ServSafe Certified Food Protection Manager Courses & Exams

Environmental Health will offer a ServSafe Certified Food Protection Manager Class on April 24th & 25th (13 hours of class time) with the exam held on the 26th.  The cost of the class and exam is $165 and it will be held in the large conference room on the second floor of the Rockingham County Governmental Center. The class is limited to 15 people and is on a first come first serve basis for those that register.  If you would only like to take the exam on April 26th, the cost is $50.

2023 ServSafe CFPM Class/Exam Registration Form

SOURCE

The Danville Police Department is participating in its first year of review after being awarded CALEA Accreditation in March 2022. CALEA, Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, will be collecting public comment on the department through April 21.

The purpose of this public portal is to receive comments regarding an agency’s compliance with CALEA standards, engagement in the service community, delivery of public safety services, and overall candidacy for accredited status. These comments can be in the form of commendations or concerns. The overall intent of the accreditation process is to provide the participating agency with information to support continuous improvement, as well as foster the pursuit of professional excellence.

IMPORTANT: CALEA is not an investigatory body and subsequently the public portal should not be used to submit information for such purposes.  Additionally, there will be no response other than acknowledgement to submissions; however, the information will be considered in context to its relevancy to compliance with standards and the tenets of CALEA® Accreditation.

To submit a comment about the Danville Police Department, click here.

SOURCE

Bill proposes requiring all Virginia motorists to have insurance

by Nathaniel Cline, Virginia Mercury
February 16, 2023

Virginia drivers may soon be required to have car insurance to drive in the commonwealth after bipartisan support sent legislation to the governor for approval.

Senate Bill 951, which is being carried by Republican Sen. Frank Ruff of Mecklenburg, would repeal an option in state law for drivers to register an uninsured motor vehicle by paying a $500 fee. The registration does not provide vehicle insurance to drivers.

Virginia and New Hampshire are the only two states in the U.S. to not require car insurance, according to AAA.

Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, said the governor will review the legislation.

“Most uninsured drivers have limited assets to either pay for their repairs at the time of the accident or assets for others to attach,” said Ruff in an email to the Mercury. “Therefore, they are doing the repairs partially themselves or junking the vehicle.”

Under the legislation, all registrations of uninsured vehicles would expire prior to July 1, 2024.

Insured motorists generally have to pay for their own damages if hit by an uninsured driver. Ruff said he hopes the focus on the issue will help drivers understand the need for insurance. 

The law allowing vehicle owners to register an uninsured motor vehicle and still comply with Virginia’s insurance laws was enacted in 1958, according to Jessica Cowardin, a spokeswoman with the Department of Motor Vehicles. The fee was originally set at $15. 

Fees are deposited into the Uninsured Motorist Fund, which aims to reduce the cost of insurance coverage for accidents involving uninsured motorists. 

The fund also receives revenues from penalties and fees for noncompliance with Virginia’s financial responsibility laws.  

Today, approximately 5,000 of Virginia’s 7.5 million registered vehicles are uninsured, according to fiscal year 2022 data collected by the DMV. Of the $5.3 million transferred by DMV to the fund that year, approximately $650,000 was from the uninsured motor vehicle fee. 

In January 1995, the DMV convened a task force to study issues related to liability insurance. The group recommended that Virginia continue to offer motorists the option to pay an uninsured motorist fee rather than requiring mandatory insurance. 

“Compulsory insurance appears at first glance to be the right answer,” says a 1996 report on the task force. However, it concluded, “compulsory insurance is not the solution to the problem of uninsured motorists. Instead of reducing the number of uninsured motorists, compulsory insurance requirements have prompted citizens, who are trying to circumvent the state’s insurance requirements, to acquire short term policies that are canceled as soon as the vehicle is registered or, obtain a fraudulent insurance card that is shown at the time of registration.”

Ron Jenkins, executive director of the Virginia Loggers Association, said the group reached out to Ruff about addressing the issue of uninsured motorists after logging truck drivers began installing dash cameras to document “some of the crazy things we see on the highway these days” and protect themselves in a potential court case. 

