Workforce Developments

Required reading

Transitional Jobs: Background, Program Models, and Evaluation Evidence
Dan Bloom
MDRC
February 2010

The budget for the U.S. Department of Labor for Fiscal Year 2010 includes a total of $45 million to support and study transitional jobs. This paper describes the origins of the transitional jobs models that are operating today, reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach and other subsidized employment models, and offers some suggestions regarding the next steps for program design and research. The paper was produced for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by MDRC as part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ project, which includes two random assignment evaluations of transitional jobs programs.

The United Regions of America
Stephen C. Fehr
Stateline
April 22, 2010 

The Obama administration wants to change the way politicians fight for jobs by encouraging regions - instead of individual states and cities - to compete for economic development projects.

Accomplishing this sea change in economic thinking will be difficult. The current system of states and cities battling for companies, often outbidding each other with ever-higher tax breaks, is pretty ingrained. President Obama's hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee, former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, was one of the best practitioners; Virginia topped Forbes magazine's "best states for business" every year of his term. 

Want to recommend some required reading to your colleagues? Add a link below or drop me a line.

Tracking layoffs in higher education

It's been heartbreaking to watch how higher education has been decimated during the Great Recession. The budgets of many colleges and universities had already been cut to the bone during the good times, especially teaching schools and community colleges that don't attract a lot of public or private research dollars.

Here in the US, education and training has served as a pathway to the middle class for people from all walks of life. It's part of what makes us unique - no matter what your parents and grandparents did for a living, you can get an education and within a generation make an enormous leap in economic status.  

It's stunningly short-sighted and bad public policy to try to solve our economic problems by laying off teachers, overloading classes and cutting budgets for books and computers. Don't worry, the wealthy and advantaged will still be able to buy an education to maintain their status. It's everyone else who will lose the opportunity. Perhaps worse, we could end up with a system where the elites get classes with live instructors while those who can't pay as much get online-only classes taught from India or China.

Think that isn't possible? Some professors have already outsourced grading to Asia. 

To track layoffs and other cuts, the Chronicle of Higher Education has launched the Campus Cuts blog. Search for your favorite educational institution on the site. They cover everything from major research institutions to teaching schools to community colleges.

This is just one of many online resources to track Great Recession layoffs, like this one for cutbacks in the news industry. This amazing map tracks the progression of net job gains and losses in major metro since 2004.  

If you don't like what you see, the time to speak up for education is now.

Pre-school graduation photo by Gideon Tsang.

Buy local, bank local

Is it time to move your money?

The folks who brought us The Huffington Post and the 2005 version of Why We Fight think it is. And I think they're onto something.

Is the money in your checking and savings accounts being used by big banks to underwrite risky behavior on Wall Street? Or is it staying in your local community being loaned to homeowners and small businesses? If you care about how your money is being used, then you should check out the MoveYourMoney site. They explain not only why it's important to put your money in an institution that shares your values, but they'll help you find safe, stable community banks in your area where you can move your money.

This is just another way to use your money as your own, personal local stimulus package.

To help you get started, check out this short video from MoveYourMoney. And let me know what you think!

How to turn your holiday gift buying into a local stimulus package

If you're like most Americans, you're going to spend less this holiday season than you did last year. What's more, you're probably planning to pay cash. 

As bad as this sounds, spending less creates an opportunity to rethink what the holidays mean to us, to think carefully about the gifts we give and the workforce that makes and sells them.

You can think of the money you're planning to spend this season as your own personal stimulus package. Just like the Obama administration set priorities on what kinds of work they wanted federal stimulus money to support, you can do the same thing to support workers in your own city.

Is there a small business in your neighborhood you want to make sure stays in business? Like a favorite coffee shop, bike shop or hardware store? Then buy something from that store to give as a gift. 

Is there a local nonprofit doing good work that you want to make sure survives the recession? A women's shelter, food bank, arts organization or library? Maybe this is the year to make a donation in Uncle Bob's name rather than giving him another tie he'll never wear. 

Buy foodstuffs from a local farmer at the farmer's market, or a book from an independent press at a locally-owned bookstore. Buy a t-shirt advertising your favorite local restaurant, a toy produced from recycled materials at a factory powered by solar energy.

The point is this: decide what's important to you, what you want to make sure stays around, and spend your little holiday stimulus package on it.

And maybe this Friday, rather than joining the mayhem, you'll stay away from the stores and spend your time with family and friends.

