US Job Growth At 206,000 in June, Unemployment Edges Up To 4.1 Percent, Ending Streak – Analysis

 July 6, 2024  

By Dean Baker

The establishment survey reported the economy created 206,000 new jobs in June. However, there were downward revisions to reported job growth for the prior two months, leaving the June level just 206,000 above the level previously reported for May.

The household survey showed unemployment continuing its gradual uptick, hitting 4.1 percent (4.05 percent before rounding). This ended the 28-month streak of below 4.0 percent unemployment, the longest since a streak of 35 months from January 1951 to November 1953.

Wage Growth Slows to 3.6 Percent Annual Rate

The annualized rate of hourly wage growth slowed to 3.6 percent over the last three months, this compares to a rate of 3.9 percent over the last year. We are essentially back to the pre-pandemic pace when inflation was at or below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. It is worth noting that if the profit share of income is to revert back to its pre-pandemic level, wage growth will have to be somewhat faster than a non-inflationary pace for a period of time to allow the wage share to rise.

Unemployment Rate Now Up 0.7 Percentage Points from Low Hit Last April

The unemployment rate has inched up gradually over the last year even as the economy has been generating jobs at a very rapid pace. The current 4.1 percent rate is still very low by historical standards, but it does indicate a notable weakening in the labor market from earlier in the recovery. Even if the current level still indicates a strong labor market, if it rises further from current levels, it will be a serious cause for concern.

Unemployment for Black Workers Rises to 6.3 Percent

The unemployment rate for Black workers rose 0.2 percentage points to 6.3 percent in June. The monthly data are highly erratic, but the unemployment rate for Black workers has averaged 6.0 percent over the last three months. It had hit an all-time low of 4.8 percent last April. That figure was likely an anomaly, but the three-month average for the period from March to May of last year was just 5.2 percent. This suggests a real rise in unemployment for Black workers of close to 1.0 percentage points.

Unemployment Rate for Asian American Workers Jumps 1.0 Percentage Points to 4.1 Percent

The unemployment rate for Asian American workers, which is usually slightly below the rate for white workers rose 1.0 percentage points to 4.1 percent, the highest since October 2021. This is likely an anomaly that will be reversed in future months, but it is still an unusually large rise.

Employment to Population Ratio for Prime-Age Workers Unchanged

The employment to population ratio for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54) was unchanged in June at 80.8 percent, 0.2 percentage points above its pre-pandemic peak. For men, it rose 0.5 percentage points to 86.5 percent, 0.1 percentage points below recovery peak. The rate for women dropped 0.6 percentage points to 75.1 percent from a record high in May. These data are erratic, but these are still unusually large monthly changes suggesting there could be something real here.

Share of Unemployment Due to Voluntary Quits Remains Low

Unemployment due to voluntary quits is a measure of workers’ confidence in the labor market since it means that they are willing to quit a job before they have a new one lined up. This share rose to 11.2 percent from 10.8 percent in May. This is still very low given the overall unemployment rate. It averaged 13.1 percent in the two years before the pandemic and peaked at 16.0 percent in 2022.

Number of People Working Part-time for Economic Reasons Falls by 199,000

The number of people working part-time because they could not find full-time jobs fell by 199,000 in June to the lowest level since December 2023. It is important to recognize that the vast majority of people working part-time (82.0 percent) indicate they have chosen to work part-time.

Government Sector and Health Care Lead in Job Creation in June

The government sector added 70,000 jobs in June, while health care added 48,600 jobs. The gain in the government sector was well above its average monthly gain of 51,000 over the last year, while the growth in health care was down from an average monthly gain of 64,000. Employment growth in the government sector has mostly trailed employment growth in the private sector in the recovery, now standing at 2.2 percent above its pre-pandemic peak, as compared to 4.5 percent for the private sector

Construction Adds 27,000 Jobs While Manufacturing Loses 8,000

The two most cyclical sectors had a mixed story in June, with construction showing a strong gain of 27,000 jobs, somewhat above its average of 20,000 a month over the last year. The job loss in manufacturing is in keeping with its pattern for the last year and a half, where employment has been little changed.

Within manufacturing, there are still some bright spots. The motor vehicle sector added 5,900 jobs in June and has added 36,600 jobs over the last year.

The continued strength in manufacturing and construction should alleviate any immediate recession fears since these sectors have always shown the sharpest losses in a downturn. The restaurant sector is showing some clear signs of weakness. It lost 3,100 jobs in June and has added just 900 jobs over the last three months. Job growth in the sector has been weak since October, with employment increasing by just 40,000 over the last eight months. By contrast, monthly job growth had averaged 27,000 in the year leading up to October. Slower job growth does fit with Commerce Department data showing slower growth in demand at restaurants.