“We think it’s a good policy,” said Jenkins. “We think it’s a perfect time to change policy, and we hope the governor signs it.”

Matt Overturf, a regional vice president with the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, said it’s difficult to predict how drivers of uninsured vehicles might respond to the proposed elimination of the fee option. 

“Some may continue to obey state laws and obtain coverage despite the likely higher costs, some may opt to continue driving but without coverage, and some may simply stop driving,” Overturf said. “But what remains certain is that having insurance coverage is a positive for both the driver and others on the road and a financial lifeline in the wake of an accident.”

Ruff admitted he had had no expectation of the legislation passing since the law allowing drivers to pay the fee had been in place for decades.

He said drivers would also illegally use a “farm use” placard to avoid insuring vehicles. Last year, lawmakers passed legislation that requires vehicle owners using the farm use exemption to obtain a nontransferable permanent farm use placard from the DMV for $15 and certify that the vehicle is insured.

Lawmakers last year also passed Ruff’s legislation to automatically fine drivers $600 every time a car was stopped if a driver could not show proof of insurance within a couple of weeks. He said a no-frills liability policy can often be purchased for less than the fine.

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Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.

The Bureau of Labor Services released its annual report today documenting the number of labor strikes and disruptions in the previous year. They found that last year marked the third fewest number of strikes in an annual period since 1947.

The year began, though, with a large number of workers on strike:

There were 27,000 workers involved in major work stoppages that began in 2020. The education and health services industry supersector accounted for over 75 percent of idled workers. Within these sectors, 21,700 workers were idled for 26 cumulative days. In 2017, 25,300 workers were idled and the information sector accounted for the majority of idled workers at 15,000 workers. In 2009, 12,500 workers were idled with almost half of the idled workers coming from one stoppage in the transportation and warehousing sector.

Overall, though, last year had eight major work stoppages, defined by 1,000 or more workers on strike. The lowest annual total was five in 2009, the year after the 2008 stock market crash and real estate meltdown. Last year of course unemployment exploded to even higher levels than it did in that economic slowdown and today the real unemployment level remains around 11-12%.

Donald Trump’s once-majestic Atlantic City casino, later bankrupt and crumbling from disrepair, was imploded this morning about 90 minutes ago. NBC New York covered the event with the help of helicopter photography. It took 3,000 sticks of dynamite to bring it to the ground.

The Trump Plaza was built by Donald Trump and opened up in May of 1984 and operated until 2014. Trump also built the Trump Marina casino and Trump Taj Mahal. All three of them failed as business ventures and went under, because of an overbuilding of casinos in Atlantic City. By building three big casinos he actually competed against himself and was forced to sell them off one by one. Carl Ichan bought the Trump Plaza from him a few years ago for future development.

Now people in Atlantic City are hoping that something new will finally come after the removal of this deteriorating hulk on the Board Walk. Its closure in 2014 put 1,300 people out of work. Those that point at this as a failure for Trump do not realize that the Trump Plaza was one of his first steps into becoming a mega celebrity through the usage of casinos and gambling operations. That image helped him to raise money for other projects and eventually become President of the United States with millions of people looking up to him as their leader.

The new administration of President Biden is facing a blizzard of troubles left over from the previous administration as it begins its term. The economy is in shambles, the Covid vaccine roll-out has proven to be slower than many predicted a year ago, and there was turmoil in Washington around the Capitol. In many ways Biden risks being overwhelmed by the depth of the trouble.

The Biden administration immediately put stricter travel regulations for people coming into the United States with mandatory quarantines and Covid testing requirements. There was talk of mandating that all passengers taking airplane flights inside the United States take a Covid test before flying in order to halt the spread of the virus.

That talk has now seemed to have a hit a wall after a meeting with top airline executives and Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigiege and several members of the CDC took place over zoom last Friday.

Among those attending were the CEOs of American, United, Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue along with airline union leaders.

“We had a very positive, constructive conversation focused on our shared commitment to science-based policies as we work together to end the pandemic, restore air travel and lead our nation toward recovery,” Nick Calio, head of the trade group Airlines for America, said after the meeting.

