During much of his tenure, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has taken credit for helping to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in New York City, from high-paying construction work to sales jobs at dozens of new big-box stores. Even as the city plods through the recession, the mayor has set a goal to “retain and create” an additional 400,000 jobs over the next six years.
The debate over how much influence a mayor, a governor or a president has over jobs is one that may never be settled. But if Mayor Bloomberg can be judged on the numbers he has used as evidence of his own success, those numbers, while generally accurate, also contain some warning signs about the future of employment in the city.
Even in the downturn, the city has 130,000 more jobs than it had when Mr. Bloomberg became mayor, according to state labor statistics. Working-class New Yorkers who kept their jobs or stayed in the same field saw their pay rise faster than the rate of inflation.
But the overall job market constantly shifts, particularly in a recession, when the economy sheds jobs and even whole industries. And in New York, middle- and working-class jobs that have disappeared — in fields like manufacturing, wholesale distribution and administrative services — have been replaced by jobs in sectors like retail, food service and home health care that generally pay less.
“There’s been much more growth in lower-wage industries than in middle-wage industries,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group. “That’s a challenge for people struggling to maintain a decent livelihood in New York City, given the cost of housing and everything else.”
For most of President Bush’s term, a term that started at the peak of the dot-com bubble bust, unemployment went down and hovered around 5.0%, give or take a few points. During almost his entire Presidency, every time those numbers were published, we were reminded that they weren’t “good jobs” and that people were still hurting despite being employed.
In 2009, we have a President who has not presided over anything but massive job losses that are currently averaging a 300,000 to 500,000 per month and an unemployment rate that’s currently at 9.8% and will likely hit 10.5% before it reverses itself, yet the NY Times has barely mentioned it. Instead, they chose to focus on Mike Bloomberg’s job creation abilities and yet again, they’ve hauled out the old “they aren’t good jobs” canard.
My question is a simple one. If Obama’s unemployment rate dropped to 9.0% next month, do you think the NY Times would be concerned about the type of jobs that brought about the drop in the unemployment rate, or do you think the only thing that would matter would be the actual number going down.
I think we all know the answer to that.