THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2009

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2009

Jobs Are

Top Priority

We’re bouncing back. We’re not bouncing back.

The current take on the public Zeitgeist

depends on what newspaper you’re reading, even, perhaps, on what day of the week you’re reading it.

It wasn’t that long ago that newspapers and other reporting media were being blamed for the recession.

That was a bit of a stretch, in our view; greedy pigs on Wall Street are responsible for the recession. But critics insisted that the press was guilty of the deepening, widening, and persistence of the downturn.

To whit: If reporters and editors didn’t keep harping on all the gloomy statistics, then people would regain their confidence and get back to buying the homes, the cars, all the knick-knacks that keep our consumer-driven economy humming.

Would that we were so powerful. And would that an economic turnaround were so easily managed.

But newspapers took notice, and after recent weeks and months of going the other way, of reporting — in excess, it seemed to us — on every perceived little inkling of recovery, we seem to be back to reality again in the last few days.

Even the Wall Street Journal is on board, recently publishing one of the most depressing economic stories that has made its way into print.

That article (“The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think,” by U.S. News and World Report editor-inchief Mortimer Zuckerman) contends that there will be no new jobs even if and when the economy starts to pick up. That’s because the work week for 80 percent of the workforce is now just 33 hours, the shortest in the 45 years that the government has been keeping track of this particular statistical nugget.

As the economy improves, businesses won’t need more workers, they will simply expand the work week for those they still have. Going from 33 hours to a more normal 40 hours equals the need for 3.3 million more workers, according to Zuckerman.

This is recovery?

Political and economic analysts have taken to postulating that we will have a jobless recovery.

Despite the paucity of our economic training and insight, we’re ready to argue that no such oxymoronic beast exists.

People aren’t making a recovery possible, they aren’t buying the cars and homes and knick-knacks to keep our economy humming, because they don’t have jobs or, if they do, they have no confidence in its security.

When double-digit joblessness is the new norm, recovery starts to look more and more like...recession.

And it looks like it’s going to be with us for a while.