What Recovery?

American Demographics,  June 1, 2003  by Matthew Grimm

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Byline: Matthew Grimm

If you ever want a crash course in the art of "communications," which, in the contemporary context, has nothing to do with the act of it, watch any news channel for a couple or 10 hours a day. You'll observe how a vast, technologically dazzling industry devoted solely to delivering information to the public can squander all its resources broadcasting hours of men saying absolutely nothing. Ari Fleischer, for example, America's First Flack, the embodiment of professional communications training and the strutting incarnation of snotty erudition, has a daily show on four channels in which he can say anything, no matter how preposterous or meaningless, and get taken at his word by every newsperson in the country.

Fleischer "communicates" by boiling complex situations down into simplistic slogans that he and his bosses expect to gather currency by sheer repetition. Take his March 11 assertion that "the economy is growing, the economy is recovering." Perhaps not as blood-scented as most of the obfuscation issued from the White House of late, this is obviously spurious and easily debunked by any cursory reading of Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Or, you might just take a look at the latest campaign from Monster.com.

An old saw claims that bars and employment agencies are the only businesses that thrive in bad economic times, and Monster, the online job search engine, has offered up a bellwether of the country's current fiscal straits. The basic setup of its ads is that specific jobs and the people who need them are like ships passing in the night. Since the campaign broke on the Super Bowl broadcast, the spot that's received the most attention shows a rugged, be-flanneled guy sitting in a diner, idle. Outside the window behind him, a driverless 18-wheeler careens down the highway, cutting a comically violent swath of destruction. In another spot, two plates of food sit on a pickup counter, just waiting for an engaging denizen of the service economy to deliver them to a restaurant's customers.

The latter, an obviously more somber spot, bespeaks the timely divergence Monster has made with this campaign, per its tagline, "Blue collar. White collar. No collar. Now Monster works for everybody." Where its ads once addressed white-collar workaday disgruntlement, juxtaposing it with dream jobs - you know, the whole "pursuit of happiness" thing - this blue-collar turn reflects a kind of quiet desperation in the market, without being condescending to the audience or the vocations, which have a genuine need for one another in today's climate. It's as if in these moments, at least one advertiser has dispensed with the Pollyanna chorus its industry specializes in - that Utopia awaits us one purchase, or phone call away - to give us an earnest reminder that there are things to do.

It would seem that Monster's approach couldn't have a more receptive audience, since Fleischer is wrong, ignorant and/or lying about the economy. Currently, there are 2.5 job seekers for every job available, according to an AFL-CIO report released in January, in an employment marketplace that has lost 1.7 million jobs over the last two years, the first consecutive years of employment drops since the late '50s. The market got a kick in the gut at the end of 2002, when, flying in the face of its tried-and-true rush retail season, the service economy hired 162,000 temp, or "contingent," employees two months into the new year, far short of the 266,000 projected, and not good enough to move the unemployment rate from 6 percent. Some 308,000 layoffs in February 2003 marked the biggest drop since the months after Sept. 11. For the 12 months ending September 30, 2002, bankruptcies jumped by 8 percent over the previous year, with the total number of cases filed in the three-month period ending last September the highest in history.

Any notion of recovery in that climate - whatever Wall Street blip the stiffs in suits want to hearken to - is far removed from the cash register, for people behind the counter or in front of it. "There's no end in sight," says Tim Costello, coordinator for the North American Alliance for Fair Employment (NAAFE). "Even with lower-wage workers, to the extent they're working, wages that were rising very small amounts before Sept. 11, that's all wiped out. Couple that with economic policies designed to enrich the rich, and it's tough to see anything but doom and gloom."

Even for the bigger benchmark numbers, the fallout beyond is palpable, says Costello. More than 22 percent of Americans have taken a contingent job they didn't want, and an additional 13 percent live in a household where someone has done so, according to an NAAFE poll conducted by Lake Snell Perry and Associates of Washington, D.C. Some 2.1 million Americans did contingency work on any given day in 2002, a 5.7 percent drop from 2001 and on top of a 14.2 percent drop that year, per the Department of Labor. More than 4 million work part-time because they can't find full-time positions, according to the AFL-CIO.