A leader of the Southwest Airlines pilots’ union said that a testing mandate “would decimate domestic air travel demand, put aviation jobs at risk, and create serious unintended consequences.”

No changes after this meeting took place and it now seems unlikely that further testing mandates will be demanded for internal domestic travel. The situation for incoming international travel into the US remains the same with the following CDC guidance: “All air passengers coming to the United States, including U.S. citizens, are required to have a negative COVID-19 test result or documentation of recovery from COVID-19 before they board a flight to the United States.”

United Airlines (NASDAQ: UAL), however just launched Covid testing access integrated with an App as part of its passenger operations as reported by CBS.

Apps increasingly are becoming the key mechanism for corporations to market to Americans and to monitor them.

Amazon has further ramped up its already-extensive use of apps, algorithms, and other high-tech surveillance techniques it uses to control and discipline its workforce at its customer fulfillment centers (warehouses) and elsewhere.

Amazon added to its existing surveillance portfolio in December 2020 with new technology called AWS Panorama, ostensibly so that it and other companies can better monitor employees’ productivity. Its new hardware and software development kits (SDK) are embedded with additional machine learning (ML) and computer vision capabilities for said purpose[1].

Work surveillance pundits are concerned. Kate Rose, a digital security expert and founder of the anti-surveillance clothing line Adversarial Fashion, noted how spytech such as AWS Panorama can unfairly target the very employees who are usually spied on, such as older or disabled employees[2].

‘Improved productivity’ is inevitably the ruse used by the e-commerce and logistics giant to justify its spytech, not to mention provide reasons to dock pay and even fire employees[3].

More on that later.

Surveillance Gadgets Galore

Amazon’s obsession with using surveillance technology to control its employees is pervasive. One example is the wristband patent granted to Amazon in early 2018. The wristband vibrates in order to point an employee’s hand ‘in the right direction’ while working in a warehouse by means of an ultrasonic tracking device in the wristband[4]. 

The wristband works in tangent with the hand-held devices that all warehouse staff carry. Once an order comes in, the worker rushes to retrieve the product from one of the many inventory bins on shelves, to then be packed into a delivery box, and onto the next order.

All the while, the wristband is tracking the exact hand movements of the worker. It vibrates using ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions via what the New York Times referred to as “haptic feedback” when the worker’s hands don’t move in the right direction[5].

According to Amazon in its patent filing, the wristband is used to streamline “time-consuming” tasks, so that workers in fulfilment centers (warehouses) can fill orders faster. Critics likened the wristbands to a further layer of surveillance of employees that treats people like robots[6].

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic revealed a new tangent to Amazon’s employee surveillance arsenal: social distancing. Amazon used cameras and sensors in certain facilities to ascertain whether employees were keeping safe distances from each other[7].

Known as the ‘Distance Assistant,[8]’ it features a 50-inch monitor with overlaid graphics and using depth sensors that flashes red if an employee walked past it and was within six feet of another employee. The software was developed by Amazon[9].

Although supposedly for a good public health cause, the social distancing surveillance was considered a ‘slippery slope’ by experts. The fear is that the technology will continue to be used by Amazon and other companies even after the pandemic, as yet another means of controlling employees[10]. 

Albert Gidari, director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, noted how this type of social distancing technology could be abused:

“The biggest risk is mission creep, even if the initial implementation is health and safety in the workplace. It’s not a stretch to see this as a productivity-measurement tool [thereafter or in the future].[11]”

An Obsession With Efficiency

Jeff Bezos (and by extension the company he founded) is notoriously obsessed with customer satisfaction, and thus efficiency[12]. Central to how Amazon operates is the continuous assessment of productivity by its employees or ‘associates’. The company measures this with its Orwellian-sounding “proprietary productivity metric,” which determines (precisely, to the millisecond) how quickly an employee should process each order[13].

Emily Guendelsberger is a journalist whose 2019 book On the Clock revealed her undercover experience working in three workplaces synonymous with modern low-paid, high-stress customer service employment: an Amazon warehouse, a call center, and a McDonalds takeaway. She was particularly critical of her time at an Amazon warehouse outside Louisville, Kentucky[14].

