Watch this video of the new Winston-Salem Police Chief being sworn in with his remarks. This happened on February 15, 2023.
Super Bowl car ads sell Americans the idea that new tech will protect them
Super Bowl ads tend to kick off trends, and it looks like the automotive industry will ramp up its pitch for electric vehicles after giving them center stage. Even Tesla, which has never run a Super Bowl ad, managed to sneak its Model Y into a Popeyes commercial, while Ram boasted that its new electric pickup truck’s smart technology solved the problems of “premature electrification” that left consumers unsatisfied.
But it was an ad paid for by the Dawn Project, a safety advocacy group, that will likely trigger a fleet of ads this year to reassure consumers that EV technology is safe.
In it, Tesla’s self-driving cars run down child-sized mannequins. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shrugged off the ad, tweeting that even bad publicity would end up promoting Tesla’s self-driving cars.
As a media scholar interested in how cultures deal with disruptive technology, I see similarities between today’s concerns over EVs and the early days of cars.
Back then, the public conversation usually contained a mix of optimism and fear. Then automakers turned to advertising to allay those fears.
Sound signals and safety
As it happens, advertising safer technology is as old as the automotive industry.
Because automobiles can endanger human life, engineers have long been trying to solve their safety problems. In the early 20th century, along with better brakes, headlights and steering wheels, engineers promised that advances in sound signaling technology – the car horn – would make driving safer by letting people know a car was coming.
In my new book, “Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History,” I tell the story of early sound signals. At first, engineers adapted the bells, gongs and whistles from other types of conveyances to automobiles. But eventually the industry settled on the squeeze bulb horn – the kind that makes a “honk honk” noise.
Squeeze Bulb Horn.
The only issue? In crowded streets, they weren’t loud enough to hear.
So in 1909, a new horn from the Lovell-McConnell company called the Klaxon solved that problem, promising drivers the ability, with just the touch of an electric button, to let loose a metallic “aaOOga” sound so loud that no one could miss it. They quickly set to work to convince the public that their patented noisy technology made driving safer.
Klaxon horn.
Klaxon’s ad campaign used a new technique called “situational advertising” that put readers in imaginary situations where they were given a choice. Many of these ads, run in some of the era’s most popular magazines, asked readers to consider the best way to protect themselves from other people’s carelessness.
One Klaxon ad from a 1910 issue of the Saturday Evening Post portrays a distracted pedestrian stepping in front of a car in New York City’s Herald Square with the tag line “You Can’t Change Human Nature.”
“The auto must have a signal that really warns,” reads the copy. “If all minds were always alert – if children could protect themselves – if the weak were strong, there would be no need of any auto signal.”
And so the ad suggests that the only responsible solution for car owners is to own a Klaxon, because its distinctive noise said “AUTO COMING! LOOK OUT! NOW!”
Quieter tech to keep drivers safe
People bought the medium and the message. For two decades, Klaxon dominated the global car horn market and pumped its technocentric safety message into the media ecosystem.
But reliance on loud signaling technology to keep people safe became an odious proposition after the traumas of World War I, when Klaxons were used in the trenches as a gas alarm. In the postwar period, a transnational culture war against noise took off.
So societies everywhere turned to different forms of technology, like traffic lights, to solve the safety problem that noisy car horns could not. The Klaxon went into diminuendo as engineers turned their attention to the problems of quieting automobile noise with muffling technologies such as closed cabins and “silent gearwheels.”
Yet though their focus changed, the underlying message did not: Emerging technologies could always solve the problems caused by existing ones.
Smart technology promising less thinking
Flash forward to today and you can see that the more things change in technology advertising, the more they stay the same.
Consider a recent commercial for the Volkswagen Atlas that ran during football games all season – and which eerily echoes the Klaxon ad from 1910.
Titled “Those Guys,” the clever ad shows a wired-in zoomer, transfixed by his smartphone and oblivious to the world around him, walking the streets while Doris Day’s “It’s a Lovely Day Today” plays in the background. Like the man in the 1910 Klaxon ad, this guy steps right in front of a moving Atlas. But, thanks to its “Standard Front Assist and Pedestrian Monitoring” technology, the car brakes automatically and everyone is safe.
Obviously, the situation portrayed in the ad has changed. Today’s new quiet technology protects both pedestrian and driver from harm by sensing movement and automatically braking, so it doesn’t really matter whether either is warned.
But the subtext remains the same: Since you can’t change human nature and there will always be “those guys,” rest assured that emerging technology “built with safety in mind” can protect us.
And no matter what gadget the advertisers are trying to sell, that underlying technocentrism – a civic religion in American consumer culture that is practically as important as football – is a constant you can count on.
So whether it’s noisy horns, self-driving cars, smart speakers or cryptocurrency, people are bombarded with messages encouraging them to adopt new technology – without stopping to consider if they really need what companies are selling.
Matthew Jordan, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Penn State
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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.
[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.
On Thursday morning the US Labor Department released its weekly jobless report, which reported that 779,000 Americans made first time unemployment claims. This was below the consensus estimates among economists for a 830,000 print on this number. That better than expected result helped to fuel a lot of excitement in the financial markets and helped to creating a morning rally in the S&P 500 and the US stock market.
However, the numbers also showed a huge drop in productivity per work and a jump in Labor Unit costs. Nasdaq.com reported, “unit labor costs skyrocketed by 6.8 percent in the fourth quarter after plummeting by a revised 7.7 percent in the third quarter.”
The unit labor costs were only expected to jump by 3.9%. This is a sign of inflation ticking up in the US economy, a process that most Americans expect will begin to impact them before the year is over, according to a survey done by the Federal Reserve.