Facts about American employment.

[Cassius23]

First, did you know that for about 47% of people their average income is $14.32 an hour?

I went over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm and have been doing some interesting research.

And IT/knowledge workers? They do account for a good rate of pay at $30 an hour on average, but only account for around 2% of the work force(the rate of pay stays the same when you factor in managers, but still adds up to around 6%)

Yeah, outsourcing won't hurt us that bad at all, at all.

Below I have copied and pasted for your review the data how many people are in various professions and what their average rate of pay is(also, we have 128127360 currently working as per the BLS, though they don't count independent contractors.)

Another interesting factor is the unemployment rate. According to the census our current labor force is around 138,820,935 and the population over 18 is 159381846(subtracting the number of US citizens who are listed as disabled which is in the area of 49-50 million). This produces the most cheerful unemployment figures which I could find at which is 12%.


Office and administrative support 22649080 13.95
Sales and related 13507840 15.49
Food preparation and serving related 10507390 8.43
Production occupations 10128200 14.08
Transportation and material moving 9581320 13.41
Education, training, and library 7891810 20.23
Healthcare practitioners and technical 6359380 27.55
Management occupations 6200940 41.12
Construction and extraction occupations 6170410 18.04
Installation, maintenance, and repair 5215390 17.89
Business and financial operations 5131840 27.10
Building/grounds cleaning/maintenance 4300440 10.33
Healthcare support 3271350 11.17
Personal care and service occupations 3099550 10.48
Protective service 3006100 16.75
Computer and mathematical occupations 2915300 31.50
Architecture and engineering 2372770 29.69
Community and social services 1673740 17.52
Arts/design/entertainment/sports//media 1595710 21.01
Life/physical/social science 1131390 26.89
Legal occupations major 958520 38.42
Farming, fishing, and forestry 458850 9.76

[shenmue]

1. I am presently earning considerably less than that

Zero dollars an hour, to be precise.

****ing outsourcing.

Wonderful how G. B*** cares about the economy. Of other countries.

[Cassius23]

2. Outsourcing is one of my touchpoints as well

As I am(hopefully soon to be was) in the IT industry and spent years looking for work and finding something at $9/hr. I am reading an article that Wired put out last year talking how wonderful outsourcing is and how we will be doing primarily R&D work.

Funny how that works out.

[PowerToThePeople]

3. I think about this with the "No school - No work, Nov 2."

I have been living on less than this average since * took office. Now, recently I have achieved a job which is higher than this rate. Still less than what the job would have payed back in Clinton's days, but better than I have seen in many years. And now, someone wants me to walk out in protest? Sorry, ain't gonna happen. I would rather keep myself fed and work towards donating extra money and/or time that my financial unburdening will give me to good causes.

Why don't they schedule stuff like this for better days?

[Birthmark]

4. Yeah, I arrived at a similar percentage

I used a different method, though. It's not good no matter how hard they try to spin it. My sympathies go out to anyone who is out of work.

[Cassius23]

5. Seconded..

The percentages of between 2% and 6% are way, way off and almost a statistical fiction. I'm wondering how much worse it is going to get.

Also, you guys think there would be interest in an outlay of the income(i.e., 10% of people make x per year, etc,etc.)?

[hootinholler]

18. Those % numbers are how many are drawing unemployment...

After 6 months it runs out and you come out of the unemployment numbers.

-Hoot

[ProfessorGAC]

19. You're Correct

These numbers have always been grossly off. The way they're calculated is intended to make the information "new" and as low as possible.

The way i get my values is to run a moving average chart of both the UE numbers and the Commerce & Labor departments' new hire values.

The disconnect is then highly visible. I show approximately 11% of all those who WANT a job, don't have one. When discouraged or surrendering workers are included, it's about 13%. However, some of those folks are so close to retirement, they really don't care. So, i would guess the OP's number of 12% is pretty darned close.
The Professor

[rman]

6. how many on minimum wage?

$14.32 average doesn't say much about how much people actually make.

[PowerToThePeople]

7. I agree, avg is not a good term. Mean income would be better.

Average can be skewed from very few, very wealthy people.

[Cassius23]

8. And here are the minimum wage figures.

Again from the BLS report(http://bls.gov/cps/minwage2004.htm).

According to Current Population Survey estimates for 2004, some 73.9 million American workers were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.8 percent of all wage and salary workers.1 Of those paid by the hour, 520,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage, and another 1.5 million were reported earning wages below the minimum. Together, these 2.0 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 2.7 percent of all hourly-paid workers.

