Labor-less Day

I suppose that the numbers do have some relative value as long as whatever perverted method is used remains constant over time. By the way, if you work on a farm you don't count because your work is seasonal, meaning you are used to being unemployed. Since fewer and fewer people work on farms than there were when the government started tracking the data, I wonder how significant it is now?

Instead of removing farm labor from the data, what would happen if government jobs were removed? After all, what is the unemployment rate in any of our thousands of city bureaucracies, 50 state legislatures or in congress? How many people have been discharged from any government agencies, or the post office, public utilities or public works? To be clear, a job is a job, and when anyone loses one it is unfortunate; but these jobs are much more stable than jobs in the private sector. This information would portray things very differently with higher rates.

The employment data varies by industry and geographic location, but the figures are higher than I have ever seen in California. While the national figures approach 10% ours is around 12+%. In architecture, engineering and construction I believe it exceeds 40%.

My practice is down that much. Another firm I have been working with over the past year reduced its staff from 100 to 60 to 40. Then they cut the pay of those 40 by 10% and reduced their hours by 10% too. But it did not stop there. Among the remaining staff they soon after cut back half to 32 hours and half to 24 hours per week. Most of my engineering consultants have reduced their staff by 50% over the last year.

A year ago a friend with a well established construction firm had a 120 employees; today it is at 16, a very common scenario. Government has no money to spend, and in the private sector new construction is almost non-existent. It makes no sense to build anything if you can buy existing properties at half the cost or less.

My contractor friend and I have penciled out several projects we would build at break-even in this market, just to keep our staff busy, but it was going to cost 2.5 times that of buying something so we gave up the futile exercise for now.

Given what I know about vacancy rates and the hundreds of billions of dollars in loans set to rollover in the coming 36 months, the recovery will be very slow and things will get worse. Telling folks that 40% unemployment, or worse is not the bottom is very tough.

In this difficult environment how should we position our businesses and what stocks might benefit from this outlook? That is the subject of my next post. The areas I will be focusing on involve infrastructure, renovation and rehabilitation.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture and planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money.