The economy may have grown 2.4 percent last year, its strongest advance since 2010, but that doesn't mean everything is peachy keen in this country, economist/financial author Robert Dickie told
Newsmax TV.
"When we get these numbers you can kind of see how people want to massage it a little bit, but they really hide some underlying foundational problems within our country," he said on the network's "America's Forum" program.
Most of the jobs created since the Great Recession ended in 2009 have been part-time, he said. "Although unemployment numbers are dropping, many people don't have the full-time employment that they enjoyed in the past with benefits."
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In many cases, "they're trying to cobble together two or three jobs to make ends meet," said Dickie, author of
"The Leap: Launching Your Full-Time Career in Our Part-Time Economy."
The jobless rate dropped to 5.6 percent in December, the lowest level since June 2008.
And the economy produced 2.95 million jobs last year, the most since 1999.
But the weakness underlying the jobs market has forced many Americans to work as freelancers, Dickie notes. "The free agent economy is really taking off, not because people want it to, but because they have to, to make ends meet," he said.
"The CEOs I've been interviewing see that the contingent workforce here in the U.S., roughly 10-12 percent right now, they're predicting it's going to grow and become more like Europe, where you've got 20, 25 percent and even 30 percent in some countries in a contingent status."
Millennials, those born in the early 1980s and afterward, are particularly suffering in the free agent economy, Dickie said.
"They are graduating from college with enormous student loan debt, on average at least $30,000. They're going to an economy where they don't have full-time employment," he said.
"They're trying to piece together various odd end jobs. Many people graduate from college, they thought they were going into one particular career field, and all of a sudden they find themselves working in a different career field that has no bearing whatsoever with what they studied."
That means "there's a complete disconnect with how we're preparing the millennial generation and the economy that's out there today," Dickie explains.
Then there's the issue of wages. While average hourly wages did grow 1.7 percent in the 12 months through December, that was the lowest rate since October 2012.
"Prior to 2007-2008, wages were increasing at a clip of about 3 percent a year. We are vastly under where we need to be as a nation. People need to be able to prepare for this," Dickie said.
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