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US Private Sector Sheds More Jobs Than Expected: ADP
WASHINGTON — The US private sector shed jobs at a slower pace for the eighth consecutive month in November as the economy emerges from recession, and the drop was sharper than expected, ADP data showed Wednesday.
(AFP/Getty Images/File/Spencer Platt) Payrolls firm ADP said the nonfarm sector lost 169,000 jobs last month, 26,000 fewer than in October.
The reading was worse than the average analyst forecast of 150,000 job losses as businesses struggled amid persistent tight credit conditions and worries about the strength of the nascent recovery.
The poor ADP survey, a snapshot of nonfarm private employment that offers a clue to the momentum of the labor market, comes ahead of the official monthly labor report Friday that includes government jobs.
Most analysts expect the Labor Department to report the unemployment rate held steady at 10.2 percent in November -- a 26-year high -- and the economy shed 120,000 nonfarm jobs, down from 190,000 in October.
"Although overall economic activity is stabilizing, employment usually trails economic activity, so it is likely to decline for at least a few more months," ADP said.
That outlook was more pessimistic than the Federal Reserve, which forecast in late November that the unemployment rate would begin to fall in January.
According to ADP, the vast services sector, representing more than 85 percent of US nonfarm employment, shed 81,000 jobs in November, up a tick from 79,000.
By contrast, job losses in the goods-producing sector dropped to 88,000 from 116,000 in October, with employment in the manufacturing sector falling 44,000, the smallest decline since May 2008, the ADP noted.
The ADP report highlighted the steep hurdles to economic recovery as consumers curb spending, which drives two-thirds of output, amid job insecurity and losses in home values and investment portfolios.
To address the problem, President Barack Obama has called a "jobs forum" Thursday at the White House that will gather business leaders, including Google boss Eric Schmidt and Disney chief Bob Iger, economists such as Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and labor chiefs.
Amid growing calls from Democrats in Congress for government action, since unemployment topped 10 percent in October, Obama must also balance long-term concern over soaring US budget deficits, which could constrain any new spending.
The White House argues that a 787-billion-dollar economic stimulus plan passed early this year has likely saved or created a million jobs, and prevented an even worse unemployment crisis.
But Republicans assail the White House with calls of "where are the jobs?" alleging that officials are cooking the figures and have done more to safeguard federal government jobs rather than create new ones in the private sector.
32 Comments so far
Show AllThe Murderous Economics of elite fundamentalist capitalists is directly responsible for job losses. They and they alone should be heavily taxed to support a federal jobs program. Tax them till they cry and when their screams are heard, turn up the heat.
Stone, you must be kidding. If we tax the rich, "Trickle Down" economics will stop. Then once "Trickle Down" economics stop we'll see official unemployment over 10%, and unofficial unemployment over 17%. You'll see American jobs going overseas, and people coming to this country on H1 visas to do high tech jobs that Americans are too lazy to do.
And as long as I am on the subject, these lazy Americans should get off of their fat butts and take out some loans to go back to school and train for all the non existent jobs that are out there. Come on people lets get with the program! Interest is money in the pockets of the bankers, and that means more trickle!
No, we have to make sure our elite capitalists make has much money as possible. This is because the more that they make, the more will trickle out of them and onto us. The more we cut their taxes the more jobs they will create! The proof of this is all around us. Wake up man and look around!
What we really need to do is to send even more jobs overseas and bring even more people over to do the high tech work cheaper. This concentrates wealth upward which is good for the trickle.
If we do these things, and all the other things our elite capitalists demand the trickle will build and build. It will be like a giant human bladder at the point of bursting right over our very heads!
Ronnie Raygun the best-est president ever told us this was true and it has worked so well so far, that it makes him appear to be a great prophet. What a great man! What a financial genius!
So everyone, on three, Praise Ronnie! Praise Republicans! Praise tax cuts for the rich! Praise the trickle!
Tom
Lol. It's a miracle. Praise be!
And the sheep will all sing hymns of praise as they march off the cliff together.
