
The End of Full-Time Work in the American Retail Service Sector - protomyth
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2013/04/17/the-end-of-full-time-work-in-the-american-retail-service-sector/
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oneplusone
The author is being deceitful with his chart and it throws this entire article
in question. Just because you draw a line and call it stagnation doesn't mean
it is. The chart is a monthly change in employment not cumulative growth.

[http://reflectionsofarationalrepublican.files.wordpress.com/...](http://reflectionsofarationalrepublican.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/bush-
vs-obama-total-private-jobs-full-picture-june-data.jpg)

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ZanyProgrammer
News Flash: This has been going on for a long time. I remember while working
at the Palo Alto Whole Foods (2008-last year), that almost no one in my
department worked 40 hours, except the supervisors. Of course the article is a
bit biased to begin with-its like reading an indictment of unions from a
manager who doesn't want the wealth to trickle down to the peons.

~~~
stephengillie
I'm just going to throw this out there: the UFCW has had Kroger, Safeway,
Supervalu, and the other major players paying for fully subsidized insurance.
Every employee working more than 80 hours a MONTH has had medical insurance
for their families for more than 20 years.

And Safeway's president reworked the plan 10 years ago to require preventative
care like annual physicals, arguing that the ounce of prevention was cheaper
than the pound of cure.

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adventured
The conclusion drawn at the end, via chart, is completely wrong.

It's wrong for the same reason the old Bush vs Obama job chart from the
election period was wrong (both sides context dropping).

There is a reasonable limit to the number of jobs an economy will or can lose,
unless you're talking Zimbabwe style economic armageddon (that takes decades
typically top to bottom). Even then, in the most extreme of scenarios, it runs
out.

After the point of maximum damage, job losses will revert to close to nil by
default. The side the author is claiming as recovery, is not recovery but
rather it's continued job losses in fact (at a gradually lessening rate). So
it's remarkable to see it used as an indication of recovery, when it doesn't
inherently indicate any sort of thing. A chart with an arrow pointing up does
not mean recovery.

If you took a look at the Spanish economy right now, which suffers from
intense 27% unemployment, you could run a similar chart on their unemployment.
For it's a mathematical requirement that eventually the job losses must slow
to a trickle, and at that point some idiot economist could claim that as a
proof of recovery via a similar chart with a fun arrow pointing up to lessened
job losses. Noone would confuse 27% unemployment, in which there are low job
losses, as a proof of recovery - context matters.

In the same vein, producing 100k jobs per month on average is no proof of
stagnation just because the average is flat. That is to say, there's literally
zero strong evidence to suggest it would have been better without Obamacare.
The US economy has problems far worse than the mess that is the implementation
of Obamacare. We began losing massive numbers of manufacturing jobs at far
back as the 1970s, all the way through the 1990s and 2000's. The inflation
disaster the Fed gave us over those 40 years, is continuing today, and is
approximately a million times larger a financial issue than Obamacare. If you
wanted to look for the reason for the destruction of below middle class paying
jobs in America (most service jobs), that'd be the first place to start (the
impossibility of keeping up with just 3% to 5% perpetual inflation).

A real discussion on all of this would require detailed information on the
types of jobs being created, the number of hours those workers were getting,
the portion of those that are 2nd or 3rd jobs, and so on. It would also
require examining the number of people falling out of the work force versus
jobs created, and on and on and on. That would be context.

