OpEdNews - Article: America's tenth decile, the "sitting around guys."

OpEdNews - Article: America's tenth decile, the "sitting around guys."
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Hebert's column spoke directly to a problem that has been, and continues to be, one we have either intentionally or unintentionally ignored: The peril to the core of our civil society that this Great Recession has created; a combined total un- and underemployment in Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies lowest decile, those households with annual incomes less than $12,499, of 51.4 percent! (A "tile" or "cile" is a population division under a bell curve. For example, the "normal" bell curve is typically divided into five groups, or quintiles. A bell curve with ten such division is called a decile.)

The unemployment rate within this decile is 30.8 percent. The underemployment rate is 20.6 percent. Underemployment is quite as vicious as unemployment. It includes those who are working part-time, when they'd much prefer/need full-time, but cannot get it, are in jobs they are overqualified for, or have given up looking for work because there simply do not exist a sufficient number of jobs they may be qualified for at rates of pay that warrant continued looking.

Before any of us holier-than-thou jump down the throats of those who have given up the chase on the presumption that "any job is better than none," let me introduce the idea that a very real Fortune 500 business decision is being made by those who have given up. For example, if a single mother has no dependable relatives with whom she can leave a preschool child, while the mother is at work, she will have to find and pay for child care. Then arises the business expense of transportation; getting her child(ren) to the day care facility, and then herself to and from the place of employment. One way or another, those compose expenses that must be significantly lower than the net income (gross wages less all taxes and deductions from pay) derived through the employment. Regardless how any of the rest of us might want to feel, it would be an utterly foolish business proposition for that mother to take a job that did not meet those minimum criteria, and were any CEO to engage a similar business opportunity decision similarly, he or she would be rightfully fired. ...