time -- at the true efficiency number here, jobmarket-wise.

Forget the various rates of unemployment, each more astoundingly record-breaking then the last. Just go ahead for a moment and carve away the layers of knee-jerk agitprop and notice the real big dog in the hunt here. It's not any delta of UN-employment rates at all. In fact, it's a rate of employment, not unemployment -- the so-called job participation rate, traced here in all its graphic beauty over the last 50 years:

(Click to enlarge.)

Over on the left you got yer New Frontier rates -- wow, only in the mid 50's! Then comes the obvious if cruelly jagged climb through five cycles and 40 years to the apex in the champagne twilight time of the Clinton-Rubin-Greenstain miracle. Yikes, the rate hit the mid-60's: a 20% increase!

Since then, after one complete cycle and into the "bite me" opening of a new one, looks like maybe we face a break in the trend, the onset of a epochal reversal, the beginning of an n-cycle, m-year-long ragged secular decline in the participation rate.

I know, I know, most of those uptrend years were for shit, what with us goin' faster to barely stay in place. Rising participation was coupled with wage stultification, but at least it liberated the housewife army. Without that wage squeeze, who knows, today we might face far worse, as the last of the male-order factory jobs slink away to Asia major.

Much has been made of the now nearly completed trend toward two-job households, most of it bad: oh the sweat, oh the waste, oh the toil. But right now how about we look at it from the eggs in a basket POV. Compare in your head the impact of pop's layoff back in the Ike years, when so often he was the only householder participating in the job force, with now, when even after the most grotesque job contraction since 1937-38 we as a jobbled nation are still at a higher participation rate then in the glorious new frontier/great society years of Sinatra and Lennon.

Sure, we make less per hour, and produce a lot more "value", but we see more of our hours bought... right? And that means despite drastic job loss, today's middle American households not only have unemployment comp but often a second household member still out there at the front, still at the job site, still pullin' in gainful work-time wages.

If we think of ourselves, each of us in our little household unit, as yeoman outfits, each a private grower of potential job hours, much like the family corn farmers of old -- what has happened to us since Nixon jousted with premier K on that fake kitchen set in Moscow?

Well, we're sellin more time, and as I mentioned, producing more with it. And okay, getting less per unit sold.

But sports fans we're still selling our two pairs of hands per household, not one. And that's even at this pit point in the cycle.

No wonder the teabaggers aren't savaging corporate America; their spouse still works inside there.

Gotta love a system that can increase household income AND at the same time increase the rate of exploitation; create more job insecurity AND spread around more jobs. Shows an instinctively keen inner coherence, an innate ability to stablize itself right along with its satanic drive toward insane instability.

Yeah, it relies on us to scramble a bit too much, to produce that dugout of stability in the gale force instability roaring around us. And yup, it was us wee weebles done all the streamlinin' to our basic units -- you know, cut down on kids underfoot and old folks overhead; pretty well wiped out marathon family repasts and home-cooked pies and haircuts, etc.

But like the resurrectionists used to say: "Hey, don't knock it, mate, till ya tried it. Fuck, it's a livin'... ain't it?"