The Washington Examiner is becoming a journalistic force to be reckoned with in a profession otherwise dominated by partisan ideologues who haven’t had an original thought since the Great Society. Recently the Examiner has enjoyed a major talent infusion from rising conservative voices like Byron York, Michael Barone, Mary Katharine Ham and Michael Freddoso.

So, it was a special honor to get a featured spot in its “Sunday Reflections” page yesterday. We had submitted a column as a regular op-ed page offering, but editorial page editor Mark Tapscott–obviously a very discerning individual!–thought highly enough of it to ask for 200 more words and slate it for the Reflections spot. (I can’t even remember the last time an editor asked me to add something…)

Our intention was to contribute something of cutting-edge nature, and we think it succeeded. Followers of “Back to Work!” will hear echoes of things previously posted on this site:

Here’s the real story on America’s unemployment

By: Steve Adams
Sunday Reflections Contributor
December 27, 2009

KEY DATA: Real total U.S. (U-6) unemployment exceeds 17 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Take-away: The modern office/factory-model job as we know it actually could be headed for extinction.

I’m one of the many casualties of the Great Recession. My position — along with 200 others — was eliminated 13 months ago at a major nonprofit organization in Colorado Springs. Permanently.

Oddly, I keep finding myself referring to it as a “layoff.” It’s not like there’s going to be any callback. Is it denial? Perhaps in part. (Reality and I aren’t on the best speaking terms right now.)

More likely, however, it’s a kind of collective future shock. Some of our thinking just hasn’t quite caught up with the realities of this Brave New Economy. We tend to assume, for example, that when recovery comes (and it’s right around the corner, the partisan cheerleaders keep promising), we’re going to pick right back up where we left off pre-recession.

Well, probably not. Already this recession has wiped out all job growth from the previous expansion. And when the dust finally settles, there’s likely to be a net permanent loss of jobs — jobs, at least, with the kind of pay and benefits we’ve become accustomed to.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Here_s-the-real-story-on-America_s-unemployment-8679698-80076392.html

(more…)

Break out the bubbly. The monthly unemployment rate finally stopped climbing–even dropped .2 percent, from 10.2 percent to 10.

Psychologically, that’s huge. The bleeding has definitely slowed–from hundreds of thousands job losses per month to a mere 11,000. PTL. We finally have valid reason to hope that we’re bottoming out and on our way back.

Practically, it’s still too soon to party hearty. The bleeding may have slowed, but it hasn’t stopped yet. The best we can really say is that the patient appears to be stabilizing for now. Actual recovery is not yet in sight.

Things, we know, can change. Often it’s a case of two steps forward, one step back. The partisan media, for example, got carried away with the last quarterly GDP numbers–ballyhooing economic recovery all over Page 1. Then when the entire uptick evaporated in the next adjustment, that news was carried way back by the proverbial hemorrhoid ads.

We must not forget that some 27 million people are still unemployed or under-employed, the dollar is quickly losing value and the biggest factor in the new unemployment rate may be the hiring of temporary and part-time workers going into the holiday shopping season.

Yes, I’m a bear on this economy. I don’t want to be overly discouraging, but I am afraid that people are grasping at straws (so eagerly offered by the partisan media) sheerly out of fear. That can be dangerous.

So, here’s the plain truth we all need to grasp: When recovery does come, we’re not going to pick right back up where we left off. Many of us are going to be settling for jobs with significantly lower pay and benefits. Many of us–especially the older folks–are going to be left behind.

That’s not all bad. Here’s the good news: I believe while there may be fewer actual jobs in the end, there will be plenty of opportunities for work. It just won’t be in the form of factory-and-office-model employment.

Many of us will have to lose our dependency on the paternalistic corporation and learn how to make a living the way our forefathers did–as self-employed independent contractors. It can be done. And I believe for many of us this is the way out.

I think that’s better news than this new unemployment number, which is little bigger than a rounding error. Still, we’ll take it. It sure beats the alternative.