Don't get me wrong - the causes of this crisis are truly terrible: layoffs, reduced work hours, hiring freezes, furloughs, pay cuts and economic fear. But the truth is, small businesses and nonprofits are hurting too. At the local level, your choices can make a real difference. Spend your holiday gift budget with them and your gift will go twice as far. Once to the recipient of the gift, and once to the place where you bought it.

You just might be the difference that keeps their doors open and keep someone in a job just a little longer.

A final post from the Washington conference

Talk about timing. On the first day of the Washington State Workforce and Economic Development Conference Boeing shunned its long-time home in Seattle to announce it would expand production of its 787 in South Carolina. The next morning, Jeff Finkle of the International Economic Development Council tried to put a positive spin on it - at least there's still some manufacturing taking place in the U.S. I don't think a lot of people in Spokane were buying it.

Finkle also said he didn't think Congress ultimately will pass bills creating tax credits for job creation to address the economic downturn. The administration, he said, is more focused right now on not digging the deficit hole any deeper.

Linda Lawson of the National Governors Association offered a different view. She said she's been in meetings at the Treasury and at the White House domestic policy office where the possibility of large WPA-style public works projects to get Americans back to work have been discussed.

In case you're keeping count, I've been advocating this since early 2007 when the problems of unemployment, underemployment and wages not keeping up with the cost of living were already clear. My new New Deal would include investments in putting people back rebuilding our education and health care systems, alongside investments in physical infrastructure. Data and analysis from Washington's own chief economist suggests that jobs are the key to the economic recovery, so I hope Finkle has it wrong.

Later in the day I went to a workshop on jobs in the health sector where I learned 

• Medical technology is creating new jobs, but it's also making others like medical record clerk obsolete
• Health care careers aren't for everyone - don't encourage people to go into health care just because that's where the jobs are right now 
• Washington state has done an exemplary job of creating articulation agreements allowing people to work up nursing career ladder from licensed practical nurse to associates degree in nursing to bachelor's degree and beyond

My big takeaways on ARRA from Heather Moss in Governor Gregoire's office:

• Efforts to stabilize the economy are either building the plane as we fly it, or trying to put a pig through a python, depending on who you ask
• The 2011-13 state budget is looking pretty dismal  (surprise!)
• Wisconsin and Alaska are doing a notably good job of tracking ARRA grant opportunities on their state recovery act websites - a good resource for everyone nationally

Finally, I have to give a big personal shout-out to David Harrison, who was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Workforce and Economic Best Practices. Well deserved!

And, as the Washington Secretary of Health Mary Selecky reminded us in the closing ceremony: If you get sick, stay home!

The recovery depends on consumer spending

That's according to Dr. Arun Raha, Washington state's Chief Economist.

Having heard him speak, I have to agree Dr. Raha is a bit of an unexpected rock star. He put a whole lot of scary charts and graphs up on giant screens around the ballroom as we ate, but nobody lost their lunch. What's more, his agency has one of the most retro-cool websites I've seen in a long time: Washington State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council.

If you remember when all of the World Wide Web looked like that, raise your hand.

 

Couple of big-ticket items I took away from Dr. Raha's talk:

• It's almost certain that the recession ended in August, but employment, consumer spending and government revenue collection are all still fragile and will lag behind.
• Unemployment will continue to rise until some time in spring.
• In Washington, government revenues from taxes will improve in 2011 but they won't return to 2008 levels until 2012. 
• The global economy is in recovery because of more than 700 stimulus packages passed by governments around the world - the policy response to the Great Recession is working.
• Real recovery from the recession in the US depends on consumer spending. If consumers don't pick up their spending soon, we're likely to see another economic downturn.

That last item is hugely important for those of us in workforce development. Consumers can't spend money they don't have, and if they don't have jobs, they won't have money. Which means that jobs are central to making sure the recovery continues. 

Those of us in workforce development know this, and we know what it takes to prepare workers for good jobs. We know where the skills gaps are. We've built excellent training partnerships to prepare people in our communities to meet industry labor needs. We also know where some of the challenges are - whether it's hiring, retention or promotion practices, or the places where the training and education pipeline gets clogged up.

We need to get out there with this message. The recovery requires investment in jobs and job training. It may require government investment in job creation. Perhaps it requires businesses to take job hiring risks. Those investments will pay off with a faster recovery for all.

Creativity and the arts: vital for economic development

Great session on Arts, Culture and Creativity as Strategies for Economic Development and Community Vitality.