And, as is now corrected, what are listed is the mean wages per hour.

[sandnsea]

10. What about higher minimum wages

Lots of states have passed higher minimum wages than $5.15. Are those people just not included in the minimum wage numbers anymore?

[Cassius23]

13. That's more difficult because of the way they display the #s.

It's a lot easier for me to say how many people are in a specific profession and what their median income is as that is how they display their #s. What was interesting to me is that the "design", "IT" and "Management" professions(as shown in the first post), though they show making a decent median income, still only make up for a very, very small portion of the overall workforce.

I'm afraid that I have to conclude from that that my original theory is true. We are getting more jobs but the jobs that we are getting aren't the design/creativity jobs originally hoped for, but jobs making less money with less security than before.

[sandnsea]

9. Another new statistic

For the first time, the top 20% receives 50% of the income. The bottom 20% receives around 4.7%. Not good.

How did you come to your unemployment figure? Did you check the TANF numbers because they aren't added in the official unemployment numbers. Also the self-employed numbers, I'm wondering if they're hiding the unemployed in there. They count people who mowed the neighbor's lawn as self-employed these days. I just can't figure out how they keep coming up with such low unemployment numbers. They just don't make sense.

[Cassius23]

11. Well, there were a lot of ways I could do it..

At first I was going to take the total # of the US population(census) and then divide that by the total # employed(BLS), but that didn't take into account people not of working age and disabled persons, so I used the working population provided by the census divided that by the number of americans of working age taking into account that a portion of those eligible would be disabled. The fact that even THIS number(which I think is probibly low, but I'm erring on the side of caution so I don't seem really alarmist) was twice the listed unemployment rate was quite shocking. Oh, and according to a comparison to the census there are around 10 million people or so self employed(as the BLS doesn't include self employment but the census does, and the census shows 138 million people employed while the BLS shows 128).

[rman]

12. Krugman on quintiles (blocks of 20%)

"...What has been happening is a extraordinary pulling apart of the income distribution. Traditionally people look at income distribution by "quintiles", by blocks of 20%.
But that is not where the action is. It is not in the top 10%, it is not even in the top 5%.

To really see what is going on you need to look at the top 1%, the top 0.1% and the top 0.01%.
Then you discover that there has been an explosion of income on the very top of the scale."

top 1%
1970 9%
2000 22%

top 0.1%
1970 2.8%
2000 11%

top 0.01%
1970 1%
2000 5%

"We are by these numbers fully back to and by some measures above the level of concentration of income that we had in the 1920's."


from "What went wrong"
Paul Krugman
rtsp://real.dialnsa.edu/REAL_BEARD/spring2003_events/schwartz.rm (realplayer)

[Cassius23]

14. It looks like Marx might have been onto something..

The middle class as a temporary abberation. However, I'm still not ready to toss around my red star and start calling people komrade just yet. And we don't even have the option of a world war to redistribute the wealth back(even though I hate the idea of war).

What do you see as a viable incident that could redress this and thereby keep the economy going?

[rman]

16. Don't start me on war and redistrubution of wealth.

All wars are fought over redistrubution of wealth; redistrubution from weak, resource-rich nations to the elites of the wealthy nations who start these wars.
I'll refer to this post by me in another thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5085506&mesg_id=5089076

I'm not sure i quite understand your question.
I think it is not a matter of one "incident" that can correct this situation. It all comes down to awareness of the people about what is going on. Going from non-awareness to awareness is a long process where the mass media play a crucial role. Not much is going to change for the better untill the make-believe media that we have are replaced by real independent media.

Also it looks like the economy can keep going when economic activity is highly concentrated in a small minority of the population. That's how it has been for a long time, it's just getting worse. Thing is, having a strong economy doesn't say anything bout who benefits from it. There are lots of things that are "good for the economy" that are bad for (a majority of the) people - for instance low wages, low environmental standards, poor social security.

[Cassius23]

17. Ok, I'll restate(I was a little vague).

Sorry, it was/is a very long night.


How do you think we can avoid a Great Depression/Mad Max/Horrible Gut Wrenching Apocalypse/Cyberpunk 2008 scenario(though if I have to escape to the woods there are a lot more woods than people think and keeping warm isn't THAT hard if you have the skills for it)? Now I'm not talking about paradise on earth/return of the dot com era, more like the idea that if one works hard one can make it in the US even with a blue collar job.

