Since Friday, President Trump has called for a government shutdown, invited an aspiring dictator to the White House, rehashed his unfounded wire-tapping claims, and waxed philosophical about how Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War. What he failed to mention — both over the weekend, and over the course of his 102 days in office — is that one of the country’s largest, most demographically diverse industries is hemorrhaging jobs at an unprecedented rate.
According to a recent Business Insider report, 89,000 general merchandise workers in this country have lost their jobs since October, 2016 – “more than the total number of people employed by the US coal industry, which Trump repeatedly pledged to revive both on the campaign trail and in office.”
That’s about 16,000 jobs per month, on average. And it could get worse: more than 3,200 stores have closed stateside this year already, and, according to Credit Suisse, that number could swell to 8,600 by December. For perspective, there were 6,163 store closures in the entirety of 2008, and Brad Pitt literally bankrolled a movie about how historically awful the economy was that year.
Yet, as noted earlier, Trump has remained silent about this “American carnage” (his words, not mine), even though, “as more and more retail workers lose their jobs, a new class of unemployed and underemployed workers is emerging in America that’s larger and more geographically far-reaching than the coal industry Trump has vowed to revive.”
You can read more about it at Business Insider.
