The End of Full-Time Work in the American Retail Service Sector

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/...

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.

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.