The new unemployment numbers are out from the government and they are {{GASP!!!}} up from 5.7% to 6.1%.

As with many subjects, I have an opinion.

Do you think, for instance, that it just MIGHT be a little bit due to the government deciding that if you have a business, you need to pay your entry level, no job skills workers a minimum wage that is 12% higher than it was at the beginning of July? Tell me, did little Kayleigh behind the counter at your local McDonalds sucessfully translate her superlative skillz at selecting nail polish into a 12% productivity increase? Did Leondre’ suddenly start showing up and doing his job picking up the parking lot 12% better? NO?

Perhaps it might be because every government in the country looks at a business in terms of how can we squeeze some tax dollars out of it to provide money we can give away to keep our phoney-baloney jobs? “But Cajun,” you say, “Our government just gave several million dollars in incentives to get a new mall/factory/facility here in Podunk South.”

Government business incentive (Def.): Don’t tax the new guy, tax the crap out of somebody else.

To which I say, “You poor, poor creature…. The government giveth, and the government taketh away. The millions of dollars in “incentives” for the new business are being squeezed out of a) existing businesses and b) the pocketbooks of you poor citizens. The new business and the old businesses will have to pay higher wages so you can scrape together enough ducats to provide your family with food and shelter, and that makes it more expensive to do business overall.

The average BIG business carefully observes the bottom line, and when it becomes more expensive to produce here than it costs to produce in China or Malaysia or Mexico and have it delivered here, guess what happens. You guessed correctly, didn’t you?

Smaller businesses are less susceptible to such pressures because they cannot react, but eventually big businesses swallow them up.

Thus endeth my ‘macro’ view.

Now here’s my ‘micro’ view: I just spent the day worming my way through a hurricane disaster area. For the next year or so the place will be crying for craftsmen: carpenters, roofers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, etc. Know what? There ain’t enough of them, so like happened to us after Karina and Rita, we’re gonna see a lot of crews where English is NOT the first language.

Why? Because little Harley is TOO damn good to go out and work with TOOLS. Mommeigh and daddeigh want their little crotchfruit to have a job where he can wear slacks and a nice shirt and THINK for a living, even though said job will pay half of what a good craftsman can make.

Sow when it comes time to slap rafters together and tug wire, little Harley is going to be deciding how to stock the shelves at Starbucks at eight bucks an hour while Bubba at thirty bucks an hour leads a crew consisting of Pablo, Rafael and Juan and a few others.

6%? Feh! Louisiana. If you’re not working in THIS state, you don’t have the skills or you don’t WANT to work, or both.

Out in the plants where I work, they have a job called “hole watch.” What’s a “hole watch”? Let’s say you have work to be done inside a big ol’ tank. That is, by OSHA definition, a “confined space”, in that it was not set up for human habitation. It has to be tested for a breathable atmosphere and several other precautions have to be taken, then as workers go in the thing to work, the hole watch signs each one in, monitors for hazards or accidents, and then signs each worker out of the space. To become a qualified ‘hole watch’ you have to be able to pass a drug screen and sit through a training session and pass a written test on the training. Rocket science it isn’t. And hole watches make more than department managers at retail stores. Of course, you’ll be sitting outdoors on a bucket in the heat and dust of an industrial facility instead of the air-conditioned halls of JC Penney’s.

We have a bunch of jobs just as intellectually demanding. And I see contractors having trouble filling those as well as the hard skills like electrical, millwright, machinist, ironworker, pipefitter, boilermaker, etc. And those guys make good money. A bit of brain, a bit of ‘want to’ , a bit of experience and a pair of safety-toed boots makes a six-figure income for thousands of people in this area and other industrial areas around the country.

And that’s my take on ‘unemployment’.