New York City is stuck in the economic misery lane of middle-class jobs flight and an unemployed and underemployed class faced with long-term joblessness and rising hunger, according to the latest economic research.
The city is emerging from the worst of the Great Recession, but this so-called recovery is nothing to write home about.
The unemployment rate is 8.4 percent and has eclipsed the nation’s average. More disturbing, the city’s “underemployment” rate surpassed New York state’s by just over 1 point.
The city’s “underemployment” rate stood at 14.8 percent in the first half of 2013.
That figure counts the underclass of workers officially unemployed, working part time, or who are no longer counted as unemployed but are willing to work, according to an analysis of New York State Department of Labor data by New York’s Fiscal Policy Institute.
“We do have an issue with lower-paying jobs coming in, and Wall Street is not back to where it was before the recession,” said Jim Diffley, regional economist for IHS Global Insight. “There have been a lot of job gains in the leisure and hospitality sectors.”
But on the whole, these jobs do not have the pay or benefits of the jobs lost in banking or other middle-class vocations.
...
“Much of the job growth that has occurred has been in jobs that will make it hard to build a stable future for working New Yorkers,” a Fiscal Policy Institute report says. “Trends have continued in which New York has lost tens of thousands of middle income jobs in manufacturing, construction and government.”
The rest of the article is just as devastating - a single mother of three who had her hours reduced from 40 a week to 20, had her benefits cuts and now must make it on just a few hundred dollars a week.
And this woman is the coordinator of the Park Slope soup kitchen Christian Help.
The article says that like 2 million other New Yorkers, she needs to get by with the help of food stamps.
The article also goes on to report that while "food insecurity" - a phrase used to denote a time when people do not have access to food - has remained stable across the nation, it has risen in New York State.
In the Bronx, 23% of households are food insecure.
The very same newspaper, the NY Post, writes glowing reviews of the Bloomberg years on their op-ed pages, slams Bill de Blasio as a "class warrior" for running a campaign that acknowledges the "Tale of Two Cities" economic divide in New York, and then publishes this devastating article about the economic "malaise" (their word, not mine) New York City is suffering through in 2013.
Who is at fault for this malaise?
Bill de Blasio?
You can bet if he's mayor in 2014, within a month or so, they'll start to blame this stuff on him around.
And yet, Bloomberg, the mayor who has done everything in his power to assuage and cajole the rich people of this city - including going down to Goldman Sachs and soothing the tears of the brain trust when a former staffer published a Times piece about how evil the firm is - gets off free and clear in the Post article.
It's not his fault he's rezoned huge swaths of the city and turned them into playgrounds for the rich, given tax deals to real estate developers to knock down tenements and build luxury apartments, refused to raise taxes on the wealthy, refused to negotiate contracts with unionized municipal workers (the core of the middle class in this city), demonized teachers as greedy, lazy scum even as he has praised the bankers and hedge fund managers on Wall Street who helped bring about the '08 collapse through their own greed and criminal activity.
Not Bloomberg's fault at all, say the Posties.
You can bet if de Blasio is somehow elected mayor in November, they'll make sure they make it his fault in February.
That is, if the Post is still in business.
As Bloomberg noted in that infamous New York Magazine article yesterday, the Post is suffering its own "economic malaise"" - it loses $100 million a year.
As the poster I saw during Occupy last year said: "They only call it class warfare when we fight back."
ReplyDeleteThat's right - when the plutocrats are having the police bust up a protest against income inequality, they call it "law and order."
DeleteThe newspaper avoid mentioning that the city allowed CityTime to scam them for close to $700M and who was asleep at his post in the comptroller's office when that happened?
ReplyDeleteI'll give you a hint: His first name starts with Bill and ends with Thompson.
Not only did Thompson did scammers get $700M but during his watch the city was being scammed left and right with these no-bid contracts and absconding with million$. What was he doing all this time while he was the comptroller?
Now here's something interesting. His daughter, Jennifer Thompson, is in his campaign commercial and says that she "used to be a teacher". Why did she leave the teaching profession? Interesting, the NY Times, January 2009, stated the following when she was 29: "Jennifer Thompson majored in political science at Wellesley but has no desire to be a politician. So grueling, she said. So taxing. So she took on a different challenge: She is a fifth-grade special-education teacher at Public School 256 in Bedford-Stuyvesant."
Her NYS teaching certificate shows the following:
Childhood Education (Grades 1-6) Transitional B Certificate 09/01/2008 08/31/2011 Expired
Students With Disabilities (Grades 1-6) Transitional B Certificate 09/01/2008 08/31/2011 Expired
Did she let her license expire and that's why she left teaching? Or did she go into teaching because her father, Bill Thompson, was running for mayor in the 2009 election?
Wow, the plot thickens with lots of political manure.
With Thompson, you can never go wrong with leading with the skepticism!
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