More Private-Sector Jobs in August; Government Lays Off Workers
“With the American economic recovery showing clear signs of slowdown, private employers added 67,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday. The number was more than forecast. Over all, the nation lost 54,000 jobs in August, the agency said, as state and local governments, many of them grappling with severe budget deficits, cut 10,000 jobs last month…. The unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent from 9.5 percent in July.” (New York Times)
Fewer people working for the government is a good thing.
FEE Timely Classic
“A Classic Hayekian Hangover” by Roger Garrison and Gene Callahan
Comment by Cry Aboutit on 3 September 2010:
Sure, fewer people working for the government is a good thing…but between losing local or state employees vs. federal I’ll keep the locals until last.
States can actually go bankrupt; they have to keep a budget and we’re seeing how pensioners and other costly programs have devastated states’ ability to function with those heavy outflows. So they are reacting, slowly, but correctly to the downturn.
The federal government has no such restrictions, no correcting strategy to runaway spending.
I don’t like dealing with the City for a zoning variance, but at least they have to live where they eat, so to speak. Federal employees have taken parasitism to a new level of refinement.
So I contend that losing these jobs isn’t a good thing. It distracts those of us who want smaller government into believing that the inexorable effects of the market are beginning to show through, when in fact the most responsive (dare I say “good”–no–”mildly better”) government is being sacrificed to the benefit of the federal government.
If states and municipalities cannot perform politically expedient services, the federal government will step in. And there’s no stopping those leeches.
Comment by Cry Aboutit on 3 September 2010:
The US government is the world’s largest employer.
Wal-Mart is the second.
I wonder how many people get hired/fired from Wal-Mart every year?
How many from the federal government?
Retiring doesn’t count, I mean actually terminated due to substandard performance or breach of policy.
I don’t even have to see the numbers, adjusted to compare “apples to apples” to know that working for the Feds is a lifetime-sized security blanket, where the biggest risk to employment is missing a scheduled promotion, not termination.
Contrast that with Wal-Mart…a successful global enterprise that hires and fires mostly unskilled workers with such frequency that their average length of employment is less than 6 months.
Or how about Caterpillar? They are another global company where 4 out of 5 people who start there retire there…or did until they slashed jobs to avoid paying people after their revenues were expected to drop.
Now they are hiring again.
Where am I going with this?
The ability to terminate workers is an immensely important strategy that employers need to retain to remain competitive in the face of changing market needs. The federal government’s ability to exercise that strategy is woefully hindered, to the extent that no one should be surprised to see a bloated, barely responsive, vastly expensive bureaucracy where our government used to be. I suppose it’s inevitable.