The Bush Economy: Ouch!

From the New York Times (thanks to Lambert at Corrente for the link):

Layoffs occurred at the second-fastest rate on record during the first three years of the Bush administration, a government report has found.

In the government's latest survey of how frequently workers are permanently dismissed from their jobs, the layoff rate reached 8.7 percent of all adult jobholders, or 11.4 million men and women age 20 or older. That is nearly equal to the 9 percent rate for the 1981-1983 period, which included the steepest contraction in the American economy since the Great Depression.

...While job displacement has gradually increased during the 23 years covered by the surveys, the unemployment rate has trended down. For some labor economists - Mr. Farber and Jared Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute, for example - that makes the rising layoff rate even more striking.

"If you plot the displacement rate in relation to the unemployment rate, it is a staircase going up," Mr. Bernstein said. "You are more likely to be laid off now than in similar levels of unemployment in the past."

...In the latest survey, 56.9 percent of those who said they were re-employed also said they were earning less in their new jobs than in the jobs they had lost. That compared with 46.6 percent from 1991 through 1993, a similar period of recession followed by weak recovery, and 42.2 percent from 1997 through 1999, which were boom years.

The worker displacement survey has been conducted in January or February of each even-numbered year since 1984. The members of 60,000 households, a cross section of the population, are asked if they lost a job at any time in the previous three years because a factory or company closed, there was insufficient work or the position they occupied was abolished. A "yes" answer meant the job was permanently gone, without prospect of recall.