Have you ever heard of the dodo bird? Once upon a time, dodo birds lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. But if you go there today you won’t find any because they are extinct. Well, if you are a blue collar worker in America today it looks like you are headed for a similar fate. 

Blue collar workers are truly becoming an “endangered species” in the United States. In the old days, the balance of power between business owners and labor was more even because they both needed each other. But today that has all changed. 

Thanks to robotics, automation and computers there is simply not as much of a need for physical laborers anymore and nothing is going to reverse that trend. Big employers will continue to look for ways to replace men with machines, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But there is another major trend that is also destroying blue collar jobs in America that we should do something about. 

Right now, it is perfectly legal for big corporations to shut down manufacturing facilities in the United States and send the jobs over to nations on the other side of the globe where it is legal to pay slave labor wages and where there are barely any regulations. As you will see later on this article, this has been the biggest reason for the shocking blue collar job losses in America over the past decade.

The big corporations don’t care that you need to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for your families. All they care about it the bottom line, and if dramatic changes are not made soon, the number of blue collar jobs leaving the United States will continue to increase.

Once upon a time, almost everyone who wanted a job in America could get one. If you go back a few decades, you will find that about 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.  Today that figure is struggling to stay above 80 percent.

If you are a blue collar worker in America, you are simply not valued.  Your bosses are constantly trying to think of ways to replace you or send your job overseas.

According to Reuters, 23.7 million American workers are either unemployed or underemployed right now.  The more “blue collar” you are, the more likely you are to be unemployed.  The following chart that shows the unemployment rate during 2010 broken down by level of education comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics….

If you are an unskilled worker in America today, you simply are not needed.  Yes, once upon a time nearly anyone could go out and get a factory job, but those days are over.  Neither major political party seems the least bit interested in trying to keep manufacturing jobs in America.

Back in the year 2000, more than 20 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.  Today, about 5 percent of all jobs in America are manufacturing jobs.

To have that huge of a shift in a little over a decade is absolutely mind blowing.

Many Americans had been hoping that Barack Obama would stand up for the working man like he promised to do.  But just like so many of Obama’s other promises, that one was totally worthless as well.

The Obama administration has been pushing hard for even more “free trade” deals that will allow big corporations to ship even more of our jobs out of the country.  The Obama administration simply does not value blue collar jobs at all.  In fact, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk is running around telling the press that there are lots of things that “we don’t want to make in America” anymore.

If you are a blue collar worker, Barack Obama does not care about you.

He never cared about you.

In fact, the vast majority of the politicians in both major political parties do not care about you.

What they do care about is winning elections and taking care of the big donors that keep helping them win elections.

Many of those donors are systematically shipping huge numbers of our jobs overseas.

In addition, now that labor has become a “global commodity”, wages for the jobs that remain in America are being steadily driven lower.

A recent White House reported entitled “Investing in America: Building an Economy That Lasts” actually bragged that our trade policies have driven wages in America down.  The following chart is from that report….

We were told that the “one world economy” would be great for America, but the truth is that it has only been great for the giant corporations.  For the average working man, it has been a disaster.

But we should have all seen this coming.  It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going to happen once you put American workers into the same labor pool as slave laborers on the other side of the world.  After all, what greedy corporate executive really wants to pay U.S. workers ten to twenty times as much compensation just because it is the “right” thing to do?

Today, formerly great cities all over America are being transformed into hellholes while shiny, new industrial cities are popping up all over China.

For example, a couple of decades ago the Chinese city of Shenzhen was a sleepy little fishing town.

In 2012, it is a teeming metropolis of over 13 million people.

Foxconn (the builder of iPhones, iPads and many other products that we buy) runs a factory in Shenzhen that employs over 400,000 people.  Most of those people work for about a dollar an hour.

A recent article posted on Business Insider described the incredibly long hours and the nightmarish working conditions that those workers must endure.  The following is a brief excerpt from that article….