>>But Republicans assail the White House with calls of "where are the jobs?" alleging that officials are cooking the figures and have done more to safeguard federal government jobs rather than create new ones in the private sector.
Odd this. I thought that The Republican Mantra was that the Government has no role in creating jobs in the private sector and that the private sector should be left to itself and they will create jobs.
they will create jobs --- in India and China
When you two are both right...it scares me! (lol)
economic and ecologic collapse simultaneously...
truly, the same collapse, as economy is exhausting the supporting ecology...
poignant nostalgia and death throes? no, a new way...without property ownership...without the need to pay another for life's necessities...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...individual engagement with the living world...local acoustic, agrarian living...local water, food, shelter and defence...local customs and governance...cessation of industrial and chemical alteration of the planet, and electricity use...
let the living planet be cleansed and arise, as the phoenix, unbroken, clean and fresh, from toxicity, destruction and waste, that it may rejoice, thrive and provide as it will...
I'd like to know just how much of the decline in job-loss is due to retail hiring for the Xmas season. Given how often these leaked labor reports are revised downward a few weeks after we see them in the news, I think that the truest picture of how things are going will emerge sometime in mid-February.
And I bet the lower loss in manufacturing is do to there being hardly any manufacturing jobs.
You know what when there are zero manufacturing jobs there will be zero job loss in manufacturing.
Obomber needs to keep the Afghan war supplied with desparate cannon fodder.
And many of those becoming unemployed are lossing their homes also, will citizens be to stingy to keep these people in their homes to every citizens betterment?
The answer to high unemployment is to shorten the work week with no reductions in take home pay. A stroke of a pen could do this.
Not sure that makes sense. That would not help a company be more profitable. They'll have to pay the same amount of money for the same number of people to work less.
That is the point of it! More of the surplus value needs to go to the working class so that consumers then have more purchasing power. The problem capitalism is facing is that the working class has become so productive (due to technological inputs into the production process) that it can longer purchase back all that it produces. That is the basis of the capitalist economic crisis.
Wages have stagnated over the last 30 years, while prices have gone up and productivity has soared. The only way to deal with high unemployment is to reverse this trend and the only way to do that is to shorten the work week (work month, daily hours, whatever).
struggle says:
"The problem capitalism is facing is that the working class has become so productive (due to technological inputs into the production process) that it can longer purchase back all that it produces."
I think your analysis may be largely correct, but only within limits...
the true problem capitalism faces is the ultimate, utter exhaustion of the components: the source material that is pulled from the planet, and the labor that also is pulled from the planet...(the laborer, of course, frequently being the purchaser, as well, per your comment)...
everything relies on the planet, and capitalism quite simply destroys the planet, not only through the devastation of production, and product use, but also the colossal collateral waste, frequently toxic, created thereby...no planet, no nothing...
whether technological advances in production have created a glut of product unaffordable to the jobless, and increasingly homeless, masses may be true, but without a living planet from which to draw material and labor, capitalism dies, along with everything else...essentially, capitalism is suicidal...
the future is not economic in nature, but ecologic...
I agree that capitalism is destroying the planet. However, the topic is about unemployment and the only way capitalism can alleviate high unemployment is by passing more of the surplus value labour creates to the working class.
perhaps unemployment is natural?
Unemployment, under capitalism, is certainly "natural" and is in fact a requirement of capitalism. Capitalism could not function without a reserve army of the unemployed available to be employed when and where capital has such a demand for more labour power. This reserve army also works as a brake on wage demands by those presently working.
I appreciate this exchange...I wish to address your previous statement:
"I agree that capitalism is destroying the planet. However, the topic is about unemployment and the only way capitalism can alleviate high unemployment is by passing more of the surplus value labour creates to the working class."
How do we rationalize alleviating unemployment, if employment, itself, is destroying the planet? Do you believe there is a workable and sustainable point of equilibrium between human industrial and chemical alteration and the living, natural world? You would not be alone, although I don't believe such a compromise is possible...I wish it were...sort of...but, also not...
