U.S. Unemployment: Rich = 3%, Poor = 31%

Unemployment for Those Who Earn $150,000 or More is Only 3%, While Unemployment for the Poor is 31% - (Washington's Blog - April 24, 2010)

Notes from this article

In the face of one of the worst economic environments in memory, those in the highest income groups had nearly full employment levels, with just a 3.2 percent unemployment rate for households with over $150,000 in income and a 4 percent rate in the next-highest income group of $100,000-plus.

The two lowest-income groups -- under $12,500 and under $20,000 annually -- faced unemployment rates of 30.8 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively.

Official figures put unemployment in the United States somewhere between 9 and 10 percent. But the official figures use a very different measure for unemployment than was used during the Great Depression and for many decades afterwards.

This article also points to what former U.S. Labor secretary Robert Reich states as the permanent destruction of jobs in America:

This means many Americans won't be rehired unless they're willing to settle for much lower wages and benefits. Today's official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which Americans are already on this path. Among those with jobs, a large and growing number have had to accept lower pay as a condition for keeping them. Or they've lost higher-paying jobs and are now in a new ones that pays less.

Yet reducing unemployment by cutting wages merely exchanges one problem for another. We'll get jobs back but have more people working for pay they consider inadequate, more working families at or near poverty, and widening inequality. The nation will also have a harder time restarting the economy because so many more Americans lack the money they need to buy all the goods and services the economy can produce.

An excellent summarization of the unemployment issue done by Washington's Blog last August - The Rising Tide of Unemployment in America: How Bad Will It Get, And What Can We Do?

The Hound knows that it rolls downhill. Many Executives want to make sure that they don't feel the pain and so they do whatever they can to preserve their own standard of living many times at the expense of others. It seems to me that the best managers have a firm understanding that they must put some skin in the game by cutting their own salary also.

Those managers who choose not to be a part of the team will be able to stem the tide of the negative economic climate over the short run, but eventually they will see their leadership fall into misfortune. The average laborer has to accept the way things are in this current economic debacle and keep moving forward. It is a matter of survival.

When we take a look at what has been happening, we see that people who were previously in the $50k to $75k range are taking paycuts and/or having to take on more responsibilities as fellow employees are laid off or reduced through attrition. People who are laid off and looking for new employment are expected to fall to the next tier down in income level. Someone that was making $50k per year has to take a $35K job, a former $35K wage earner is now working at a $25K job, and someone previously making $25k has to take a $20K job, etc.

People are left scrambling, because their expenses are the same or higher. The mortgage is the same, the car payment is the same, Insurance is higher, utilities are higher, fuel is higher, food is higher, etc. So people are going to have to find little side jobs to supplement their income and usually these are low to no skill jobs.

Where does this leave the Unskilled Laborer? The rest of us are underemployed and we are soaking up jobs that used to go to those with lesser skills. It means that they have little, if any, prospects to find full time employment. It means most likely that they will have to depend on Government and Society to help them get through life. And, in the end, that will mean more of a burden on the rest of society as we have to help those who essentially will be permanently unemployed.