“Back to Work!” is getting noticed. We’ve done a half dozen radio interviews thus far, and the phone is ringing more frequently each week. Today I did an interview with Faith Radio in Montgomery, Alabama, where host Bob Crittenden was kind enough to provide a link: http://www.meetinghouseonline.info/download/AdamsSNovember2309.mp3

Please take a listen. It was a good interview, and we actually had a little bit of fun with it. Thanks, Bob!

Farewell to the job

Did you know that work in the form of jobs is just over 200 years old? (No, but if you hum a few bars, we’ll see if we can fake it…)

It’s true. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, everybody who wasn’t a slave was essentially what we’d call an independent contractor today.

The workplace was the village, the field and the home, where craftsmen, farmers and families did their work without time clocks, employment contracts and management consultants. In frontier days the pioneers may have worked themselves silly part of the year, but when the larder was full, they took the rest of the year off–without a single qualm. That’s the way it had always been.

Then came industrialization, and now the workplace became the factory and the office. Even your educational system, as Alvin Toffler has so eloquently pointed out, morphed into factory-model schools:

Raw material in. Structured processing through division of labor. Finished product out. A 12-year assembly line, as it were.

Our thinking has become so conditioned to factory-model work as the norm, that it’s hard to grasp that it all may have been no more than a momentary blip in the human experience. Here’s what I’m saying:

This is not your father’s recession. When the music stops this time, some of us will find ourselves without chairs. There’s going to be a net loss of jobs–perhaps now and going forward indefinitely.

It won’t be picking up where we left off, as before. It will be a sea change, a paradigm shift–and it will be irreversible.

Some of us won’t make that shift. Aging boomers in their 60s are bouncing off the walls, trying to figure out what they have to do to get a job, not knowing that for many of them, it ain’t gonna happen. There will be some tragedies. But for most people it’s not the end of the world, or anything close.

We just have to change our own paradigm. There will still be work; it just won’t necessarily be in the form of an employer-employee contract. Increasingly, it’s going to be in the form of work for hire for PICs–professional independent contractors.

I’ve had to learn how to make this paradigm shift, and Back to Work! is comitted to helping you do so, too.  Stay tuned. It may be a wild ride.

I may draw unemployment, but I’m not really unemployed. I’m a freelancer. I do the thing you first think of when you hear that word–freelance writer (and editor).

If you’re one, too, then we’re pioneers together. Our mission is to show others how to make a living in a world without jobs. One of the refrains of “Back to Work!” is there’s a lot more work than jobs. Did you know that work in the form of jobs is only a little more than 200 years old–a product of the Industrial Revolution–and the pendulum may be swinging back to self-employment?

Many of the currently unemployed will need to learn how to make the transition to PIC–professional independent contractor. We’ll need to teach things like how to calculate not just your project fee, but your billable hourly rate.

Even now, there’s a surprising number of fields that lend themselves well to self-employment. A Google search quickly yields:

writer
technical writer
copywriter
editor
journalist
Web developer
Webmaster
blog writer
grant writer
proofreader
photographer
architect
illustrator
security professional
programmer
translator/inteprreter
artist
video editor
chef
video editor
music teacher
courier
patent agent
paralegal
pilot
programmer
foreign correspondent
consultant
video producer

In the book, we have another list of fields that lend themselves to home-based businesses and independent contracting:

accounting and bookkeeping
advertising and promotion
art and promotion materials
career counseling and outplacement
editorials and writing
field sales
janitorial and maintenance
market research and analysis
MIS and computer software and systems
personality testing and evaluations
phone sales and telemarketing
secretarial and office production services
tax and tax planning
training and educational materials

I have to admit to some surprise here or, at least, failure of imagination. I tried to think of something to throw in here as a ringer, asking readers to find it–with “answer tomorrow.” Fact is, there’s precious little in the way of work that can’t translate into self-employment.

Exploding-head warning: Tomorrow’s column will deal again with unemployment and public policy. Basically, the returns are in from Europe, and those who are doing the best economically are those who have avoided the road the United States has chosen.

I promised we’d make this as interesting and informative as possible by providing lots of resources and a wide variety of content. In that spirit, I want to offer a few voices besides my own from time to time to give you the benefit of other perspectives. This is one of those times.