[newportdadde]

21. My take on your question.

We cannont avoid the scenarios you listed. I'm not sure if it will be a Great Depression type scenario I'm starting to think its going to be more like letting the air out of the ballon very slowly type play. Basically if you have a job which can be done by cheaper labor, that includes white collar as well, your screwed. What I see resulting from this is that once cheap credit and debt have run its course our standard of living will begin to decline as countries like India and China begin to rise, meeting somewhere in the middle.

The sun is setting on the days of a blue collar worker, working one job raising a family and retiring with a good pension.

[rman]

23. I agree

I think it can not be avoided. To many people in high places go along with the preparations for the scenario, either knowingly or in ignorance.
I think it is the elite's response to the end of the age of cheap energy. Running out of it is going to take several decades, but the continued decline of production capacity will cause demand destruction - ever so slowly over the cause of decades. Large numbers of people will be forced to live without cheap energy, and alternatives are not available on a sufficient scale for this to not cause great problems for many people.
That is besides the impact that continued oil wars will have on people all over the globe. China in particular is desperate for oil, and so is the US. And so is Europe. And Russia of course. And they will become ever more desperate.


"The sun is setting" you say?

I say the sun has already set on the blue collar worker. Last time one could provide for a family on just one full time job was in the 60's and 70's. These days it's hard to come by even for a single parent family with multiple part-time jobs. These days families go straight from middle class to homeless working poor.
But of course it can get darker still. It ain't midnight yet.

[rman]

15. That's 500% rise of income for the Mega Super Rich over the past 3 decades

Just in case anyone missed the significance of the numbers that Krugman cites.

Over that same period the federal minimum wage standard has not even been compensated for inflation.

It obviously does not "trickle down", it does in fact do the opposite. But that should not be a surprise, given the RW's trackrecord of bold faced lies.

[TahitiNut]

27. The Federal Minimum Wage is at a 50-year low.

It's even worse when you consider that the number of people earning at or below the federal minimum wage is at a 50-year high.

[TahitiNut]

25. That's why the Gini Index is so revealing.

We've become a banana republic! Even China has more equitable distibution of income!

[elehhhhna]

22. You forgot the high paid weekend ebayers! lol.

[newportdadde]

20. Question on IT/Knowledge worker percentage.

Does the figure go from 2% to 6% then when management is thrown in? That seems like a lot of managment. I'm also surprised that the average pay did not increase significantly.

As an IT person myself I find this all very interesting. I haven't run the data like you have but wanted to throw in a personal observation about outsourcing.

1) At least half of our area is now onshore/offshore.
2) The quality of work has rapidly declined in the past 2-3 years.
3) The amount of time billed albiet starting from a lower rate seems to be increasing rapidly.. behond making sense. Perhaps an attempt now that they are inplace to boost their bill?

Anyways good topic, recommended.

[Cassius23]

24. Yes, there are a little under 3000000 IT workers

and, according to the BLS, about 6,200,000 managerial types and their median pay is 35.77/hr(with a mean hourly of 41.12). This is driven up by the presence of 346000 chief executives making around 67.50/hr and 1,752,910 making around $38/hr, but the rest tend to stay in the rough area of 25-38/hr. I think this is because of the use of the managerial unpaid overtime provision passed a couple of years back(and keep in mind that a manager at Mcdonald's is still technically considered management).

And I agree about overall quality going down, btw. I'm hoping to go into knowledge management work(research and information gathering which is needed at this company because we support about 500-800 on a daily basis, around 2000-6000 applications overall) and save enough money to get my master's in library science.

[newspeak]

26. yes, considering average is not realistic, mean is more realistic

I remember after NAFTA-GATT was passed, we were all going to move away from manufacturing base and move into the service industry. I laughed and told my husband, yeah McDonalds, Wal-Mart--Lo and behold, it's happening!!! When I worked part-time at Mervyns, there were people holding down two and three jobs just to support their families and make ends meet--that included senior citizens working there. Most working Americans are working more hours and receiving less wages and benefits---it's a hundred years ago, and these are the Robber Barons!!!!!

[Neil Lisst]

28. The REAL minimum wage is decreasing every year.

The REAL minimum wage is crawling backwards every year. It remains constant, while everything else goes up. Buying power is in reverse for the working poor.

40 years ago, one hour's minimum wage would buy 8 gallons of gasoline for that worker's car. Now it will buy 2 gallons.

Most of that erosion has occurred under BUSH the past 5 years.


he's a moran, as shown here ..
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/neillisst/