“Officially,” U.S. unemployment is 9.5 percent. But when you add in the millions of Americans who have given up even trying to find work, and those who need full-time but can find only part-time jobs, unemployment and “underemployment” together total almost 17 percent.
But where are the job losses concentrated, and what part of our economy is suffering the most? Bloomberg News considered that question not long ago and found that private-sector workers have been hit much harder than government workers.
Bloomberg looked at figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It found that private employment peaked in December 2007, and since then, businesses have laid off roughly 8.5 million people — about 7.5 percent of their work force.
But local governments around the country continued hiring until they hit a peak of 14.6 million workers in September 2008 — many months after the recession had started. Since that time, they have laid off only 141,000 employees — or not even 1 percent of that 14.6 million.
So despite the recession, “Americans find themselves with local-government payrolls that in many cases remain at record levels,” Bloomberg reported.
Federal government payrolls, meanwhile, have continued to grow, as more employees are hired in connection with the $862 billion so-called “stimulus” that Congress approved last year. Many government workers have avoided layoffs with the protection of their unions — though government employees, as public servants, should not be unionized at all.
The news service’s findings are not really so surprising. After all, a business can raise its prices only so much before people stop buying its goods or services. If it cannot make ends meet, it must lay off workers and economize in other ways. But if government wants to protect existing jobs or fund new ones, it can just raise taxes, which taxpayers have no choice but to pay.
We do not relish the prospect of any honest, hard-working employee being laid off, especially during the current economic crisis when it can be hard to find another job. And we do not begrudge government workers their jobs, since it is not they but elected officials who approve the high taxes and wasteful spending that bloat government payrolls.
But in a time of outrageous government budget deficits, does it make sense or seem equitable that so many government workers are being hired or protected with tax dollars taken from workers in the much harder-hit private sector?