Her experience using Amazon’s infamous ‘scan gun’ is telling: “The scan gun I used to do my job was also my own personal digital manager. Every single thing I did was monitored and timed. After I completed a task, the scan gun not only immediately gave me a new one but also started counting down the seconds I had left to do it.[15]”

Efficiency trumped all else.

Amazon’s delivery drivers have also been tracked for some years now, always in the name of time efficiency. CNBC reported in February 2021 that Amazon had begun a roll-out of in-vehicle cameras from Californian start-up Netradyne that use artificial intelligence (AI) for a handful of contracted delivery partners across the United States[16].

The AI-enabled cameras record delivery drivers “100% of the time” on their routes. The company insists the cameras are used solely to monitor traffic infractions such as speeding and distracted driving. It’s also asserted that the cameras only upload footage for 16 types of actions such as hard braking. But the camera also claims to red flag drowsiness by being triggered when a driver yawns. The driver is then forced to pull over for 15 minutes[17].

However, employees and experts contend that the cameras amount to further surveillance and invasions of privacy on already hyper-monitored drivers[18]. It also begs the question: how does one objectively monitor ‘distracted driving’ if not by a driver being actively watched?

Terms used by drivers to describe the new AI camera system (and all of them anonymously, for fear of reprisals) included “unnerving,” “Big Brother” and “just another punishment system”[19].

In the words of Silkie Carlo, Director of UK-based Big Brother Watch: “Amazon’s appetite for surveillance knows no bounds. This intrusive, constant monitoring of employees creates an oppressive, distrustful and disempowering work environment that completely undermines workers’ rights.[20]”

Surveillance technology and efficiency rates work symbiotically at companies like Amazon. Guendelsberger states in her book that, “Technology has enabled employers to enforce a work pace with no room for inefficiency, squeezing every ounce of downtime out of workers’ days.[21]”

Amazon’s Efficiency Obsession

Amazon’s use of surveillance technology on its employees goes beyond its neurosis with productivity rates. It also uses its tracking devices to control workers on the basis of their  productivity, including how and why they get fired. This is particularly prevalent in its warehouses.

The importance of its warehouses to the Amazon behemoth cannot be underestimated. As Colin Lecher noted in his 2019 article in The Verge: “Amazon’s fulfillment centers are the engine of the company — massive warehouses where workers track, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it on its way to the buyer’s door.[22]”

Warehouse workers are relentlessly hard-pressed to achieve what is called the “make rate,” i.e. how long it should take for an employee to optimally finish a given task. ‘Inefficiency firings’ are rife, which even an attorney representing Amazon acknowledged when stating that the company fired ‘“hundreds’ of employees at a single facility between August of 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas”[23].

Monitoring of employees by robots, apps, and algorithms is the backbone of this singular focus on productivity in something akin to ‘management by algorithm’[24]. For example, Amazon uses what is called “time off task” or TOT, which monitors how long workers take a break from scanning packages. When these breaks become ‘too long’ (literally by seconds), warnings are automatically generated which can eventually get an employee fired[25].

It has been extensively reported how Amazon warehouse employees avoid bathroom breaks in order to not run afoul of the constant productivity surveillance[26][27]. The same is true for delivery drivers contracted by Amazon. A famous undercover exposé by the BBC in 2016 revealed that many Amazon drivers resorted to urinating in plastic bottles in their vans instead of taking ‘time-consuming’ bathroom breaks during their rounds[28].

This ‘bathroom shaming’ as one pernicious form of employee control by Amazon was also noted by journalist James Bloodworth in his book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. Bloodworth noted how it was tech surveillance that made Amazon employees too scared to even go to the bathroom for fear of not meeting high productivity targets and thus risk being fired[29].

Amazon’s Union-Busting Tech

Amazon’s surveillance technology is not limited to keeping stringent tabs on productivity and assessing inefficiency in its employees and contractors. It is also being used to keep tabs on unionization efforts within the company.

