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No Recovery Without Jobs. No Recovery Without Jobs. No Recovery… |
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“Jobs now” was the rallying call of thousands of delegates to the recent AFL-CIO Convention in Pittsburgh, and “unemployment aid” is the cry from millions of those who find themselves unable to get work in a U.S. economy that now has six jobless workers for every one job opening. More than eight of 10 Americans (83 percent) cite unemployment as the nation’s big problem in a survey just out by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.
And yesterday in Washington, D.C., several top economists, including Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, all stressed that creating jobs and alleviating the pain of unemployed workers must happen quickly at the federal level—or unemployment will not fall below 8 percent through at least 2014.
That’s more than 12 million U.S. workers without jobs as America’s status quo. And that’s only the official unemployment figure. Those not counted in the official data likely would double that number to at least 24 million workers.
All those who think 24 million jobless workers is a fine way to operate the economy, raise your hands.
Speaking at a panel sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Krugman said that although “the apocalypse has been postponed” because of the Obama administration’s economic recovery package passed by Congress earlier this year, it’s essential to follow up with further fiscal action—that is, spending money now to create long-term benefits, like jobs—to prevent prolonged suffering.
The notion that we’re going to pay a heavy price for spending a lot now is just wrong.
Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, went further, saying that lawmakers on Capitol Hill don’t seem to understand the difference between incurring short-term debt—which would aid the economy—and long-term structural debt, which is a different animal. All three agreed Congress must approve more funding, especially for states, which are at the front lines of providing critical support for those without jobs, health care and food.
In fact, DeLong stated, the economic recovery act Congress passed is only between one-fifth and one-third of the funding needed to adequately address the economic crisis, and it did not include a cortically needed “trigger” that would have automatically moved more aid when unemployment increased beyond 9 percent. Right now, the official U.S. unemployment rate is 9.7 percent-and likely will worsen when the Labor Department releases September jobs data tomorrow.
EPI economist John Irons made real the long-term damage of an ongoing recession, citing a recent study that found some 35 percent of jobless workers don’t have jobs two years later and 13 percent had only part-time jobs. Meanwhile, 13 percent of those who did find full-time work were paid less than at the job they lost.
DeLong also pointed to the debilitating effects of a jobless recovery on young people: Every 1 percent increase in unemployment results in the loss of 7 percent of income for young people entering the job market.
Job loss also disproportionately affects people of color. New unemployment data for September show overall unemployment at 9.8 percent, with 15.4 percent of black workers jobs and 12.7 percent of Latino workers unemployed, compared with 9 percent of white workers.
And that means young workers are in real trouble with this recession. Our AFL-CIO report we released last month on young workers, shows that one-third of young workers cannot pay the bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.
Creating jobs isn’t enough. Working families need jobs that enable them to support themselves and their families. And right now, that picture looks grim. Recent data show that the U.S. income gap is worsening. While household income declined across all groups, middle-income and poor Americans are hurt the hardest. Median income fell last year from $52,163 to $50,303, wiping out a decade’s worth of gains to hit the lowest level since 1997. Poverty jumped sharply to 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.
Yet we hear from some in the Obama administration that the worst is over.
Yet that’s not what most Americans think. In fact, the Hart survey, which found strong support for stimulus spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also showed that the overwhelming majority of respondents-81 percent-say the Obama administration still has not done enough to deal with unemployment.
As Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) summed up at yesterday’s panel:
We should be very wary of any economic suggestion that recovery is over and that will translate to the family level. Our economic recovery should not just be measured by the liquidity of banks but by nutrition for our children. Now is not the time to pull back our economic resources.
We second the sister from Connecticut.
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The article below details the disaster now facing all working people,
The time for the AFL-CIO and the organized labor movement to act is NOW!
The looting of the treasury, the privatization of the federal government, the unending wars for profit, the destruction of public health and public education,
and the loss of millions of jobs due to the corruption of the ruling elites must be challenged and stopped!
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US Census Bureau report: 40 million living in poverty
By Kate Randall
30 September 2009
The overall poverty rate in the US rose to 13.2 percent in 2008, as workers across all sectors of the economy became jobless and increasing numbers of families were forced into destitution, according to a new government report. Real median household income also declined by 3.6 percent.
The report released Tuesday, part of the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, is the most recent to measure the recession’s impact on working class families and the poor. Based on the changes between 2007 and 2008, the first full year of the recession, its findings do not reflect increases in poverty and joblessness this year as the consequences of the crisis have become even more acute.
The official poverty rate of 13.2 percent in 2008 was up from 12.5 percent in 2007. This figure translates into 39.8 million people in poverty across America. The official poverty level is set at $22,000 annually for a family of four with two children or $12,000 for an individual, an absurdly low threshold. This means that far more people than indicated by the survey do not have adequate resources to pay for food, shelter, medical care and other basic necessities.
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Read the full detailed article here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/pove-s30.shtml
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It is an impossible task to understand what is happening by watching Fox News or listening to Rush Limbaugh!
For an alternative socialist perspective, read the daily World Socialist Web Site:
http://www.wsws.org
(A free email newsletter subscription, with headlines and links to the entire daily contents of WSWS, can found on the home page right side. Just add your email address to the form for each issue, six days a week. Remove your address anytime.)
“The answer to all opponents to the reduction of the hours of labor could well be given in these words: ‘That so long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot obtain it, the hours of labor are too long.’” — Samuel Gompers, founding president of the AF of L.
