land of jobs. . .

. . . and first Friday of the month employment reports. 

CNSNews reports that over 100 million working-age Americans are not currently working (add those not participating to those without a job but looking for one) while also noting that we broke a record for foreign nationals in the workforce (almost 25 million are employed).

Meanwhile, CNN Money suggests a "family feud" could have exacerbated the net job loss reported in the "food and beverage retail category." 

I've no information as to whether any authors I've just linked to received pay for their posts.

Enjoy the weekend, and the work, if it calls.

jobs

The stock market rallied fiercely the past two days despite a second straight month of mediocre job creation. For the January report, five people left the workforce for every one who gained a job, and the February report suggests a similar pattern, as the number of jobs created fell below expectations even as the unemployment rate was reduced to 6.6%. It's also hard to get a raise these days.

united states of contingency

Beyond academia, contingent employment is in the news, too, and increasingly common among millennials. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Younger workers were four times more likely to have contingent jobs than older workers." (I have no statistics on how the writers of all the hyperlinked article were paid; in commercial publishing there are many examples of writers being paid in "exposure," and not by cold hard direct deposit or any other means.)

worker participation

"The result is that the percentage of working-age Americans with a job or looking for one has dropped to 63.5 percent, a 31-year low."

Maybe it's too easy to blame it all on the Koch Brothers, the "Food Stamp President," Republican blocking and tackling in Congress, technological advancement, global warming, American obesity or generalized sluggishness, alleged worker abuses by apple in China, amazon.com's monopoly on everything, the unusually hot summer, a global earthquake pandemic, or the Wal-Mart in Central, SC raising the price of gallon of milk to $3.87 soon after all "permanent" state employees received a 3 percent raise?

Yes, yahoo, why did unemployment fall?