June Report Shows Clear Evidence of a Slowing Economy

While the ending of a streak of below 4.0 percent unemployment does not really mean anything and 4.1 percent unemployment is still very low by historical standards, the clear trend towards higher unemployment is cause for concern. As noted, the relatively low share of unemployment due to voluntary quits indicates less confidence in the labor market than would be expected given the relatively low unemployment rate.

In this respect, it is also worth noting that the share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) increased to 22.2 percent, the highest since May 2022. This indicates that some unemployed workers are having a harder time finding new jobs. It had bottomed out at 17.5 percent last February, although this is still a relatively low share.

In any case, with wage growth settling to a place that is consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent target, or at least very close, the balance of risks indicates that the major concern at this point should be weakness rather than inflation. We’ll see if the Fed views it that way.

• This article was published at CEPR

Dean Baker
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

. He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy

Breaking Barriers: The Political Empowerment Of Bolivia’s Indigenous Women – Analysis

 July 6, 2024  

By Linda Farthing and Thomas Grisaffi

The political inclusion of one of Latin America’s most marginalized groups reflects an unprecedented change, but many challenges remain.

Remigia Ferrel Vallejos, a Bolivian union executive from Chimoré, in the coca-grower Chapare region, isn’t nostalgic for the old days. “Before there was a lot of fatalism. Many times, in meetings I was told, ‘women don’t count, the man has to come,” she explains. “That’s how it was; we didn’t even have the right to speak, or keep our own names, or hold title to land. Now it’s almost 50-50, we have rights, and we participate. We have authorities at every level of government who are women.”

Ferrel is describing the remarkable transformation over a decade of Bolivia’s rural Indigenous women from “helpers” of male-dominated peasant unions to ministers in the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government of Evo Morales from 2006 to 2019. Yet this achievement stands in stark contrast to the current disintegration of the MAS and its political project due to a fractious competition between the current president, Luis “Lucho” Arce, and former President Morales.

The infighting has also split the national Indigenous women’s organization, the National Confederation of Campesino Women of Bolivia Bartolina Sisa, commonly known as “Las Bartolinas,” that spearheaded the changes in Indigenous women’s status during the Morales era. The Bartolinas are estimated to have some 1.5 million members, making it the country’s most important women’s organization as well as the largest Indigenous women’s organization in the Americas.

Despite the rifts today, the surge in political inclusion of one of Latin America’s most politically marginalized groups achieved by the Bartolinas reflects a metamorphosis that has never occurred anywhere else before or since. Bolivia’s gains in gender parity are particularly significant during the current “super election year“—when more of the world’s population will vote than any other time in human history—yet most candidates worldwide remain men.

Seeds of Change

The roots of Bolivia’s success are found in Ferrel’s home region of the Chapare, where Indigenous coca-growing women, known as “cocaleras,” fought against the 1990s U.S.-financed war on drugs. Constant police and military repression in the Chapare during that period accelerated the creation of a separate women’s movement. “I always say women are stronger thanks to coca, thanks to the government of the USA,” jokes former union leader Apolonia Sánchez, who from 2016 to 2019 headed the Cochabamba department’s Decolonization unit. “We were obliged to get organized, even if the men did not want us to.”

Given coca’s importance to household finances in the Chapare, growers mobilized to defend their right to cultivate the leaf, using the vocabulary of Indigenous rights and national sovereignty. Women also deployed traditional gender roles as the “weaker sex” to advance their movement’s goals in the streets: “Women went first because the men were attacked like animals, and we weren’t. For that reason, women have always been at the head of the march,” recalls union leader Rosena Rodríguez from the town of Shinahota.

In March 1995, a congress of national peasant organizations convened to form a political instrument to represent campesino interests—which eventually became the MAS party. Women’s involvement proved a game changer in ensuring Morales’s rise to national leadership; he and other male coca grower leaders’ efforts to position themselves as the vanguard of the country’s peasant movement depended on cocalera backing. “Our brother Evo said, ‘together with the women, we will defend ourselves,'” recalls Sánchez.

Another critical turning point came with the 400 km (250 mile) Women’s March to La Paz in December 1995, demanding an end to coca eradication and respect for human rights. For the first time in Bolivia’s history, Indigenous women acted as representatives of social movements and negotiated directly with the government without male intermediaries.