Amazon is notoriously anti-union. The company has successfully thwarted any unions being formed by its American employees since it was founded in 1994[30]. Time reported in 2014 on how Amazon successfully thwarted a union being formed at its warehouse in Middletown, Delaware[31]. A few unions have been created at a few European operations in countries like Germany and Italy, but they are the exception, although a few of the unions were very vocal at the height of the pandemic during 2020[32].

In October 2020 a leaked 11-page Amazon memo dated February 2020 revealed the company had allocated staffing and hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds for software, called the geoSPatial Operating Console, or SPOC, that would help the company better analyze data on unions[33]. 

A month earlier, Vice reported how Amazon’s human resources (HR) department had been found monitoring employee-focused listservs online that were potential hotspots for union activism[34].

A report issued by the Open Markets Institute in September 2020 (titled Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power), accused Amazon of using surveillance technology to thwart union efforts among employees. Unsurprisingly, the accusation also stated that said technology was being used to hyper-boost employee productivity rates[35].

The Open Markets Institute report cited devices such as the aforementioned wristbands as part of this internal surveillance regime. The report also alleged the use of heat maps and meta data regarding employees’ attitudes toward the company. Even a “diversity index” was developed to determine which locations were more likely to have unionization efforts. The goal? Separate employees who may be showing signs of wanting to unionize[36].

Amazon even got caught out in 2020 when CNBC reported the company had posted a job listing for two intelligence analysts to monitor “labor organizing threats” so that findings could be reported to “internal stakeholders” which included  “executive leadership”. Amazon later deleted the job listing and denied its validity[37].

Amazon seems oddly averse to admitting the extent of its employee surveillance culture. Even its latest employee spyware technology, the aforementioned AWS Panorama, is touted as allowing clients to monitor “workplace safety,” and, specifically, “Automate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) detection to improve workplace safety practices”[38].  

But even a seemingly benign client like guitar-maker Fender knows the true ‘value’ of the surveillance technology, when one of its VPs enthused: “With AWS Panorama and help from the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab we can track how long it takes for an associate to complete each task in the assembly of a guitar so that we’re able to optimize efficiency and track key metrics”[39].

Amazon soon removed the Fender quote from its AWS website. Nevertheless, true to the Amazon ethos, it’s all about productivity, folks.

Ultimately, this rapacious surveillance by Amazon of its own employees must be seen in the wider context of contemporary scourges on labor and labor rights such as ‘zero hour contracts,’ ‘right-to-work’ legislation,’ and the so-called ‘gig economy’.

In the words of James Bloodworth after his six-month sojourn working undercover in an Amazon warehouse in the UK: “We perpetrate a swindle every time we use that hip phrase “the gig economy” to describe the modern labour market. If we wanted to be accurate, we could call it the “piece-rate” or the “precarious” economy. If we wanted to be polemical, we would call it the “rapacious” or the “boss-takes-all” economy.[40]”

Invasive, 24/7 surveillance technology is indisputably at the heart of inhumane working conditions for Amazon’s warehouse workers and delivery drivers. They are technology-driven conditions that result in perverse invasions of privacy, high levels of stress, and even loss of employment which is already highly precarious.

These factors are both the indictment and epitome of today’s labor markets.

One thing is sure: ‘Productivity uber alles’ should be Amazon’s slogan.

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[1] Mashable: https://mashable.com/article/amazon-aws-panorama-worker-customer-tracking-technology-smart-cameras/?europe=true

[2] Mashable: https://mashable.com/article/amazon-aws-panorama-worker-customer-tracking-technology-smart-cameras/?europe=true

[3] The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/worker-surveillance-big-data/

[4]  The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-warehouse-wristband-tracking

[5]  New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html

[6]  New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html

[7]  Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/26/workplace-apps-tracking-coronavirus-could-test-privacy-boundaries-340525

[8] Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/workplace-surveillance-times-corona

[9]  Amazon: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-introduces-distance-assistant

[10] Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/26/workplace-apps-tracking-coronavirus-could-test-privacy-boundaries-340525

[11]  Observer: https://observer.com/2020/06/amazon-artificial-intelligence-monitor-warehouse-worker-social-distancing-coronavirus/

[12]  The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-jeff-bezos-wants/598363/