A Chinese working “hour” is 60 minutes–unlike an American “hour,” which generally includes breaks for Facebook, the bathroom, a phone call, and some conversation. The official work day in China is 8 hours long, but the standard shift is 12 hours. Generally, these shifts extend to 14-16 hours, especially when there’s a hot new gadget to build.

At Foxconn, they don’t really care about the health and safety of the workers.  Workers are expected to do the same repetitive tasks as rapidly as they can for as long as they can.  When their bodies break down, they are fired….

Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs. Once the workers’ hands no longer work, obviously, they’re canned.

But the Obama administration insists that allowing big corporations to ship our jobs over to countries with working conditions like that is “good for the economy”.

Well, it might be good for the profits of the largest corporations, but it is a total nightmare for the rest of us.  Just consider the following stats….

*The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

*Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

*According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, America has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years.  During 2010 it got even worse.  Last year, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day shut down in the United States.

*In all, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have shut down since 2001.

*According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.

*According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades.

Are you starting to get the picture?

If you are a blue collar worker that cannot find a job, it is not because you have failed as a human being.

Rather, the truth is that you cannot find a job because of the failed trade policies of the federal government.

We are experiencing the bitter fruit of a “one world economy”.  Globalization was never intended to make the lives of American workers better, and now many are finally waking up and realizing this.

Hopefully, as Americans wake up on these issues they will fight to turn this nation in a more positive direction.

Unfortunately, way too many Americans are giving up hope completely.  The following comes from a recent article in the Guardian….

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

As I have written about so many times, we are watching the middle class in America be systematically destroyed.

The economy is not getting better.  There may be moments when the economy seems like it is improving, but the reality is that we are mired in a nightmarish long-term decline.  If you are not yet convinced of this, please see this article and this article.

Even those running our economy are saying that things are not going to be getting much better any time soon.

For example, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Charles Evans, recently admitted that the employment picture is not going to be much brighter than it is now by the end of 2012.  He recently said that “at the end of the year, we’re not going to be very different from 8.5 percent unemployment.”

And remember – history has shown us that most pronouncements by Federal Reserve officials are usually far too optimistic.

If you are a blue collar worker in America, there is simply not too much to be optimistic about right now.

You might want to think about how you and your family are going to survive without any work.

The millions of jobs that have been sent overseas are not coming back.  Even if you still have a decent job, now is the time to be developing a side business or developing other alternative streams of income.

What you don’t want to do is to just sit there and hope that somehow things will “magically” turn around if we just vote in the “right” politician.

If you want to get a really good idea of what is really going on with the U.S. economy right now, just go tour some of the formerly great industrial cities in the “Rust Belt”.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio one out of every five houses is sitting vacant.  It is not that those homes are not needed – it is just that there are not nearly enough people with good jobs available to buy up all of the foreclosures.

So thousands of perfectly good houses are being torn down.  The following comes from a recent CBS News report by Scott Pelley….

Across America, recession-fueled foreclosures and plummeting home values have left countless properties abandoned and vulnerable to looting. As Scott Pelley reports, the problem has gotten so bad in Cleveland, Ohio, that county officials have demolished more than 1,000 homes this year – and plan to demolish 20,000 more – rather than let the blight spread and render nearby homes worthless.

Can you imagine that?

20,000 homes being demolished in one county alone?

Of course Detroit is in even worse shape than Cleveland.  If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.

For much more on all of this, please read my recent article entitled “Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering Sores“.

It would be great if I could tell you that hope is just around the corner, but it is not.  The plight of the blue collar worker in America is going to get worse and worse.

But just because blue collar workers in America are an endangered species does not mean that you have to be a victim.

We should all seek to become less dependent on the system.

If you are completely and totally dependent on having a “job” (just over broke), then you have put yourself in a very vulnerable position.

That job could disappear at any moment.