By the early 2000s, cocaleras from the Chapare had become the country’s most dedicated advocates for Indigenous women. “We remain the best organized,” says María Eugenia Ledezma, the leader of the Chapare women’s organizations. “Our struggle is not just for our own region, it’s for the whole country.”

For people with little formal education, union participation was like going to school, preparing them for leadership positions. Cocalera and former Bartolinas executive Leonilda Zurita, who served as a national senator from 2006 to 2009, told sociologist Sandra Ramos Salazar: “To go to union meetings was our high school, the meetings of the Six Federations [Chapare coca growers unions] our university, and national level meetings our specialization.” This training has meant that the cocaleras have led the Bartolinas more often than women from anywhere else in the country. 

That cocalera leadership and influence proved instrumental in the formidable coalition of social movements that thrust Morales to the presidency in late 2005. The new government went on to guarantee equal pay for equal work; significantly increase women’s access to land, education, and health care; and announced plans to curb endemic violence against women, among the highest in Latin America. Bolivia’s overall poverty rate plummeted, which impacted the poorest, least educated, and most marginalized group—working-class Indigenous women—more than any other.Nonetheless, like many laws in a country that has always lacked implementation capacity, equal pay enforcement was (and is) almost non-existent. And despite legal protections and government campaigns, violence against women persists as one of Bolivia’s most serious problems. Girls and women endure more partner violence than anywhere else in Latin America and the Caribbean, with most femicides—57 percent—impacting largely Indigenous women from the countryside, where only 30 percent of the population currently lives.

Indigenous Women and Feminisms Find Common Cause

As Indigenous women’s organizing gathered steam, this constituency also benefited from the advances made by urban middle-class feminists, particularly their pioneering work advancing electoral representation during the late 1990s. Indigenous women nevertheless kept a critical distance during this period. Tensions between the Bartolinas and feminists have historically run deep, stemming from hundreds of years of Indigenous women’s servitude to lighter-skinned women, who often viewed them as clients of their nongovernmental projects rather than as political partners. The Bartolinas frequently identified feminism as a white, middle-class consequence of capitalism, even when they were in the same political party.

Prior to 2019, when Morales was ousted and replaced with a far-right government, Bolivian feminism—with the exception of feminist anarchist groups like Mujeres Creando and the Asamblea Feminista Comunitaria—rarely considered Indigenous women, either theoretically or ideologically. This blind spot echoed historical patterns—like the exclusion of Indigenous women from the first suffrage struggles in 1929, which advocated literacy as a criterion for the vote—that have hampered collaboration between Indigenous women and middle-class women for generations.

Indigenous women argued that feminism incited disagreements with Indigenous men and undervalued Indigenous culture. Because of these differences, racial equality has consistently trumped gender as Bolivian Indigenous women’s priority, although that has steadily shifted with time. In 2023, the Bartolina leadership declared a “frontal fight against machismo which is the source of violence and violation of our rights.”

This changed dynamic in Bolivia’s women’s movements is also reflected in the explosive growth of radical feminism in the aftermath of the 2019 crisis, mirroring a process throughout the Americas, particularly among young urban women, including those of Indigenous origin. Fueled in part by widespread revelations of sexual abuse in Bolivia condoned by the Catholic Church, marches for International Women’s Day and the hemispheric Ni Una Menos anti-violence campaign have proliferated and grown, as have feminist collectives and organizations. Almost all of this new mobilization incorporates a broader population in terms of race and class than its predecessors.

The Struggle Goes On

In 2009, the Bartolinas successfully coordinated with middle-class feminists to incorporate gender parity into a new constitution, which emerged as one of the most advanced in women’s rights in the world. The Bartolinas were largely convinced by cocalera leader Leonilda Zurita, who argued that gender parity was consistent with Indigenous values. “The political parties agreed to gender parity without realizing what it actually meant,” said Monica Novillo, former director of the Women’s Coalition, a broad-based alliance of feminist non-governmental organizations.

“The Constitution changed a great deal, raising consciousness of women’s rights among many people for the first time,” maintains Freddy Condo, a longtime adviser to the Bartolinas. Today, Bolivia stands out as one of the few countries where women make up approximately 50 percent of lawmakers across all levels of government. As Bolivian women only won the vote in 1953, this achievement is extraordinary.

Achieving gender equality has not been easy: after parity was mandated, some men presented themselves as women and were crudely referred to as “transvestite candidates” in the media. And male-dominated parties often selected women candidates they were sure they could control, according to Jessy López, director of the Association of Councilwoman of Bolivia, or ACOBOL. Violence against the new female politicians grew as well. Over 80 percent of women municipal councilors reported to ACOBOL at least one case of violence or political intimidation while in office, most often carried out by other authorities, López told us in a 2015 interview.