I want to thank my good friend, Jim Pfaff, for graciously agreeing to provide the following post on this week’s hot topic–i.e., how some folks (like the Partisan Media and the current administration) are playing a little fast and loose with economic numbers. Jim is a longtime political activist and public policy analyst and currently host of The Jim Pfaff show on KLZ AM560 in Denver. He is one of the savviest observers of the current scene that I know.

Jim Pfaff

Take it away, Jim:

Do recent economic numbers offer any hope for the unemployed?

The federal government recently reported that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen by 3.5 percent during the third quarter of 2009. The Obama administration is using this news to bolster its claim that its economic plan–including the “stimulus” package passed in February–is beginning to turn the economy around.

But is this a real indicator of renewed growth in our economy? Will this cause a reduction in unemployment and a renewed prosperity? Let’s analyze this for a moment.

First, we need to understand what GDP actually is. GDP is reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in the U.S. Commerce Department, and it indicates the entire economic output of our country. If this number is rising, it should tell us we’re doing pretty well. But if it is going down, that has been interpreted to mean a poor economy. If we aren’t expanding as a country, that means business is doing poorly and problems like unemployment are likely to get worse.

Economists use the GDP figure as a major factor in determining when a recession begins and ends. But there are some hidden factors in GDP, which when closely examined, show that we are nowhere near an economic recovery yet.

There’s an old saying that “numbers don’t lie, but liars use numbers.” GDP is particularly susceptible to being used by liars (commonly known as politicians) to argue for or against government policy. Because understanding its components can be a tricky business, it’s a simple matter to credit government policy unduly when GDP is on the rise or to criticize your opponent’s policy when it is going down or shows slow growth.

GDP has three components: personal consumer spending, business investment and government spending. Then after balancing out the difference between exports to other countries and imports from other countries, you get GDP. In the recent Commerce Department GDP report, government spending alone increased by 2.3 percent. We also saw major increases in durable goods orders (purchases of goods designed to last a long time…..like automobiles) and residential real estate purchases. This was influenced by two major government programs: the “Cash for Clunkers” program and a first-time home buyers’ tax-incentive program. These are short-term programs that artificially increased these numbers.

The bottom line: Without increases in government spending, many economists believe GDP would have fallen for four straight quarters. And private business activity in the report was still down, and we imported 2 percent more than we exported. In other words, business activity still isn’t growing and is way down from last year’s levels.

For job seekers, the news isn’t very encouraging, but there is still reason to hope. Those who are being hired right now are the ones with the best strategy and the most creative plan for success. “Back to Work” is a great resource for you as you plan your way through your job-seeking activities.

For more about this rising new voice in conservative talk radio, go to www.jimpfaffshow.com and www.opiniontimes.com.

A jobless recovery or jobless growth is a phrase used by economists, especially in the United States, to describe the recovery from a recession that does not produce strong growth in employment. … Prior to the 1990s, most economic recoveries led to employment increases relatively rapidly. However, in the early 1990s’ recession, early 2000s’ recession, and late-2000s’ recession the employment recoveries have lagged increases in gross domestic product (GDP).

–Wikipedia

First of all, the positive GDP growth that’s being ballyhooed by the Partisan Media is smoke and mirrors. As our friend Jim Pfaff www.jimpfaffshow.com points out, GDP is a combination of consumer spending, private investment and government spending. The reported 3.5 percent GDP “growth” was almost all federal spending. I’ve asked him to weigh in later this week with his take on all this for Back to Work.

And even if it were true, it’s a distinction without a difference for real working stiffs who have to live in this brave new postmodern world of jobless “recovery.” What’s different now is that many of us are not going to pick up where we left off before the Great Recession. We’re going to be dealing with a permanent net loss of jobs–or at least of comparable well-paying jobs–that will force us to adapt or die.

I predict that many more Boomers will die before they can retire. The smart ones will stop looking for jobs and start looking for work–income-producing opportunities not in the form of traditional 40-hour weekly employment. Survivors will swell the ranks of PICs–professional independent contractors.

One of the things Back to Work proposes to do is help light the path for those looking to make this necessary transition. So, again I say, “Stay tuned.”