On May 30, 2013, Adolfo Flores writes in the Los Angeles Times:
In the last year, more U.S. small businesses were giving employees the boot rather than hiring, a recent survey found.
The Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index survey reported a net hiring index of -12 in April, down from -9 for the same period the previous year and down from -10 in January. The quarterly analysis surveyed 603 small business owners.
Net hiring has remained at similar levels since January 2011, but is up from the low of -27 reported in January 2010, Dennis Jacobe, Gallup chief economist, said in a statement. The figure is calculated by subtracting the percentage of owners expecting a decrease in jobs from those expecting an increase.
“Small-business owners’ self-reported net hiring over the past 12 months remains anemic,” Jacobe said. “While owners’ net hiring intentions for the next 12 months remain slightly positive, they trail where they were at this time last year.”
While there seems to be a lot of optimism on both Wall Street and Main Street, the confidence hasn’t translated into significant job growth at small businesses, Jacobe said.
“Because small businesses are the key driver of job growth in the U.S. economy, it is hard to see how the recent surge in economic optimism — at least on Main Street — can continue to increase without increased small-business job growth,” Jacobe said.
The track this article pursues is full employment or income through a JOB ONLY. Yet full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
Increasingly the non-human factor––let’s simply it as things such as human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc––is exponentially devaluing labor wages and replacing the need for labor as our products and services are produced without the need for expanded labor input.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor.
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are independent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
For a more in-depth analysis, please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.org/11/economic-justice/
Also see my article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html, and the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.nationofchange.org/solution-america-s-economic-decline-1367588690
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-small-business-hiring-20130530,0,3785111.story
