Data can be funny. Especially when politicians get their hands on it. Or media outlets with an agenda – which would be all media, including this one.

The past few months have been particularly funny in how unemployment reporting gets covered.  So let’s be clear. We are still losing jobs. Maybe not me or you, but our economy as a whole, that includes our communities, our friends, neighbors, brothers-in-law, etc., continue to suffer a net loss of millions of jobs.

But once you put on rose-colored glasses, the fact that we are losing fewer jobs is a sign that happy days are here again. According to the December 31 Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, 8,088 fewer initial unemployment claims were filed – great news! Add that to the fact that the Dow Jones finished thousands of points up since the beginning of the year, and we can be hopeful again, right?

Maybe not if you consider the other piece of data in the DOL report: there were still 557,155 people who filed initial claims in the week ending December 26. Sure that’s better than the 717,000 initial claims filed at this time last year, but tell that to the 557,155 people without work, or the 452,000 who filed for unemployment the week of December 19th, or the roughly 500,000 people on average who have filed for unemployment over the past fourteen months.

The reality remains that for the super majority of Americans who are workers, there are fewer and fewer jobs to compete for, some seven million if you are conservative, upwards of 18 million if you count those who stopped looking for work or have taken part time work as a paltry substitute.

Although the trends show we are losing jobs at a slower pace nationally, other data from last week’s unemployment insurance claims report showed that the number of claims filed actually increased by 2,820 in Iowa, due to continued layoffs in the construction and manufacturing industries. Economists will tell you not to worry, though – jobs creation always lags behind economic recovery – and we in the hinder lands recover at a slower pace than those on the coasts. Cheer up – recovery will eventually reach you.

Now, I said we should be clear, so I must recognize trends, and we have been losing fewer and fewer jobs for a month or so now, give or take a few exceptions, and that’s supposed to make us all feel better. But no matter how I try I can’t make myself feel better about the jobless recovery because I think from a worker’s point of view, rather than an economist. Behind the data that gets crunched and stretched, and from which all sorts of “indicators” are interpreted, are millions of families who have to make do with much less.

So, let’s look at other trends. In addition to the slowing of job losses, the DOW Jones Average has recovered half of its losses, up from 8,776 to, 10,428.5 from December 31, 2008 to December 31, 2009. Banks have also had a stellar year of record profits – Goldman Sachs alone reported more than eight billion dollars in profits just for the first three quarters of 2009. Such data has not been lost on our investment community. One can almost hear the champagne bottles pop in the business press:

 “Earlier Thursday, U.S. stock futures pared slight gains after the Labor Department reported that weekly jobless claims fell to their lowest level in 18 months, confirming investors' general expectations that the labor market is improving.” (WSJ Market Watch)

“Stocks were poised to open the final trading session of 2009 with modest gains after a report on initial jobless claims came in better than expected, giving investors even more reason to celebrate a year of solid market advances.” (CNNMoney.com)

New York Times cut to the chase: “This was the year that Wall Street turned a crash into a bang.”

The main reason that I find these headlines so disturbing is that the vast majority of Americans (of all people for that matter) are not of the investment class. Upticks in the Dow will not pay our gas bills. We work for a living, and depend on the availability of jobs to survive. We cannot eat and pay rent based on the promise of jobs to come in the not-too-distant future. The banks that hold our mortgages do not give us breaks on “expectations that the labor market is improving.”

What that data shows me is that money is being made, but it’s a consolidation of wealth that benefits investors over workers. An interesting report by the Economic Policy Institute illustrates this fact well. As companies laid off workers throughout 2009, their profits and stock portfolios went up: 

    * IBM cut 10,000 jobs, 2009 profits grew by 18% to $12.3 billion. It’s stock is up almost 50% from start of year
    * Aetna cut 1,240 positions, earned $1.38 billion profit
    * Danaher Corporation cut 3,300 jobs, earned $1.3 billion profit and its stock soared 30%
    * Verizon cut 8,000 jobs, and its profits jumped 14% to $6.4 billion
    * Monsanto cut 900 jobs and profits doubled in two years to more than $2.1 billion for 2009

For the above-cited companies, the increase in stock value over the past year correlated with decreases in jobs. Is it just me, or does it seem anachronistic that such trends will somehow improve the labor market?

The truth is, our economy remains in serious trouble. Looking at longer trends, our economy hasn’t had any net job creation for the past ten years. This is not only a reversal of sixty years of trends, it’s a monstrous tide change. Since 1940, job growth has i
ncreased by at least 20% per decade.

Median income for the American middle class has also nosedived, but for the poor, the situation is always worse. At this point 36.5 million people are receiving supplemental nutrition benefits (formerly known as food stamps) from the government – that’s 11.9% of the population or equal to the entire state of California . That number is up from 6.7% a decade ago. Altogether 17 million households or 14.6% are classified as food insecure, meaning they had difficulty at some point in the past year with putting food on the table. This percent is the highest ever recorded.

 As a consequence of stagnant job growth, American have relied more and more on debt which rose 117% in the past decade. Since debt accumulates interest, its increase compounded with no job growth resulted in losses in the net worth of Americans – the total value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts.

All of this is well-reported in a surprising article published in the Washinton Post on 01-02-2010 
But they end the article by joining the rest of the chorus of La Vie en Rose: “The financial crisis is, for all practical purposes, over, and forecasters are now generally expecting the job market to turn around early in 2010 and begin creating jobs.”

Watch for the Department of Labor’s January 8 unemployment rate report. But be sure to cull through a variety of sources to see past the politicians' and pundits' enthusiasm for our recovery.

As Howard Zinn has said, when the Dow spikes again, ask the waitress who served you breakfast how her stocks performed. Ask your children’s teachers to what exotic destination they will go to spend their outstanding dividends. When you pick up groceries, try to gauge how excited the clerks are about the remarkable profits on Wall Street. If all you get from them is a WTF expression, don’t be surprised.

Tracy Kurowski writes a labor update every Monday on Blog for Iowa