How does a city develop? Lanie McMullin explained it starts with a city just being feasible - can it survive as a city. Once it's well established, then city leaders start to invest in making it more livable. Not so many cities get to the next stage: making the city memorable. She gave several great examples of how cities like Chattanooga, TN, and Louisville, KY, have used culture and the arts to develop along that continuum and grow their economy.

She also talked about how in the past, workers moved to where they jobs were, but today, employers of knowledge workers have to move to where the workers are. When Nike took over Adidas's market share, she explained, Adidas went after Nike's designer workforce. Come work for us!, they said. Move to New Jersey? No way! the workers answered. So Adidas up and moved to Portland where they could hire away their workforce.

Brenda Nienhouse of the beautiful Fox Theater in Spokane told the story of how a theater that was almost destroyed to make room for a parking lot (really? in downtown Spokane?) was saved, and how the restoration created jobs and is helping revitalize the downtown core. Local craftspeople were hired for the renovation, new hotels and restaurants have opened, and they're attracting better musicians to the local symphony. I have to say, downtown Spokane is very walkable, and all those old red brick buildings are lovely. Plus great coffeeshops.

We also learned all about the Creative Vitality Index created by the Washington State Arts Commission, explained by Kris Tucker. This index doesn't just add up all the donations and spending on nonprofit arts and use some multiplier to calculate impact on the local community. This index seeks to calculate the full creative vitality of a local community, including individual artists, arts organizations and arts businesses. They're using data from Employment Security, the Urban Institute and Claritas to do their magic.

One of the things I really like about the CVI is that it emphasizes the local. Buy from a local supplier, hire a local artist, and your CVI goes up. Buying a book from a local bookstore like Auntie's in Spokane and the Washington CVI goes up more than if you bought the same book from Amazon, even though the giant online seller is located in Washington state.

I can't do the CVI justice in this space - check it out yourself to see how it works, and how it might work in your community.

Workforce and economic development in Washington State

Day one of the conference was great. It started with a keynote address from Eric Liu, former staff for President Bill Clinton and founder of the Guiding Lights Network. He talked about the power of imagination and innovation and what that can do in workforce and economic development. Couple of highlights from his talk (paraphrased as accurately as I could): 

Instant innovation isn't possible. It's like expecting apples to appear when you haven't planted any seeds. 

Expert knowledge can be an enemy of innovation. Thinking you know it all stifles imagination.

The one thing in our workforce and economy that cannot be outsourced is our capacity for imagination.

As I captured some of Liu's best lines on my twitter feed, I found a couple of other people in the room were tweeting him too - Barb Chamberlain and Yvonne Thomas.

Later in the day I went to sessions about using the arts for economic development (lesson: treat your artists as a workforce, not a tool) and how to get economic and workforce development stories into the media (things aren't looking so good there). We heard from the state's chief economist Dr. Arun Raha over lunch (recession is over, but will we survive the recovery?). More on those talks and today's events later.

If you were at the conference and learned something you'd like to share, add your comments below.

See you in Spokane!

I'm headed to Spokane, WA, this week for the Washington State Workforce and Economic Development 2009 Conference. If you're at the conference, stop by and say hello. I'll be doing a workshop on Social Networking and other Web 2.0 Tools on Wednesday afternoon at 3:15 p.m. Click for the full schedule.

If you can't make the conference, I'll be blogging and tweeting periodically to let you know what I'm learning. And I'll post my powerpoint presentation as a slideshow later in the week.

Transportation to work: social media links

These are some links related to the talk I gave this morning at the Community Transportation Association of America's Joblinks conference:

Twitter transit

• New Jersey Transit
• Seattle's Sound Transit
• Chicago Transit Authority (unofficial)

Getting started on Google maps

Transportation-related online video

• How to ride a bus
• How to ride the bus
• How to load your bike on the bus
• How to load a bike on a bus
• How to rideshare 
• How transit agencies are using social media

Links to rideshare social media sites.

For more, check out this graphic summary of my talk, or check out my tweets of the conference at twitter.com/workforcedev. 

Social media, workforce development and transportation

They have graphic recorder Jim Nuttle doing his magic at the Community Transportation Association of America conference. Here's what I talked about this morning:

Thinking outside the bus

Tomorrow morning I'll be giving a talk on workforce trends and social media at the Joblinks Employment Transportation conference in Des Moines, hosted by the Community Transportation Association of America.

I'm twittering the conference right now. Interesting stuff. 

