ARE THE GOOD JOBS REALLY GOING TO COME BACK?

Economists recently announced that the recession ended in November 2001.

The White House insists that the economy is coming back, citing increases in the gross domestic product since 2003's second quarter.

But administration critics claim that the recession in jobs is permanent because too many jobs are being sent overseas to Asia and south to Mexico.

Who is right? Is the economy coming back? Will the so called recovery continue to be jobless?

The answers lie in connecting the dots, in this case September's news reports.

• New York Times: The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.7 million last year and the median household income declined by 1.1 percent. It was the second straight year of adverse changes in both poverty and income, and the first two-year downturn since the early 1990s.

• Associated Press: Total of manufacturing jobs in Indiana nears a 20-year low. Another 14,000 lost jobs would put manufacturing employment at 586,000, a level not seen since July 1983.

• Quad-City Times: Heavy job losses in the manufacturing sector prompted a jump in the poverty rate in Illinois last year, according to government figures released Friday. At the same time family income dropped by nearly 6 percent. Iowa is not as reliant on manufacturing jobs, so its economic hits weren't as hard, economists said. Still, in both states, median family incomes shrunk.

• Knox College News: At the same time that Maytag, Inc. is closing a refrigerator factory in Galesburg (Illinois), the appliance firm is opening a new refrigerator factory in Reynosa, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande River from McAllen, Texas.

• Athens Daily Review: With the cutbacks at Maxxim Medical and the closing of the Athens Champion Homes plant, more than 250 jobs have been lost in Athens (Texas) in the past month (September). Champion had cut its work force by a couple of hundred people in the last two years.

• Indianapolis Star: ArvinMeritor will close its Franklin exhaust plant. Layoffs of all 850 workers will begin, probably in December and continue into next September, as production is moved to ArvinMeritor plants in Columbus, Indiana, and three other states, as well as to Mexico.

• Los Angeles Times: "Levi, an American Icon, to Shut Last Plants in U.S." Levi Strauss & Co. said Thursday that it would close the last of its North American manufacturing plants, laying off almost 2,000 workers. The company said it would shutter two plants in San Antonio by the end of the year, displacing 800 workers there and marking the end of its U.S. manufacturing operations. The venerable company has been shifting its production overseas during the last two decades and today uses about 500 contractors to produce its apparel in 50 countries, including Mexico, China and Bangladesh. Last year, 96% of the apparel purchased in the U.S. was made in other countries.

• Baltimore Sun: Future dimmer for local GM plant. The Baltimore plant, with 1,100 employees, is the only major factory scheduled for closing under the tentative four-year contract agreed to last week by General Motors and the United Auto Workers. A power train plant in Saginaw, Michigan with 378 employees and offices in Detroit, is also in jeopardy during the contract's term, according to the Associated Press.

• New York Times: Shutdowns of knitting, apparel and related businesses in part of Queens that includes Ridgewood, Glendale and Maspeth is accelerating because of foreign competition and hundreds of thousands of square feet of industrial space have been put on the market. There were about 500 factories there 20 years ago, making roughly three out of every four sweaters worn in the U.S., but now there are only about 75 knitting-related factories.

• Indianapolis Star: Chrysler announced this week that the Indianapolis foundry is closing. This is one of the last engine foundries owned by the car companies inn the United States.

• Associated Press: Diana Corp. will close its truck axle plant in Montgomery (Alabama), affecting 105 jobs. The Montgomery plant manager, Dana Desko, said he cannot guarantee replacement jobs in the company for the Alabama workers.

• Atlanta Journal Constitution: Tyson Foods said it will fire as many as 600 workers at its Hope, Arkansas, chicken processing plant.

• Rocky Mountain News: Hundreds of thousands of blue-collar American jobs have left this country over the past 20 years in search of less costly domiciles. The same development is now occurring in traditional white-collar occupations such as telephone call centers, accounting, tax preparation, brokerage industry research, claims adjustment, home loan processing, engineering, product research, architecture, etc.

• Daily Journal, Johnson County (Indiana): For those who have lost well-paying manufacturing jobs, the problem is not an absence of available positions, but rather a shortage of jobs with comparable wages and benefits. Displaced workers with hourly wages in the teens may have to settle for $7 or $8 per hour. Manpower branch manager Tracey Carney said, "I see the pay going down. Now they're going to be looking for entry-level assembly jobs."

• Daily Journal, Johnson County: Manufacturing jobs comprised 11.9% of Johnson County's work force in 2001, but those jobs brought in 19.3 percent of the County's income according to the U. S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The opposite is true of retail jobs, which comprised 17.8 percent of the job market but just 12 percent of the overall earnings.

• Wall Street Journal: The national office market continued to deteriorate in the third quarter, with vacancies continuing to climb and rents falling further.

• Globalization experts: World trade is good because the U.S. is losing lower-skilled jobs, which allows us to create high-skilled, better-paying jobs.

Alas, connecting the dots tells a far different story.We are now exporting good, high-paying middle-class jobs in both the manufacturing and white-collar sectors. These jobs are being replaced with dumbed-down, low-pay jobs in retailing (selling blouses at Wal-Mart), fast food (flipping hamburgers at McDonald's), health care (changing bedpans at the local hospice) and other lowly service jobs.Will the jobs come back? Job losses sent overseas are lost forever. When the textile and shoe industries fled New England in the 1930-1960 period, New England suffered, but total textile and shoe manufacturing jobs increased in the U.S. But today's situation is different. As Kevin Brinegar, president of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, said recently, "It's not just Indiana versus North Carolina or Alabama, but Indiana versus Mexico or Korea or China."

Whose recovery is it?

News stories report that excessive CEO compensation continues and will be increased with the recovery of the stock market. Because CEO compensation is heavily influenced by lowering costs and improving productivity, there is every incentive for business leaders to continue sending jobs to China as fast as they can.