I believe that a new rational social-economic system is possible to establish by society that can live in harmony with the natural world. I don't believe that the capitalist system can ever be reformed enough to do so, because in doing so, capitalism could no longer work.
I don't believe such a compromise is possible...I wish it were...sort of...but, also not...
---------------------------------
Your "sort of but also not" is intriguing. Could you expand on it?
I've been thinking about this issue for ages and am convinced that we not only *must* do things differently, but that it's perfectly possible. Difficult, but, in the sense that there's nothing about the needed changes that violate physical law, fully possible. Humans are supremely adaptive.
How many current jobs are nothing more than what Lincoln called "useless labour"? How many humans are so limited that they can't do anything that Lincoln would call "useful labour"? I'd guess well over half in the first case and perhaps 5% in the second. What would be your guess?
Imagine a culture not completely unlike a sort of "secular Mennonite" or 1930s Appalachian one, or perhaps the current Cuban one, or one of those beginning to emerge in S. America, where the economy is one of barter, mutual support, and production-for-need. But with an industrial, first-world base underneath. A culture where all the basic necessities are a right of citizenship, and the only people who sit idle are the few who are too disabled for some reason.
We can see such cultures in operation today. On islands, particularly, and in farm country. People have all the necessities, and everyone works, but few work for other people's profit. They're not part of the "consumption culture". They buy only what they need, and then they buy the best and expect what they buy to last a long time, they mend things when they break, and they spend their free time in craftwork and social activity.
For the longest time it puzzled me why there are so few creative people --artists, musicians, writers, actors-- among the elites, or even people who truly appreciate creativity. I thought it was very peculiar, since they have the most free time for it.
It took *ages* for the penny to finally drop: elites are mentally unhealthy, and they've imposed their lunacy on us. They're concerned almost completely with wealth, power, and status. When they buy art, it's as an investment, not because it's beautiful. They dress up to go to a concert because they're going to be seen, not for the sake of the music (I got my very first faint stirrings of that insight when I worked in Germany in the '60s: Germans treated orchestral concerts and operas the way we treat folk-music concerts. They went to orchestral performances in their ordinary clothes because they were there to listen, not to be admired.)
So if we give the elites and their pathology the push, I strongly suspect that we'd evolve to a non-predatory culture quickly and almost painlessly. In every single human culture we know of where its members have a free choice about how much time to spend working, the healthy ones stop when they have enough. Is there any reason to suppose we're different?
"where are the jobs?"
I can think of nothing more revolting than seeing the old GOP guard of the Republican Revolution screech "where are the jobs?". Overseas, no? You old buzzards said the magic of the free market would produce prosperity too cheap to meter. You were wrong. Next.
Of course, we also watched the rightward creep of the People's Party over the same timeframe until now they really are Just as Good as Republicans when it comes to serving the corps. The only Democratic answer has been to expand programs like HUD, to tax and spend.
Neither one of these strategies has helped the American people prosper. The Republican cutting of taxes and forced competition with peasants around the world devastated American incomes along with the dismantling of public policies designed to give people a hand up. The Democratic single solution of earmarking for the poorest of the poor while ignoring the fact that increased taxation combined with lower incomes was creating more poor and further stressing the middle class was also not a solution for widening prosperity.
Meanwhile, income distribution in this country is worse than it was in the Robber Baron age, and Congress's ability to do anything about that is limited by the fact that the Robber Barons own the place.
A certain special interest remains unnamed, but is a very expensive mistress to keep.
And war is affordable.
I eagerly await the too little, too late conference to be held by those who really don't know what it's like and don't give a damn. I'm sure the results will be spectacular.
During Rachel Maddow's show, Rachel broadcast a clip of Senator Mitch McConnell proposing to use the money that hasn't already been used from the previous stimulus package --and didn't really work anyway -- to help fund the war in Afghanistan.
What an idea?!?
And, now, the Republicans are screaming, "Where are the jobs?"
However, I do remember Obama promising green jobs, and I haven't heard too much from the Democrats on this issue.