The number one thing I've learned today is that transit agencies provide a lot of services that involve partnerships with businesses, social service agencies, universities and other organizations. And they offer a lot more than fixed bus routes: carpools, vanpools, employer shuttles, paratransit, rideshare assistance and even services to help people find a buddy to bike to work with.

If your local workforce board, One-Stop or workforce development nonprofit hasn't connected with your local transit agency, I definitely recommend making a call and getting to know them. Who knows what kinds of partnerships might be possible? It might take a while to get everyone to work together, but it will never happen if no one makes the first call.

Click to learn more about the conference.

Can our economy recover without a real jobs creation program?

Two and a half years later, the pundits might be starting to catch up with your humble blogger.

This week, Time magazine explores the possibility of creating a WPA-type jobs program to put people back to work. The WPA - the Works Progress Administration - was a New Deal program that employed 8.5 million people at a cost of $11 billion. It put people back to work, put food on the table and kept people in their homes during the Great Depression.

But wait, you say. Unemployment was really, really high back during the Depression, on the order of 25%. Well, unemployment in Imperial County here in California is above 27% already. If you include all the people who have given up looking for work or who are working part-time when they want to work full time, rates in many states like Michigan and Oregon are above 20%.

Back in April 2007 I wrote a post on this blog titled It's time for a new New Deal. The jobs problem was already clear back then to many of us in workforce development. It took an almost complete economic collapse for the rest of the country to experience what had been happening in low income and disadvantaged communities. For the middle class to find out they can't leverage their future on cheap credit forever.

I argued then - and still do today - we need a jobs program that focuses on the industries where we have the greatest need to rebuild. Health care and education are both fraying at the edges, so they're at the top of my list. The Obama administration has made green jobs hip and sexy, so let's have them too. Jobs rebuilding the infrastructure that is crumbling beneath our feet as a result of disinvestment have to be a priority.

Even the narrow minded taxes-are-always-bad crusaders are starting to argue that we can't rebuild our economy without investing in jobs. They're wrong when they argue that tax cuts will magically create jobs, but they're right that creating jobs and preparing workers for those jobs is absolutely necessary.

Way back in November when the president-elect's team started talking about a stimulus plan, I was optimistic their investments would create the jobs we need to recover.

They haven't done that yet, but there's still time for lawmakers to reconsider whether it makes more sense to pay the the salaries of Wall Street executives or the wages of the people who teach our children, care for us when we are ill, and build the roads we drive every day.

Social media and workforce development: Will welders tweet?

With the recent events in Iran, the tipping point for Twitter as social innovation has happened. Most likely if there is a successful change of power in Iran, it will likely be known as the Twitter revolution. Throughout the world there is a new awareness of how people use social media to transform everything, from knitting to the US Army. In June, Army officials ordered U.S. bases to stop blocking soldiers' access to some of the most popular social-networking sites.

As reported on Wired.com, the order states: "The intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to 'tell the Army story' and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information, the social-media sites available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all campus area networks."

As I watch the adoption of social media by various government agencies I think: Why not workforce development?

This is the question I am posing to my community as we tangle with the enormous challenge American workers face in our rapidly shifting and unpredictable economy. Here in Tucson, despite the downturn, some employers are still having trouble recruiting key high tech workers because of skills gaps. We're creating the WIRED Innovation Frontier Arizona (IFA) regional knowledge exchange in response. This is an innovation collaboration platform intended to transform workforce education and training programs and enable them to be nimble enough to keep pace with employer needs.

The IFA regional knowledge exchange builds on the development of entrepreneurial collaboration platforms for WIRED regions in Mid-Michigan and Southeast Michigan where CSW  and WIRED partners have created WeToo, a feature rich social networking site that supports the regional WIRED goals and objectives.

The Arizona office of the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) has entered into a partnership with the University of Arizona's Eller College MIS program to create the regional knowledge exchange. The WeToo Research and Development Lab has been established to support workforce development strategies for four counties in southern Arizona. Eller MIS students are working together with CSW, academic faculty, government agencies and private sector partners across the region to launch the new online collaboration platform later this summer.

The new WeToo platform will support innovative workforce education and training initiatives across industry sectors. This is the first time the academic institutions, One Stops, economic development professionals and employers in the different communities have worked together to create joint workforce development programs. It includes a rural entrepreneurial education program that will transform the lives of many young people in our area who previously didn't have access, to one of the best entrepreneurial programs in the country at the University of Arizona. The WeToo regional knowledge exchange will support WIRED objectives to facilitate project collaboration, sharing and archiving information, creating virtual work spaces, and assist partners in attaining benchmark goals.

