There's no good way to give bad news

The piddling, puny, pitiful, pathetic, piss-poor job growth - if you can even call it growth - of 21,000 in February wasn't as bad as it sounded.

It was worse.

First, consider that the average prediction among economists was for about 125,000 new jobs - six times the actual figure. It was the fourth month in a row that even conservative predictions had proved too rosy. Oh, and January's figures got revised downward at the same time. (And even 125,000 new jobs would have been below the roughly 150,000 required to keep pace with population growth.)

But beyond even that, by almost any measure the jobs picture is bleak, CNN/Money reports. The facts are cold:

Since the start of the last recession in March 2001, the nation has lost 2.35 million jobs - 700,000 of them since the recession ended that November. It's the longest stretch of labor market weakness since the Labor Department started keeping track in 1939.

Unemployment held steady at 5.6%, but that was only because the labor force dropped by nearly 400,000. The official number of "discouraged workers," who have simply given up trying to find jobs, stands at 484,000.

The labor force participation rate of 65.9% is the lowest in 16 years; the average duration of unemployment is 20.3 weeks, the highest in 20 years; the percent who've been unemployed 27 weeks or longer (meaning, in many cases, having exhausted their unemployment benefits) is 22.9, which is almost the highest in 21 years.

Manufacturing employment, traditionally high-wage work than the service sector, lost 3,000 jobs, the 43rd straight month of falling factory payrolls.

The sector has lost 3.3 million jobs since early 1998, and many of those jobs are never coming back, having been moved overseas or made obsolete by technological improvements.

And despite productivity growth, which we were told over and over by the corporate flacks was the engine of wage growth, average hourly wages have grown just 1.6 percent in the past year, the slowest growth since 1986.

According to Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo, "the economic recovery is almost three years old, and the economy should be producing 200,000 to 300,000 jobs per month." So why isn't it? After all,

[b]y almost every measure, the economy has been expanding at a healthy pace for six months [says the March 6 New York Times]. But the nation's employers remain stubbornly reluctant to add jobs in the United States.

Outsourcing abroad, particularly the shifting of work to China and India, so much in the news, is one reason hiring at home has been sparse. Another is rising productivity, squeezing more work from existing staff and other efficiencies.

But these are only two aspects of a much broader syndrome that might be described as just-in-time hiring. Instead of optimistically adding workers in anticipation of demand, as in the past, the new mind-set is to hold off until the demand for a company's product or service is so great that an employer has no choice but to hire, and then add as few people as possible.

In search of profit maximization, employers are reducing inventory-to-sales ratios and moving toward just-in-time production of goods and even services. Instead of having skilled staff to manufacture products or provide services, they will have a small core of such people surrounded by rings of less-skilled, lower-paid, often-temporary workers who can be taken up or let go as market conditions indicate.

In short, we are even more than we were just disposable - and increasingly interchangeable - parts.

So what happens now?

"What we are looking at now is a more extreme version of the early 1990's, when we also experienced a jobless recovery but not as severe as this one," said Edward McKelvey, a senior economist at Goldman, Sachs. "We have no way of knowing when hiring will pick up; we don't have models for what is happening now."

Oh, well, in that case it's obvious what we have to do: Cut taxes on corporations and the rich. Isn't that what we always have to do?