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Key to Beating Donald Trump: More Jobs!

By Cory Allen Heidelberger on 2016-03-28

If part of Donald Trump’s appeal is his promise of strength and prosperity to an economically anxious middle class, then we could really use an upswing in the labor market.

Hey, look at that:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are streaming back into an improving labor market as employers raise wages and hire less skilled job candidates to cope with an intensifying worker shortage.

The portion of the U.S. population working or looking for jobs — known as the labor force participation rate — has risen to 62.9% from 62.4% since September, Labor Department figures show. The rate had been falling since 2008, mostly because of baby boomer retirements, and that’s still expected to be the long-term trend [Paul Davidson, “Why More and More in U.S. Are Returning to Work,” USA Today, 2016.03.27].

62.9% participation is still notably lower than the 66%+ we had before the recession, but those new workers are rejoining the rat race, and the economy is absorbing their sweat without a boost in the unemployment rate.

But what about the poorly educated whom Trump so loves? The skills gap will probably keep them out of the workforce and thus with more time to go to Trump rallies, right?

Wells Fargo said recently the rebound appears to be driven by the less educated, including discouraged workers who had been on the sidelines….

Companies are also getting creative. Adecco’s Gates says some manufacturers unable to find experienced workers are splitting jobs into two positions and hiring less skilled candidates for the simpler tasks. Others are bringing on unskilled workers and training them, a strategy rarely deployed when unemployment was elevated after the recession, says Becca Dernberger, of Manpower’s Northeast division [Davidson, 2016.03.27].

Look at that—companies feeling healthy enough to do their own training and to make room for less skilled, less educated workers. There’s nothing like a good paying job to keep people off the streets and out of Trump rallies.

Either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders will beat Donald Trump. The Obama economy will help.

Published in national

12 Comments

  1. Don Coyote 2016-03-28 21:47

    While there has been a slight increase over last month, it’s only because the participation rate dropped most of last year and didn’t start a rebound until October. Year to year job growth is only .1%. We are essentially treading water.

    http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

    Job growth has been so anemic that if we had the job growth seen in an average recovery there would have been 5 million jobs more than we have today. And just how weak is the Obama Recovery? According to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress the Obama Recovery is the weakest seen in over 50 years. Thanks Obama.

  3. Darin Larson 2016-03-28 21:58

    Don Coyote- there you go again! You want to compare what Obama has done compared to what Obama might have done. Well, what he actually did was rescue our butts from going into the 2nd Great Depression. It was only a Great Recession because of Obama. Obama inherited the worst mess since the 1930’s after eight years of Republican rule. We were darn close to a global capital market collapse. Is any of this ringing a bell with you??

  6. John Kennedy Claussen 2016-03-28 22:39

    Darin is absolutely right! And to add to it, our nation has recovered from other economic downfalls in the past with greater vibrance because those downfalls between the 1930s and 2008 were not as severe nor challenged by the realities of a post manufacturing America. It use to be that when the American economy recovered from a economic downfall it meant workers went back to their old jobs that they had before with descent pay and benefits. Today Americans are returning, but increasingly returning to the realities of a post manufacturing world to service jobs that pay less with fewer or no benefits as the good jobs have left to go south of the border or overseas thanks to the trade policies over the past 20 years of the Republican party and the “New Democrats” crowd.

  7. O 2016-03-28 22:39

    No facts will stay the hand of fear mongering. What the state of the US is and what Trump says it is need not be anchored in the same reality.

    Trump proclaims and the believers believe.

  9. mike from iowa 2016-03-29 07:46

    Dumbass dubya’s depression wasn’t a simple downturn Obama inherited. An ordinary recovery was out of the question. Why,because the damage done by dubya and his tax breaks was so massive added to the fact that wingnuts dug in their heels to try to prevent Obama from moving the country forward. Wingnuts are still dragging their heels, still trying to make Obama a failed, one term Potus.

  10. caheidelberger Post author | 2016-03-29 09:49

    Trump is a product of the Bush economy. He is also a product of voters preferring a comforting story (Bosworth!) over serious discussion of all the economic factors at work on their lives… including the fact that the greatest threat to their prosperity and liberty is not swarthy foreigners but fake-tan billionaires determined to concentrate every last bit of wealth and power in their hands.

  11. kingleon 2016-03-29 10:36

    So, to provide some non-SD perspective…

    I’m originally from an area that looks like it will go very strong for Trump, Western New York, specifically the neighborhoods around Buffalo. The white people there are terminally unemployed, and have been since the steel plants and many of the car plants closed or decreased production in the eighties. Poverty is widespread, particularly in the rundown suburbs. People blame everything and anyone other than themselves for how things are, and although they would never say they are racist, and they make fun of southerners for racism, they really think black people and any other not-white person is the main excuse even before they had a black president to blame it on. They voted for Reagan and Clinton, and generally register Democrat.

    My mom (a diehard Hillary supporter who finally voted for Obama), who has worked for decades in a pharmacy a few blocks from where she grew up, told me that the first week of Obama’s presidency, people she’d known her whole life started using words to describe the president that… she didn’t think anyone should use. Obama gave the secret racists something to unite against, to find each other. She was and remains horrified daily by the things that these local people (mostly elderly, many of whom retired ‘early’ when the factories left, now dependent on Medicare and SS) will come in and say about our president, about his family.

    And that important to Trump’s demographics: a lot of his support in Florida and Arizona came from retirees (you can see this with his high % of vote from areas with retirement centers). Those people’s opinions of our country’s status has nothing to do with reality now, and has everything to do with a belief that Reagan and Bill Clinton sold them out for a bunch of foreign not-white people.

    I think absolutely nothing can stop WNY, and many regions around the country that are like WNY, to go deeply for Trump.

  12. Richard Schriever 2016-03-29 12:10

    I find the same emotional distortion at work among people I know in MN and SD who support Trump. Most of whom have NOT suffered from factory closings, etc., but DO harbor the same “nativist” (except for actual natives) animosities. To expand a bit, I was surprised a few years ago, when I was working with the CFO of a very well-known national security/protection provider – who was originally from WNY near the Allegheny reservation, to hear some of the racist (particularly anti-native American) coming from him. Maybe the economic issues have served to embolden the haters – but they would be haters anyhow – broke or not..

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