Here in NYC, the green jobs are being created by Mayor Bloomberg and Al Gore, who are partnering in the project. However, the two men, both very wealthy, are rounding up volunteers to do the jobs -- painting roofs white. Yes, you get the message -- volunteers don't get paid for their work. To me, this does NOT measure up to a solution -- but an illusion of a solution.
I have read that 1.5 million people in NYC are unemployed. Between outsourcing and sending our jobs to other countries, and H1b Visas (65,000 jobs per year), and other visa programs as well, that import cheap labor, U.S. citizens have been sold down the river.
As for the jobs that have supposedly been saved -- within the past couple of months, I have read quite a few stories about people working in those saved jobs, whose hours have been cut, and then cut again, to the point that they, now, can't meet expenses, and some are now in foreclosure. So, the numbers of saved jobs the authorities are purporting -- 600,000 - 1,600,000 -- should be seriously challenged.
"The White House argues that a 787-billion-dollar economic stimulus plan passed early this year has likely saved or created a million jobs, and prevented an even worse unemployment crisis."
And the tooth fairy lives!
It probably helped keep it from being worse....at least some amount. But their claims hold little credibility any longer.
The Republicans need to shut up...it was on their watch that our manufacturing base was dismantled and Corporate welfare reached the heights. Along with plenty of help from the Dems they created this recession.
This White House and Congress has DONE NOTHING to correct the flaws in our tax and trade policies. NOTHING. Till they do, they are the same as their NeoCon brothers. Thats the truth.
You are either for America and her citizens, or you are not. So far our government has not been for years now.
well said, sir, but for one thing...
I am the Tooth Fairy...
Doggone! My abject apologies your honor. I thought you had gone toes up. Glad to hear you are well!
Now about the 75 cents you owe me from 1955..........
Well, it is helping the Chinese employ Americans with respect to 'green' jobs. The Chinese plan to build a wind turbine plant in the US:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/business/energy-environment/18wind.html
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, Henry.
chessgames56
I had seen that! Unlike my Republican friends I couldn't care less who owns the business/plant as long as its here and providing local jobs and taxes. The nationality of the face on the yacht means little to us.
"Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, Henry."
Ain't it just! And sir, it seems to be getting stranger.
Obama just created 30,000 new jobs in Afganistan. What a miracle!
US Private Sector Sheds More Jobs Than Expected: ADP
WASHINGTON — The US private sector shed jobs at a slower pace for the eighth consecutive month in November as the economy emerges from recession, and the drop was sharper than expected, ADP data showed Wednesday.
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Am I really the only one to notice that these statements contradict one another??
Nope. The error undermines the whole article to the point where it's difficult to know what's intended.
We need tariffs, end the wars and shut down the empire. The money saved can be spent to make renewable energy, energy conservation, mass transit, health care, sustainable agriculture, better education and diplomacy. What we will get is more empire, more wars, more debt, more privatization, more spin and more Republicans. The Republicans are only political party alternative offered and somehow they manage to be even worse than the Democrats.
Before 2008, I was never involved in politics. After I finally started waking up, I began to notice, among many other things, how business as usual has gutted our workforce, destroyed the dreams of millions of Americans, and removed any hope for our future generations. I got really depressed.
After reading both of Barack Obama's books, listening to every speech, I concluded that it is NOW OR NEVER for a course correction. Jobs was a very important issue for me, still is. I specifically remember how excited I was when I heard about all those Green jobs that we were going to have. I thought by now, with all the billions of dollars that we spent on this stimulus, that I would see at least a few thousand of the unemployed going around insulating homes, installing solar panels, etc. What the heck happened! Are they out there and I just am missing it?
I worked quite hard helping to get this man elected, and while I think that he was by far the best hope that we had for a change, I am very disappointed. It seems as though this country is stuck in this paradigm that continues to let "corporate America" set the direction.
If this great man who most of us elected is not going to do something very bold to solve this jobs problem, then I cannot imagine myself working again for him in 2012, regardless of what nutcase the other party might come up with.