Over the next few years, the number of good jobs is going to continue to decrease.  Things are going to be really tough.  But those that have prepared and that have tried to become more independent are going to be in much better shape than those that have not.

Please follow Business Insider on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• 24 Stats To Crush Anyone Who Thinks America Has A Bright Economic Future
• 22 Signs America Is On The Verge Of A Devastating Global Recession
• Finally Americans Aren’t Getting Fatter Anymore

The hot Fed Governor speech of last week was the one delivered by Daniel K. Tarullo delivered at Columbia on Thursday.

Because he talked about how it might be a good idea to have the Fed start buying more Mortgage-Backed Securities, it really got the QE3 chatter going in full steam.

It may have contributed to Friday’s stock market rally.

But there was another part of Tarullo’s speech that was just as interesting, if not necessarily as market moving, and that’s where he talked about the unemployment crisis, and what the cause of it is, and whether it’s just cyclically very weak, or representative of something much deeper, and thus structural.

Tarullo hits on several possible factors that may be causing some kind of permanent shift in labor matters, but there’s one theory for structural unemployment — that workers just don’t have the skills needed to be productive — that doesn’t actually hold much water.

These three paragraphs are very interesting on that front:

A second factor, the one most often cited in support of the structural unemployment hypothesis, is skills mismatch. While it is quite plausible that certain features of the current labor market reflect some skills mismatch contributing to a rise in structural unemployment during the recession, closer examination reveals that they explain less of this increase than might first appear.

One such labor market feature is the sharp reduction in employment in sectors related to the housing bubble, such as residential construction and some parts of financial services. The contention is that the skills of workers in these sectors do not readily transfer to other sectors, and thus they will have a particularly difficult time finding new jobs. But in every recession, certain industries and occupations are hit particularly hard, resulting in significant permanent job losses. Yet previous recessions do not seem to have been accompanied by notable increases in structural unemployment. Thus, those who believe the mismatch problem specifically created by the recession–as distinguished from more-secular trends–is either more prevalent or more persistent now than in the past would need to identify some additional source of rigidity that has further hampered labor market adjustment.

Some have also pointed to the high level of long-term unemployment as evidence that mismatch is a major factor keeping the unemployment rate high. The claim is that those without the skills sought by employers will take longer, on average, to find new employment. However, the data do not back this claim, at least to date. If high unemployment durations were the result of mismatch, the probability of finding a new job should have declined proportionately more for the long-term unemployed than for the recently unemployed. In fact, reemployment probabilities during the recession fell by similar amounts for all durations of unemployment and have edged up by similar increments in the recovery. Again, this pattern is more consistent with weak aggregate demand being the most important cause of high unemployment.

The bolded line above is hugely important, since it bets right at this idea that the US has this growing permanently unemployable class that has no hope of ever re-entering the workforce do to their skills and situations being so far away from what’s needed by employers.

Unfortunately, in the footnotes to Tarullo’s speech he doesn’t offer a citation of this fact, so we had to go hunting, and found this post by Mike Konczal on the exact question about whether, in the Great Recession, it’s been harder than normal for the long-term unemployed to find work.

Anyway, the answer is that no, it’s not harder than normal for the long-term unemployed to find work, in fact, the opposite: It’s harder than normal for the short-term unemployed to find work.

Going based on this data from the BLS (.pdf), he put together some very intriguing charts, a couple of which we’ll post here.

This first one shows the distribution, at any given time, of people who become “unemployed-to-employed” based on how long they’ve been unemployed.

As you can see, at any given time, historically, the short-term unemployed have been more likely to find work than the long term unemployed, but…. it’s tilting, so that these days, more and more of the people who find jobs are coming from the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Now granted, there’s a problem, which is that there are more long-term unemployed than there used to be, so that could explain their greater participation in the work force.

However, other ways of slicing the data point to similar conclusions.

Here’s another chart that just looks at any given cohort’s odds of finding a job at any given moment.