“Councilwoman have had their house set on fire, their husbands fired from their jobs, their children assaulted, and been physically attacked, all so that they’ll resign early,” she reported. In two cases, women serving as municipal council members have been murdered.

In 2012, Evo Morales’ government passed Law 348, one of the region’s most progressive anti-violence laws, which was accompanied by a public campaign denouncing violence against women. “This is our great internal contradiction,” explains Monica Novillo, “We have extremely high levels of violence at the same time that we have achieved legislative equality.”

Implementation of the law has been patchy at best. While domestic violence reporting rose by 40 percent, Law 348 faces the same problems with its application as other laws: inadequate resources. Women are also re-victimized by the judicial system, face chronic corruption and impunity, as well as a culture that obstructs women’s ability to denounce their aggressors.

One of the few women mayors in rural Bolivia, the Chapare’s Segundina Orellana, told us: “There remains an attitude that women are inferior, and this begins in childhood. Women suffer because we have family responsibilities, and men just don’t understand. We need more education and training to lead.”

One struggle Bolivian women face is the doble jornada—the double working day. “Women’s responsibility is still the family: to raise children, cook, and once that is done, then we can leave home and work as leaders,” says Honorata Díaz, a former Chapare municipal councilwoman. Ruth Sejas Charca, another former councilmember, agrees: “Women always have more work and responsibilities.”

While the mobilization of the cocaleras pushed the MAS government toward greater emphasis on rural Indigenous women, many stumbling blocks remain. “As a woman, I have been a union leader and I have known women who have been the top leader of their union, which is usually a man’s job,” says departmental assemblywoman Maria Javier Yucra. “There have been advances, right? But we still have so much more to do.”

About the authors:

• Linda Farthing has 30 years of experience in Latin America as a journalist, independent scholar, study abroad director, and film field producer. She has written four books on Bolivia and reported for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, the Nation and NACLA.
• Thomas Grisaffi teaches Human Geography at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. He is the author of Coca yes, Cocaine no: how Bolivia’s coca growers reshaped democracy (Duke University Press, 2019).

Source: The above article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).

Rescue street dogs, or euthanise them? Turks split over its strays

By Victoria Craig, BBC News, Ankara

BBC
Gokcen Yildiz cares for 160 street dogs at her property outside Ankara


Under the shade of a leafy green apricot tree on a scorching summer afternoon, Gokcen Yildiz scoops up a squirming ball of light-brown fur.

It licks her all over the face and she breaks out in giggles.

But laughter gives way to a more serious tone as she points to the dog's back legs, which are missing paws. A sign, she says, of the abuse some of Turkey’s street dogs are subjected to.

Ms Yildiz is a secondary school physics teacher by day, street-dog advocate by night. The canine she’s holding is one of 160 she’s collected on the property where she lives on the outskirts of Turkey’s capital city, Ankara.

Her dogs are a small fraction of the estimated four million that make up the country’s street-dog population.

It’s a problem that has fiercely divided public opinion: are stray dogs a neighbourhood fixture to be looked after and loved?

Or does the government need to take more drastic solutions, like those state media are reporting that it's considering - including euthanasia?

On her 15,000 sq m property, Ms Yildiz looks after elderly and disabled dogs, and those with psychological or behavioural issues.

“It is not my job, but I look after dogs in need,” she said. “I always experience financial worry because the economy is getting harder. When the price of petrol increases, everything like pet food or the medicine I give, or the vet expenses - everything goes up.”


Turkey's government estimates the country now has around four million street dogs


She said she feels anxious about finances, but her bigger concern is what will happen to the dogs if she doesn’t collect them.

“The dogs outside of here eat every two or three days, but they’re alive. They’re not about to die. That’s what really worries me,” she said.

Lawmakers from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) are working on a new bill aimed at getting dogs off the streets.

It hasn’t yet been introduced into the country’s parliament, but state media report it could require municipalities to collect stray dogs, shelter them for around 30 days, and if the animals are not adopted in that time, euthanise them.

The latter provision has outraged animal rights activists - and Turkey’s dog lovers, like Ms Yildiz - but it’s also raised questions about whether existing facilities across the country could handle additional responsibilities.

Only about one third of the nation’s provincial and district municipalities have shelters, according to Doctor Murat Arslan, president of the Turkish Veterinary Medical Association.