As we work together in creating the knowledge exchange we're confronted with concerns about community adoption of the platform and users adapting to new work methods - issues confronting the workforce as a whole. Once again the way work is done is being transformed by technology, but it is happening with such rapidity that the time honored necessity of keeping one's skills up to date is virtually impossible for the majority of workers. Not to mention those of us who do our best to learn the utility of all of the proliferating apps we download to our desktops or into our BlackBerrys, iPhones and Google phones each week.

Our task is to help workforce development professionals use technology to address this vexing problem of skills shortages in a time of high unemployment, as reported in the New York Times "Despite Recesssion High Demand For Skilled Labor."

Will welders tweet? It seems unlikely, but social media is helping everyone be more nimble in responding to the workforce development challenges at the end of the naughties. This is something workforce development professionals should be paying attention to.

We tweet: @lewishumphreys / @wetoo

Contributor Lewis Humphreys leads the Corporation For A Skilled Workforce's community transformation initiatives in the Southwestern U.S.

Four day / 40-hour work week is popular, has unexpected benefits

When gas hit four dollars a gallon around the country in the first half of 2008, private and public employers began experimenting with ways to cut costs for themselves and their employees. Travel was replaced by web meetings. GPS units were installed to help drivers find the most efficient route with the fewest left turns.

And for many, the forty hour work week was squeezed into four days. This change is turning out to be popular with employees and has unexpected benefits as well.

Employers are saving money as they expected, as are workers who commute twenty percent less than they used to. The reduction in driving and air conditioning is reducing pollution too. The state of Utah estimates they'll reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6,000 metric tons annually due to Friday shutdowns.

What's more, Utah employees with the extra day off are using their free time to volunteer more.

Turns out, less is more. With all these benefits, the four day / forty hour work week just might be here to stay.

For more ideas on how to green your workplace, check out these links from Earth911, Low Impact Living, Planet Green and Scientific American.

Photo by Corbis Images

Speak now or forever hold your peace: NAICS codes revisions

If you're like me and your heart goes pitter-patter when you hear someone say "NAICS codes," keep reading.

If you're in workforce or economic development and you don't know what NAICS (rhymes with "snakes") stands for, take a moment to find out now.

It's the North American Industry Classification System, and it's what the feds use to classify all businesses in the country. Using those classifications, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, your state labor market information agency and others calculate how many of what kinds of businesses are in your neighborhood.

By extension, that data is used in workforce development to figure out what jobs in what industries are in high demand nationally, by state and at the local level. You can connect up this data with Standard Occupational Codes (SOC) data to develop career ladders and other useful tools (click here to learn how). This information is very useful for deciding what kinds of advice to give job seekers and what kinds of job training programs to invest in.

If you've been around the system for a while, you may remember the old Standard Industrial Classification (SIC codes) system. NAICS replaced that in 1997.

Like any data, NAICS is only as useful as the codes are accurate. As the economy and businesses change, they need to be updated periodically, which is about to happen again. Your chance for input into the process is going on right now.

The federal Office of Management and Budget's Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC) is open for public input. This won't be a wholesale reopening of the NAICS system; they specifically are seeking comments in the following areas:

• The advisability and desirability of reducing national industry detail in the manufacturing sector;
• Proposals for new and emerging industries;
• Classification of distribution centers, logistics service providers, and sales offices of publishers; and
• Suggestions to clarify the classification of establishments that outsource manufacturing transformation activities and provide manufacturing services in the market given the increasing specialization and globalization of business activities in the economy.

If you have an opinion, jump right in, although you have some time to craft just the right comment. You're encouraged to send in both a hard copy and an email or fax version. Deadline to file comments is April 7.

Photo by Marek Szczepanek

Obama pledges 2.5 million new jobs by January 2011

Vowing that "we must do more to put people back to work and get our economy moving again," President-elect Barack Obama this morning connected the dots between jobs and an economic recovery.

The YouTube president announced in his weekly address that he has directed his economic team to develop an Economic Recovery Plan to jump start job creation and create 2.5 million more jobs by January 2011. They'll do it by investing in rebuilding infrastructure including roads and schools, and investing in green technology.

The one thing he left out that I'd like to see in his jobs agenda is rebuilding health care infrastructure.

"These aren't just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate crisis, these are long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long," Obama said.

Watch the video:

If you can't see the video, click here to watch, or read the transcript here.