[13]  Digital Trends: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/amazon-tracks-productivity-warehouse/

[14]  Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/i-worked-three-low-wage-jobs-prize-efficiency-over-humanity-2019-8

[15]  Time: https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/

[16]  CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/amazon-using-ai-equipped-cameras-in-delivery-vans.html

[17]  BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55938494

[18]  Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-plans-ai-cameras-surveil-delivery-drivers-netradyne-2021-2

[19]  CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/amazon-using-ai-equipped-cameras-in-delivery-vans.html

[20]  BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55938494

[21]  The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-surveillance-unions-report-a9697861.html

[22]  The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations

[23]  The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations

[24]  MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/26/1021/amazons-system-for-tracking-its-warehouse-workers-can-automatically-fire-them/

[25]  CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/17/amazon-worker-claims-company-wrote-her-up-for-tot-policy-in-july.html

[26]  The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-afraid-to-take-bathroom-breaks-inside-amazons-fast-paced-warehouse-world/

[27]  Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/amazon-protests-workers-urinate-plastic-bottles-no-toilet-breaks-milton-keynes-jeff-bezos-a9012351.html

[28]  BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-37912858

[29]  The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse-jobs-worker-conditions-bathroom-breaks

[30]  CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/24/how-amazon-prevents-unions-by-surveilling-employee-activism.html

[31]  Time: https://time.com/956/how-amazon-crushed-the-union-movement/

[32] Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-30/amazon-has-a-europe-problem-unions-and-regulators-are-circling

[33]  Vox: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/6/21502639/amazon-union-busting-tracking-memo-spoc

[34]  Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7jz7b/amazon-employee-warns-internal-groups-theyre-being-monitored-for-labor-organizing

[35]  Open Markets Institute: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/eyes-everywhere-amazons-surveillance-infrastructure-and-revitalizing-worker-power

[36]  Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-surveillance-unions-report-a9697861.html

[37]  CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/24/how-amazon-prevents-unions-by-surveilling-employee-activism.html

[38]  Amazon AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/workplace-safety/

[39]  Tech Monitor: https://techmonitor.ai/boardroom/productivity-monitoring-tools-office-365-amazon-aws

[40]  The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/11/hired-six-months-undercover-in-low-wage-britain-zero-hours-review-james-bloodworth

On February 2, 2021, the U.S. Labor Department reported monthly unemployment numbers for January and said that nonfarm payrolls increased by 49,000 and the unemployment rate was only 6.3%. The increase in jobs and such a low unemployment rate was championed by some in the financial markets as a reason to buy stocks. On CNBC, as the report came out, economics reporter Steve Liesman stated the numbers and also some of his concerns, but the market futures shot up as he spoke, showing that traders focused on the headlines and job growth talk.

These headline numbers do not reflect economic reality, because they are created by not counting people who lost their jobs and have been out of the workforce so long that they no longer are getting unemployment and are not looking for a new job, because they don’t believe any are available for them or are working part-time, but would rather have a full-time job. The Labor Department calls these people “discourage workers” and does not count them in their headline unemployment statistics. When you factor in these people the real unemployment rate is 11.7%.

The Labor Department also altered the way the numbers were counted this month to help create new headline numbers, which help pump up stock market players. You have to go through the entire official release to fully understand what they did, but it helped to increase the job loss numbers in prior months and boost January numbers, which makes it look like the job situation is getting better than it really is.

The 11.7% rate is a disaster, and historically unemployment rates over ten percent have created intense social stress in the United States, such as seen during the Great Depression and thirty years of labor strife from the 1870’s to 1900’s, typified by such as events as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and Coxey’s Army of 1898.

The millions of jobs lost and not replaced yet is why the US economy would collapse completely without the stimulus aid being given to people. However, the virus situation appears to have finally peaked and more jobs and growth should be ahead of us, but the past year has caused incredible damage to the US economy, which will have ramifications going forward. Most Americans expect inflation to impact them before this year is over. This is the cost of stimulus and programs launched last year, such as Federal Reserve bond buying, to bailout giant corporations.

The headline unemployment rate gives a totally misleading picture of economic reality in the United States.