As you can see, things have gotten worse for everybody, but actually things have gotten way worse for the short-term unemployed (the top line) while only modestly worse for the long-term unemployed.

All this of course has hugely important implications.

Critics of government stimulus spit at the notion that mere “spending” just thrown out there by the government could possibly affect the deep, root causes causing the labor market to be so bad.

The idea is taking hold in elite circles that the US has these gigantic labor problems that can’t be fixed.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently wrote a post about how nobody could fix the jobs situation, keying off the news that the Postal Service planned tons more layoffs in the future. He wrote:

We are undergoing a big time technological revolution that is disrupting big industries and big companies all over the place. And many of these big companies (and societies) have in place huge entitlements that make it impossible to operate them profitably.

The US Postal Service story is not a unique situation. It is the situation. And we are going to be living with this situation for many years to come. We are crossing a huge chasm from an industrial society to an information society. And there is immense pain in that transformation. Obama can’t solve the problem nor can any of his opponents. Time will solve this problem as new industries get built, people learn new skills and new jobs, and we dismantle entitlement systems that are not sustainable.

That is what is going on. I’d love to hear Obama tell the country that. But I doubt he will. But someone should.

Yes, disruption is happening, and people are being put out of work due to new industries and competitors and all that, but the idea that it’s different this time, that this time the masses are unemployable is not born out by the facts.

The fact of the matter is: there is a deep, root cause of unemployment. it’s not the skills shortage, it’s the impact of private sector debt, and the ongoing deleveraging cycle. Thus, more spending, to help ameliorate this problem is precisely what the doctor ordered.

Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: New Poll Says The Jobs Situation Has Improved Significantly In October
• Some Actual Good News On Jobs
• ‘Groupon Is A Disaster’

A piece from Goldman credit strategist Dominic Wilson looks at what current credit spreads are saying about the prospect of recession around the world.

As several people have noted over the past several weeks, the current spread between corporate bond yields (of various flavors) and Treasuries is definitely in recession territory.

In fact, jumps like this are basically always associated with recessions.

It’s even worse if you look at sub-sectors, like financials.

Check this out. Current spreads for financial debt are consistent with an economy that’s adding shedding 300K per month.

What’s all this tell you: Well, perhaps things are going to get very bad.

On the other hand, this could just mean that credit has succumbed to a momentary panic (perhaps due to flashbacks to 2008) that have caused markets to go too far out of reality.

Even looking at that top chart, the jump isn’t THAT big, and if you notice, historically, the big yield spike has happened once the recession has already began, which undermines the idea that credit is particularly predictive.

Please follow Money Game on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Here’s How Stocks Performed In Past Recessions
• The Latest Evidence That There’s Still No Recession
• It’s Official: The ‘Recovery’ Has Been More Painful Than The Recession

Banking giant HSBC has today announced plans to axe 3,000 jobs at its Asian headquarters in Hong Kong over the next three years.

The reduction in headcount is part of an ongoing global cost-cutting plan after comes shortly after the bank said it would axe 30,000 jobs by 2013.

The bank, which is Europe’s largest, has a global workforce of 335,000 worldwide, with 52,000 in the UK.

It is the latest bank to announce job losses after Lloyds Banking Group has shed 15,000 jobs this year, while Royal Bank of Scotland has axed 28,000 employees since 2010.

HSBC said the cuts were aimed at streamlining operations.

Asia Pacific chief executive Peter Wong, said: “For all of HSBC’s strengths as an organisation… we can be needlessly complex and bureaucratic.”

He added: “This complexity reduces our effectiveness and efficiency. Our best estimate at this time is that approximately 3,000 existing roles will be reduced over these three years.”

The announcement comes shortly after the bank said Hong Kong workers were safe from such measures.

The job losses will be mainly focused on support staff, including those in IT, human resources and administration.

The cuts were criticised by Unions, who described them as “shameful” adding “it is still slashing jobs, despite profits of more than HK$100 billion last year.”