The root causes behind the root causes of the economic meltdown

It's been interesting to watch policymakers and the media jump on the economic crisis bandwagon since summer. Some of the cleverer ones caught on early in the year, when the subprime mortgage meltdown began to gather speed and unemployment numbers started edging up.

Those of us in workforce development and other human services have seen it coming for a long time.

Round about the time of the $700B bailout there was a lot of talk about "root causes" of the current economic crisis. Some blame the creation of mortgage-backed securities that de-linked lenders from borrowers and created something of a moral hazard. Others blame the explosion of sub-prime mortgages, where mortgage brokers and borrowers played a wink-wink, nudge-nudge game of pretending they didn't know the loans could never be repaid. Still others blame greed, pure and simple, on the part of both lenders and borrowers.

In addition to mortgages, there's all the other debt Americans have taken on. You can see it in the chart on the right (click here for a better view). Debt payments as a percent of disposable personal income has soared. Bankruptcy filings exploded in 2005. Prodded by lenders, Congress passed a law making it much harder to declare bankruptcy. Filings fell, but two years later they'd grown again to a level higher than they were in 1990. 

Yes, Americans took on more debt than they could repay. But why?

Answering that question gets us to the real root cause of the problem: in recent years, wages haven't kept up with the cost of living. Americans have been living fairly well, but it isn't because we're earning enough, it's because we've been borrowing. Sure, plenty of that has been spent on things we didn't need. But increasingly, consumers have taken on more debt to pay for things like health care, a college education and even to put food on the table.

Then there's that crazy housing bubble. Anyone who tried to buy a house in any urban or suburban market - and even some rural markets - since 2004 knew something was really out of whack. People earning middle-class incomes couldn't afford what was for sale in middle class neighborhoods.

The availability of easy credit didn't solve any problems, it hid them. As credit has dried up, they've come to light.

If anyone - Congress, President-elect Obama, state or local governments, or even Goldman Sachs - is going to solve the real problem, then they need to get at the real root of it: Jobs and wages have to keep pace with the cost of living. The so-called "real economy" needs balance, and it needs real money, not just credit. At minimum, that will require government intervention in the form of supports for working people and regulation of markets. 

You read it here first. I've been calling for a new New Deal that invests in both infrastructure and our service economy on this blog since way back in April 2007. Today, elected officials and Wall Street analysts are saying much the same thing.

Chart source: American Bankruptcy Institute

Economic stimulus and unemployment extension: before or after the inauguration?

It's starting to look like just a matter of time before a new economic stimulus package is passed by Congress. Odds are likely it will include another extension of unemployment benefits.

At his first post-election press conference last Friday, President-Elect Barack Obama specifically called for the extension, along with investment in infrastructure projects that would create jobs.

Even Wall Street analysts are in the tank. Merrill Lynch's Richard Bernstein wrote more than a month ago that

"The government can come up with any number of refinancing and liquidity plans, but households are likely to increasingly default on mortgages and other debts if cash flow is not stabilized via employment."

Get this: Bernstein says that our current recession, unlike others, is based in "the real economy." As opposed to the one being taken care of by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson?

Check out my post from yesterday for ideas for how the health care system can be used as part of our economic recovery. That's definitely part of the real economy.

Today's mass layoffs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show deepening unemployment. The number of Americans on unemployment is at a stunning 25-year high. Click here for the article, including a photo of the Verdugo One-Stop Jobs Center!

Health care as a foundation for the jobs recovery

Last week's unemployment numbers included one upbeat fact worth noting. Overall, our national unemployment may be at a 14-year high of 6.5 percent, and September's figures may be worse than originally calculated.

But in the same month, health services added some 26,000 new jobs.

That's more than ten percent of the 240,000 jobs lost. Not an insignificant number.

The system by which Americans get their health care is in tatters. That's not just health insurance, but physical infrastructure too. It's also the serious shortage of health workers in the US and internationally. Many rural communities are without much-needed specialists, or without any health providers at all. Urban areas are also losing hospitals and clinics. Last year's controversy over substandard conditions for veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is just a symptom of the larger problem.

The continued hiring of health workers suggests this might be a smart place to invest stimulus money. Let's put more money into training health workers and building health care infrastructure - hospitals and clinics. Let's distribute those facilities and workers to the areas where need is greatest. Last week, Dean Baker at CEPR also explained how government investment in health care insurance could serve as a powerful stimulus to the economy.

So many people are cutting back on medications or holding off on trips to the doctor. I suspect this is an area with significant pent-up demand. If we build it, the customers will come, and money will flow.

Hospital photo by Norbert Kaiser