Getty Images
Some have protested against the planned law - but polls suggest a majority think something must be done

He said this had been one of the problems with an existing law, which requires dogs to be sterilised and then returned to the streets where they lived.

“In order to manage the animal population, street dogs needed to be collected, sterilised, given some vaccinations, and then released back to the street. However, not every municipality had shelters or facilities where these operations could be carried out. Especially in small municipalities, there are neither shelters nor sufficient employment of veterinarians.”

If this law, enacted 20 years ago, had been enforced, the street-dog population wouldn’t be so large today, Dr Arslan said.

Animal abandonment and overbreeding and selling of dogs had also allowed the street-dog population to rise, he told the BBC. Although animals are microchipped and registered in a centralised database, officials needed to be better at following through with fines for owners when animals were found to have been thrown out on the street, he added.

Regardless of what led to the problem, campaign groups like Safe Streets Association argue a solution is needed to take dogs permanently off the street.

Getty Images
Stray dogs have become an issue all across Turkey

Attorney Meltem Zorba is a volunteer for Safe Streets. She works with families that have been victims of stray-dog attacks, and points to government statistics that show over the past five years, street dogs have contributed to 55 deaths, more than 5,000 injuries, and 3,500 traffic accidents.

“We have been pressuring for legal change for three years,” she said. “There should not be stray dogs on the streets. These attacks on people causing death, traffic accidents, and other animals being attacked are unacceptable.”

She’s calling for a legal requirement to take dogs off the streets for good - rather than the catch-and-release protocol in place now. Ms Zorba also says the dogs pose other concerns including rabies and public health issues arising from dog faeces in public places, such as parks and playgrounds.

“This is rationality,” she said of the creation of new legislation, adding that euthanasia should be a last resort and a result of an animal being deemed too sick or posing a risk to society.

That’s where a national consensus seems to be building. A recent opinion poll showed nearly 80% of respondents supported measures to take dogs off the street and provide shelter. But less than 3% believed collected dogs should be euthanised.

Both Ms Zorba and Ms Yildiz support a government solution that would allow dogs to be taken off the streets, collected in newly-built shelters around the country, sterilised, and looked after through the end of their lives, if not adopted.

It’s believed that ministers plan to provide local authorities with fresh funds to implement any new law on stray dogs.

But it’s unclear whether the government - already dealing with an economic crisis that’s seen inflation climb to 75% this year - has the resources available for such a solution.

WAIT, WHAT?!

Japan scraps every regulation requiring the use of floppy disks

Japanese businesses – from oil companies to shopping centres – had been required to submit documents to regulators on floppy disks. PHOTO: PIXABAY

JUL 06, 2024

TOKYO – Japan scrapped every regulation requiring the use of floppy disks for administrative purposes this week, catching up with the times 13 years after the country’s producers manufactured their last units.

The floppy disk, invented in the 1970s, was once a ubiquitous part of computing. Other forms of memory like flash drives and internet cloud storage have since taken over, but not in Japan.

While renowned for its consumer electronics giants, robots and some of the world’s fastest broadband networks, the country has also been wedded to floppy disks, fax machines and cash.

Japan began moving away from the magnetic disks encased in plastic just two years ago when Mr Taro Kono, the country’s Digital Minister, declared a “war on floppy disks”.

A wide spectrum of businesses – mines, oil companies, retailers, liquor shops, shopping centres – was bound by different rules requiring them to submit documents to regulators on floppy disks.

Even after Sony, once a major manufacturer of the disks for the Japanese market, stopped producing them in 2011, more than 1,000 floppy-mandating laws, ordinances and directives stayed on the books, according to Japan’s Digital Ministry.

On July 3, Mr Kono declared victory in his war. All of those regulations have been reviewed by lawmakers, undergone public comment, been voted on and struck down, he said.

Outside the government, some Japanese sectors aren’t ready to let go.

Each day, Higo Bank, on the island of Kyushu, processes nearly 300 floppy disks, which weigh almost 4.5kg, according to Mr Yusuke Murayama, a spokesman for the bank.

The bank has tried to persuade the clients still using the disks to store their bank account information to switch formats, telling them it would stop accepting them in the spring, he said.

Within the Japanese government, Mr Kono’s work is not done. He has indicated that fax machines, still widely used in Japan, are in his sights. He recommended switching to e-mail.

In the southern town of Tsuwano, the accounting department replaced floppy disks only in April 2023, said Mr Nobuyuki Koto, an official in the department, who added that he missed some things about the old system.

“There wasn’t any risk of getting hacked,” he said. “Now we have to be careful about data security.” NYTIMES