David Hoppe

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:: The jobless recovery

The unreal economy

By David Hoppe

There was a grocery store in Broad Ripple where customers used a keypad to ring up their sales and bagged their own purchases if they didn't want to wait in line for traditional cashier service. The grocery promoted this automated check-out's cool factor. We were told it was quicker and easier than being served by human beings. It was implied that using technology to check out our own groceries made us more independent.

I waited in line for a cashier anyway. Sometimes this meant waiting at an empty register until someone came over and helped me. Usually this person was standing just a few feet away, shooting the breeze with a co-worker. As soon as they saw me, they'd hustle over and start ringing up my stuff. Sometimes, as they did this, they would mention, in a friendly way, that I could use the store's super cool new computerized check-out system the next time I stopped by.

And I would smile and think to myself: But then you won't have a job.

Those machines weren't a convenience so much as they were a way of enabling the grocery chain that installed them to cut back on the number of people it hired. That, presumably, would then add to the store's bottom line.

It didn't help. That grocery went out of business anyway. The building it was in has sat vacant for longer than I care to remember.

Earlier this month, the Labor Department announced the unemployment rate for August. Joblessness was calculated at 9.7 percent, the worst it has been since 1983. Bad as this sounds, this news still managed a kind of silver lining. Although 216,000 jobs were cut, this was 60,000 less than were lost in July. It was also the lowest monthly loss in a year.

Forgive me for not cheering.

Many of our ways of measuring the country's economic health don't really tell us much about the quality of the country's life. The stock market, for instance, has been gradually working its way back into something like respectable territory over the past six months or so, which is good news for investment portfolios and retirement accounts. Some big banks and financial services providers have posted profits. The Institute for Supply Management reported that manufacturing grew in August for the first time in 19 months.

But numbers like these haven't spelled opportunity for people needing a regular paycheck. In fact, one of the ways businesses have been finding their way back to profitability has been by figuring out how to do more with fewer workers. This ratchets up productivity - another set of numbers - while doing practically nothing for people or the places where they live.

In theory, profitability should mean that businesses are experiencing a greater demand for their products, which then means that they hire more people to help supply that demand. But efficiencies in the workplace - a nice way of saying that one person does the work of two or more, or else -- plus the use of new technologies like those automated cashiers, are keeping a lid on hiring.

No one is feeling this so-called "jobless recovery" more than young men between the ages of 20 and 35. If you're in this age group, you probably know what I'm talking about. According to a Peter Hart survey published by the AFL-CIO called "Young Workers: A Lost Decade," unemployment among young men is the highest it's been in 61 years. That's 1948 we're talking about. Of those lucky enough to have a job, roughly one out of every three is living at home because they can't afford to pay bills, deal with health care costs or save any money on what they're making.

This used to be the group advertisers lusted after. No wonder we're seeing more and more commercials for ED and those skin creams that promise to make wrinkles disappear.

Labor groups say they want to reach out to young adults. The trouble is, to be in a union you have to have a job. So far, jobs aren't happening in this economy.

Last week, in his opening remarks to a joint session of Congress, President Obama acknowledged that while his policies had averted an economic collapse, joblessness was still eating at people in towns and cities across America. He pledged not to let up in his efforts to turn this situation around.

Federal stimulus funds injected into the economy are helpful, but they are limited and temporary. Sooner or later, we're going to have to come to grips with the unhealthy extent to which we have allowed our economy to become an abstraction where numbers mean more than things or the people who make those things. There's a reason we call something you can hold in your hand or wrap your arms around a good. At some point we will have to recognize that an economy based on pushing numbers from here to there, rather than on making goods, is like a supermodel who starves herself for a magazine's money shot -- unreal.