July job numbers are in*. Are you ready for them? Are you sure? You better think about it for a sec. OK. You asked for it:

Nonfarm payrolls dropped 216,000. (Booooo!) That's not too bad considering the 276,000 last month (meh...) and the 700,000 earlier this year (hooray?). We've lost 7.4 million jobs since the beginning of the recession in December (Super Boooo!) ... and we now have the highest unemployment rate since June of '83 (...).

Nobody seems to think this is very good news. In August analysts seemed to be pretty happy with the job loss rate, but the massive unemployment figure (9.7%) and the drop in the stock market the past few days is worrying some people.

Coupled with the massive surge in stock market profit-taking income among the wealthy over the last eight months, this country is being more, not less, divided into rich and poor during this "oh it's almost over yeah right" bullshit recession. I hate to get all Worker's Weekly on you, but this is disastrous, and I am not sure we will ever recover without, you know, pitchforks and torches and the seizing of the property of the entrenched inbred rich.

Workers of the world ... incite? Sorry. Puns are a bad habit.

Anyway, usually I try to say be alright and have a positive attitude and go to law school to ride it out, but ... oh. my. gawd.

In a memo to incoming students, Patricia D. White, the dean of University of Miami School of Law, surmised: “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm.” She then urged them to “think hard” about their plans and offered incentives for those willing to defer for one year.

[...]

As firms begin an industrywide overhaul, which has entailed slashing jobs and reconsidering hidebound inefficiencies like the lockstep salary, students will compete for half as many $160,000-a-year jobs this year as they did last. According to the National Association for Legal Career Professionals, the 2008 recruiting season marked “what is likely to be the beginning of a weaker legal employment market that may last for a number of years.”

So Law school is out. Which is OK, I guess. I mean, the world really doesn't need anymore lawyers, does it? So what to do? Right now I don't have any answers. But, let's make a deal. You go home, enjoy your three day weekend and come back here on Monday and we'll try to figure it out. Happy Laborless Day!

Side Note: I guess this is starting to become a monthly feature. I had no idea, until starting this blog, that each months job figures meant so much. I guess normally that isn't the case, but with a recession and all, well ...

"Unemployed" courtesy of erix! via Flickr Creative Commons