WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD JOBS GONE, LONG TIME PASSING!

WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD JOBS GONE, LONG TIME PASSING, (Frazer Chronicles)

The U.S. job market has been looking up over the past several months, continuing a pattern that began more then a year ago. More then 2 million jobs have been added during this period, with the bulk coming from the small business sector. During the first 4 months of 2011, payroll increases have accelerated to 214,000 per month, the strongest 4 month period in 5 years.

However there's a hitch, a catch, or a caveat, the jobs being created in the United States right now in terms of pay, benefits, hours and skills leaves a lot to be desired. The problem is not only the depth of the recession, or the sluggishness of the recovery, it also reflects a changing structure of the U.S. economy.

More and more manufacturing operations are shifting to overseas locations, while new jobs in America are becoming dominated by the service industry, which habitually pays much less hourly wages and offers little or no benefits, as the skill levels decrease. It is a sad but true reality of today's job market, the rich are getting richer and the poor.....well, they either remain where they are at, treading water, or fall further in debt.

From Pennsylvania to Missouri, empty factories set idle and falling down, the parking lots filling with weeds, and the broken windows from Vandals stones and glass bottles. Others, once bustling bastions  of activity and high end manufacturing jobs have been turned into empty fields by the wreaking ball.

People talk about what has driven America, how small business has always driven the country, not big business. That my friend is like saying, "beauty is only skin deep," big business, major industry, has always driven the United States, it is what has made the country strong and great. Small business is incapable of achieving the same things that big industry can, they simply don't have the juice. Those that disagree are simply not facing the truth, or have an agenda.

Between 2000 and 2010, America lost more then 5 million high end factory and manufacturing jobs, equating into billions and billions of dollars in lost revenue, lost buying power and inevitably threw the country into a near depression. The only thing that saved us was the unhinged credit market, where AAA credit ratings was given to unemployed folks, or people like me, who could buy a truck when I was between jobs.

When that magic credit ratings dried up and Americans discovered what had happened, "most of us still don't get it," the bottom dropped out and like every other bad business decisions that have been made by American business, the poor old taxpayer had to pick up the slack and bail business out.

Factory jobs, manufacturing jobs and many of the other top end jobs now pay alot less then they did 5 or 7 years ago. Has it been a coordinated effort by business to drive wages down, well, let me put it this way, are there anymore cut rate gas prices, or is the price of a gallon of gas uniform across the board. Can you still shop around for mainstay products like you could 10 years ago or more?

Economists point to 2001, or 2007 as the beginning of the recession, I however, "not being an economist, and not hindered by that type of logic," go all the way back to 1959 and a nation-wide steel making strike that idled more then half a million workers in the United States and in the process opened the door for foreign imports of pig iron, steel shapes and bars. That was, in a way, the beginning of outsourcing, more then 50 years ago.

Outsourcing today dominates American industry, from the entire product, to bits and pieces processed in other countries, shipped to the U.S. and assembled here by Americans making less then half of what they used to be paid. How benefits, I wonder.

This is a maddening and frustrating time for American workers, the changes that are being forced upon them is hellish, confusion and at times almost unbearable. The AFL-CIO last week begin to distance itself from the Democratic party, as has the Service Employees International Union. That is a direct reflection that many union members feel, that the labor movement in the United States is on the verge of extinction and radical change will soon be necessary.

Business, both large and small has poked so many holes in the 1935 Wagner Act, the National Labor Relations Act, that it resembles little of once it once did. The act, the ability to bargain collectively, to form unions or to join unions has been striped away in many sectors of the business community and has been taken outright from many public workers.

The road the the country is going down is at present, dangerous and in the future will cause violence in the workplace. My father worked for General Motors in the middle 1930's and saw the company goons with ax handles, bashing workers and saw retaliation against management with piano wire stretched across stair-wells, causing broken bones. It all ended in 1937 at the Flint, Michigan G.M. strike and the capitulation by the company.

In the end, the more then 6 week strike cost the company more then the striking workers. The strike of 1936-37 was really the first victory for organized labor in the United States. At the beginning of 1937 the UAW counted less then 30,000 members, by the end of the year, that number had swelled to more then 500,000.

Business, big, medium or small, has a responsibility to it's workers, to offer a fair "living" wage for an honest days work, to make good sound business decisions, to always put the company ahead of any personnel gains and to provide a safe work place.

If all of these things come together, everybody profits, everybody produces and every stockholder gets a decent return for invested funds. It's so simple.

WHAT THE HELLS A HOCHUL, (Frazer Chronicles)

Whats all the hub-bub, some upstate New York special elections got Paul "I would be King" Ryan spouting off about the results. I guess the citizens of the Empire state should have seen the handwriting on the wall, or on the motel bathroom mirror. When Chris Lee resigned on February 9th. it left a New York state representatives seat vacant, causing the May 24th. election.

Christopher Lee looks like a nice enough guy, if you like a picture of a guy in a hotel bathroom, without a shirt on, holding up deodorant in his left hand and giving a muscle beach pose with his right arm and hand. The married 49 year old has a child at home and sent the picture and some sort of flirtatious email to some gal he'd met on Craigslist.

I really don't care about the photo, the pose and even the email, I wouldn't resign a cushy job for that, or course I wouldn't bare my body, "in any part" for some babe to see.....I'd send some hunk, toned up guy's. But this idiot resigned because of the email....to a chick he met on Craigslist, what if shes ugly man, are you crazy, for that I'd resign and we here at Chronicle headquarters think that you did the right thing.

Paul "I would be king" Ryan was railing on Kathy Hochul, the Erie county clerk, a Democrat who beat out a Republican, a Teabagger and  Green Party candidate, using scare tactics with regards to his, "Ryan's" health care plan. Hochul's ascent to the vacant seat does not swing the balance of power to the Dem. but it does give another voice of decent against the Republicans.

We can all sit back and watch the fur fly over the next several months and watch politicians on both sides  squirm. We here at Chronicle headquarters would have voted for the Green Party guy