Normally, you'd think that adding 431,000 jobs to our economy in a single month would be reason to jump up and down with joy for the massive upturn in our economy.  It is, after all, about twice the number of jobs that have been added every month since the beginning of the year. 

So what's the FAIL?  Only ten percent of those jobs were private sector jobs.  411,000 temps were hired for the census.  Private sector hiring actually dropped from an average of about 200,000 jobs a month to about twenty percent of that. 

If Chad's experience that most of those workers have already been laid off holds true for most of the census offices (the ones that aren't inflating their timesheets anyway - if I had a guess, there's some of both Chad's and James O'Keefe's experiences going on) then we're in for some very interesting employment numbers next month.  Especially if we have another month of only hiring 41,000 real workers.

At least they hired the most obnoxious people they could find for census workers. (Chad notwithstanding, of course.  Although he may be insulted to not be included in the most obnoxious.)  I'm sitting at my desk in my home office one day, finally getting down to figuring out a pretty complex issue in some documentation, when the doorbell rings.  I ignore it.  It rings again.  I ignore it again.  Pounding starts on my door, I figure someone's house is on fire so I'd better check it out.  The person at the door was a census worker, asking me if I knew who lived across the fucking street.  And then she wouldn't leave when I told her I don't know their names. (I really don't, I know her first name and I know what kind of work her husband does, and I know they have obnoxious dogs.  And they know I have guns.  That's all we need to know about each other.)  I literally had to start yelling at her to get off my property to get her to go away, and this was well after explaining to her that I was trying to work.

Posted by: Alice H at 08:05 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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