Here’s all you need to know about the U.S. economy: It’s a great time to be a waiter or bartender. With there being companies such as Silven Recruitment out there, it comes as no surprise to find that the hospitality industry is one that many people want to be a part of. Or a nurse.
Everybody else….meh.
You’ve seen the numbers. The U.S. economy keeps churning out new jobs by the hundreds of thousands, month after month. Even long-term unemployment numbers seem to be perking up. So why do things still *feel* so bad? And more to the point, why are presidential candidates able to capitalize on that feeling so easily?
I set out to find out and found myself in a love/hate relationship with Labor Department data recently. We’re still dating, the data and I. “It’s complicated.” But here’s what’s not complicated:
Since March 2011 — five years ago — the U.S. economy has added 12.4 million jobs. Here’s a sampling of where those jobs have appeared:
- 2.2 million in ‘leisure and hospitality,’ including 1.8 million in ‘accomodation and food services.’
- 2.6 million in ‘education and health services,’ including 2.1 million in ‘health care and social assistance.’
- 1.4 million in ‘retail trade’ including 300,000 in car dealers and 260,000 in ‘food and beverage stores.’
- 1.3 million in ‘administrative and waste services’ for professional and business services
And there you have about two-thirds of all those job gains.
Mind you, there are plenty of good-paying restaurant jobs (though median wage data is as bad as you’d imagine). The hospitality industry, in particular, has seen some huge changes over the past few years, with developments in areas such as Restaurant Accounting Software for example that is helping businesses get ahead of their competition.
Furthermore, there are certainly plenty of good health care jobs. And there are folks who do well working at car dealerships, too. But this is not the sign of a modern economy awakening from a slumber. It’s more like an economy snoring during a nap.
Let’s take a step back. I started down this road because of a great column about last month’s job gains from ZeroHedge.com. It explained rather brutally that Americans who are losing manufacturing jobs have had no trouble picking up jobs as wait staff in bars and restaurants. And that’s the problem. The fastest-growing job categories in from that “positive” March jobs report were food and drinking establishments, retail trade, education and health, and construction. Those four categories made up about 8 out of every 10 new jobs created last month. Meanwhile, manufacturing lost 29,000 jobs. Almost exactly as many jobs as food service created.
Here’s an even bigger step back. You’ve probably heard that America is now a service economy. Here’s what that means. The U.S. has 143 million nonfarm workers — with 102 million of them working “private service.” Manufacturing and construction make up 19 million, and government 22 million.
For a very rough mental picture: put 10 American workers in a room, and roughly 7 of them would be service workers, while 3 would be making something like a house or steel, or working for the government. For a further (rough) breakdown of those 7 service workers, 3 would work in retail or a bar, 1 would be a teacher or nurse, there would be 1 ‘professional,’ 1 working in finance or real estate, and the other one would be split among things like information services, transportation, and so on. (If you want the real numbers, they’re at the bottom).
Again, among all these broad categories are good jobs and bad jobs. What I hope you can see, and feel, is that opportunities and optimism are hard to find. And hope for the future is even harder. If you were talking to a teen-ager right now, what would you tell her or him to do? Learn to love caring for the elderly, learn to like working for tips, perhaps. Learn how to program robots, certainly. But where are the good jobs coming from? This should be the topic presidential candidates are talking about. We all know the good jobs aren’t here now. What can happen to awake America’s napping engine of growth?
This is why America is so Restless.
U.S. workforce makeup (from this table).
- Retail – 16 million
- Professional services – 20 million
- Finance (including real estate) — 8.3 million
- Education and health – 22.5 million
- Leisure and hospitality – 15 million
- Wholesale trade – 6 million
- Transportation – 4.9 million
- Information — 2.8 million
- Government – 22 million
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