WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN NEW JOBS DATA FROM THE GOVERNMENT

I’m not a great advocate for Germany. OK my grandmother’s parents did come from Bavaria, and I did study the language in college, but all I remember of it is that we had to read some beautiful poetry by Freidrich von Schiller. (I recall the “Alpine Hunter“ in which God asks….“Earth has room for all to dwell,--"Why pursue my loved gazelle?") Perhaps Schiller's poem should be read by some of our economic gurus. Perhaps it will make them think more about the need of sharing too! But what makes me tout that wealthy central European nation these days is not the faint memories of poetry and Schiller's lines, but their economic policies. First, and importantly they are in the business of actually making things--to sell abroad. Second, they need their workers and wisely care about their wellbeing. Unlike the USA, where the manufacturing sector is nearly moribund--the Germans still have a thriving engineering, machining, and manufacturing sectors which today are booming. Their unemployment is low. Their export products out-compete those made in Japan and China, yet they pay their workers well and somehow, their companies continue tp make profits too. [Someone has to stick that up the noses of the CEOs of our economic giants so they get the full scent of that important fact (paying higher wages does not mean you can not compete)--such as the US giant GE which now "off-shores" so much of its work that it now generates less than half of its profits here in the US.] They (the Germans) have a well established national social safety net. Health care, child-care and elder care are all part of their economic equation. Unlike us, they have no trade deficit. They sell more than they import (or did so last year at least). But their birthrate is quite low, about 1.38 births per couple. Over the years Germans are expected to decline in population. Thus they now need and will continue to seek new labor. A recent study concluded that they will require an additional two million workers in the coming nine years! That works out to slightly more than 222,000 new workers each year up to 2020. And those figure are for a nation of only 82 million.

Since the 2008 collapse we lost eight million jobs! That's one out of every ten Germans in Germany. But here we are in the USA, some 310 million strong and this last month (January 2011) our businesses reported adding only 36,000 "new" jobs! That with some 17 million under or unemployed according to some reports. For us, that was not even enough to off-set the 120,000 wet-behind-the-ears young workers entering the workforce each month. To get those eight million jobs back over a period of ten years…we would need nearly 70,000 (actually 66,660) new jobs per month---that is over the 120,000 new workers we generate each month. That is a total of nearly 190,000 new jobs each month…and remember--even with those figures---we won’t get back to “full” employment we had prior to 2008for ten years! So when you see figures like those--that is--close to 200,000 new jobs--in the monthly report on employment--then you may take a deep breath and begin to feel---finally, we are on the way to better economic health.