The Down and Dirty of June’s Jobs Report

At first glance June’s jobs report from the Department of Labor sounds pretty good: the economy added 195,000 jobs in the month and the unemployment rate stayed steady at 7.6-percent. See, that doesn’t sound so bad, and the White House was quick to tell the country how fantastic those 195,000 jobs are, but the real story isn’t so rosy.

As the American economy has struggled to recover from the financial crisis of 2008, we’ve seen a meek addition of jobs per month that has solidly been in the “bump along the bottom” category, and the 195,000 from June barely out-performs that low bar of expectation that we’ve become used to in the Obama Economy. The real problem comes in what type of jobs we’re adding – we’re becoming an economy of temps.

America’s second largest employer, after Walmart, is now a temporary staffing firm, Kelly Services. More than 28 million Americans are now working in a part-time job, and 2.7 million currently have temporary jobs, both record highs. Temporary and part-time jobs have gone from the work of teenagers to a permanent fixture of our country’s economy. Many of America’s largest employers from General Motors to Pepsi are turning to temporary workers to fill the holes in their workforce. This enables companies large and small to get work from employees who don’t require benefits, something that is a key cost factor in the age of Obamacare.

What does this mean for the average American worker? The loss of long-term job security, traditional health care or retirement benefits and the inability to plan for their financial future. As this trend line continues to grow, more Americans will face tough choices as they sit down to pay the bills, send their kids to college and plan for retirement. In fact, in what may not come as a surprise for many in the middle-class, 76-percent of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck with little to no emergency savings.

According to a survey by Bankrate.com, more than one-in-four of your fellow countrymen do not have enough money in savings to cover at least six months of expenses. Of those surveyed, 27-percent had no savings at all, no cushion for unexpected costs or loss of income. These numbers must be shocking to the previous generations who are now living on their lavish company pension, 401(k) plan, and Social Security checks, but that’s the Obama economy.