“OUR problem of unemployment must be solved. No other question of national policy, whether political, social or economic, must be permitted to obscure this major issue until it is definitely disposed of. It can be disposed of not through half measures but only through courageous and decisive action, jointly undertaken and carried to conclusion by government, management and labor…
“The cure proposed by the American Federation of Labor is the adoption of a work-week which will absorb the unemployed, assuring wage-earners the maintenance of their incomes at previous levels. The proposal rests on two fundamental principles: First, that genuine recovery is impossible unless achieved through the normal channels of production; and, second, that industrial stability can be realized only through a broad stabilization of employment and the assurance of purchasing power adequate to initiate and sustain increased production of wealth.” — William Green, president of the AF of L, April 1935.
“The case for shorter hours does not rest on the notion it is the best way. It is based rather on the view, supported by ample evidence in the past decade of mounting unemployment, that: (1) other economic measures to achieve full employment are not being applied and perhaps cannot be applied; and (2) even if other economic policies are successful in stimulating greater growth in the period ahead, the rate of advance in technology and other labor-displacing changes is gathering such momentum that, unless part of the gains in efficiency are distributed in reductions in hours, it is virtually inevitable that it will show up in persistent and increased unemployment.” — AFL-CIO American Federationist, November 1962.
We have to be careful to preserve and protect the forty hour work week. There is nothing the Corporations would enjoy more than variable hours.
When I was laid off I took a non-union job and there were days they’d just send us back home. Some would pack their lunch, put on their uniform and drive fifty miles to work only to be told to go home, without any warning.
I’m a union member of a major airline and full time workers are being reduced to part time from eight hour shifts into four hour shifts, that’s a fifty percent pay cut! Last year I made $29,000.00 as a union member with thirty five years of seniority. Which is $7,000.00 over the poverty line. My twenty dollar an hour job is now worth $10 an hour. Also, any over time is now straight time until you hit eight hours which the company won’t let you do.
So much for my own sob story. The point is, be very wary of hour reduction and make sure it doesn’t become a permanent part of your contract. It’s O.K. in an emergency basis and you see it used in the trades when it gets slow but once business picks up the boys are back to forty hours so it works out alright for them.
Thanks, zebra8835 — great letter.
What you say shows more eloquently than anything I could say why unions need to educate their members about the history of the struggle for the eight-hour day and about the campaign during the last Depression for the 30-hour workweek. Yes, that’s 30, not 40 hours.
Corporations have the leverage to impose unwanted work schedules on people precisely because the labor movement has given up the fight for shorter hours ON OUR OWN TERMS. The forty-hour workweek has become an albatross around the neck of labor. Just look at the timing of the decline in union density in the U.S. The AFL-CIO effectively threw in the towel on shorter hours in the 1960s and opted instead for job retraining and greatly expanded government spending (much of it on “defense” — the military-industrial complex). And that’s about when union density in the US began its long, relentless decline.
Ira Steward’s theory of shorter hours, on the other hand, was the basis for the growth of the American Federation of Labor in the late 19th and early 20th century. It is summarized in the slogan, “Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, reducing the hours increases the pay.” That didn’t, of course, refer to employers arbitrarily cutting back hours during a slow period but to the establishment of a universal standard of progressively shorter hours.
Would we be better protected against corporate “flexibility” if the weekly hours were 54 hours, 60 or 72? Of course not. That’s why workers fought (and sometimes died!) for shorter hours. The forty hour week should not be carved in stone. To imagine that preserving and protecting it is the only thing between workers and corporate whims is to ignore the sorry history of the last 40 years.
Chris Nyland wrote the following in 1986:
“Traditionally worktime has become a major political and economic issue at times of high unemployment. During periods of economic crisis the labour movement invariably puts forward the argument that standard times should be reduced to spread the available work amongst as many individuals as possible. [emphasis added]”
Nyland predicted that demands from organized labor would intensify as decay of the capitalist economies proceeded. As we now know, that didn’t happen. Nyland was right that previously worktime had become a major issue during times of high unemployment. He was almost right that the argument was “invariably” put forward by unions. “Usually” would have been a more judicious word. But his extrapolation from past experience that demands would intensify was falsified by the course of events — at least in North America and in other English-speaking countries. The question is “why?”
There are any number of facile answers to that question. The Sandwichman has heard them all. But there are no well thought out answers forthcoming — most conspicuously from organized labor itself. My two candidates for possible explanations come from Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Virno.
The Marcuse excuse would be that the balance between work and leisure have reached a tipping point where any substantial increase in leisure would move work out of its privileged central role in everyday life. This is something “the authorities” cannot and will not tolerate.
The Virno gloss proceeds from the observation that the boundaries between work and non-work have become permeable and imprecise and thus leisure, work and unemployment cease to appear as clear-cut contraries or alternatives. For example, why should those who are paid for “leisurely” work (that is to say knowledge work with a high social content) seek to exchange it for more “arduous free time” (isolation and amusing-ourselves-to-death entertainment)?
What those two explanations have in common, I suppose, is the notion that a great deal of the paid work that is done today is superfluous, “treadmill” work. This is not to say that it is superfluous to the individuals who have to perform it and rely on income from it. On the contrary, the objective nonnecessity of much work makes it all the more subjectively precious. Because… the wolf of unemployment lurks just outside the cubicle. The nonessential thus presents itself as a “matter of life or death.”
Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, University of Michigan professor of economics and finance, Mark J. Perry offers his “thoughtful and timely analysis” on “When Will the ‘Jobless Recovery’ End?”:
“Bottom Line: The good news is that we are probably in the early stages of the 12th economic expansion since World War II. The bad news is that it might take until 2011 for the “jobless recovery” to end, and it might also take that long before the NBER makes it official declaration that the recession is over. We should probably be prepared to be patient.”
No, the bad news is… something about cake.