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Wanted: Jobs for 25.5 Million Americans
There’s a lot more that’s frozen in D.C. this week than the usual fallout from a blizzard. The brains of many Senate Republicans are on ice as well. The House passed a jobs bill in December, but the Senate is dawdling, and worse—threatening to pass bits and pieces, taking apart what should be a comprehensive approach to jobs and turning it into minced cabbage. Or, as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) put it, Democrats shouldn’t advertise the package as jobs legislation
because it’s just extending a bunch of tax policy and related items that we need to do.
Only today did the Senate Finance Committee release its first take on jobs. The immediate need is for passage of unemployment insurance (UI) because it will expire for millions of workers Feb. 28, unless Congress—specifically, the Senate—takes action. COBRA also must be extended to help unemployed workers maintain health care.
The White House’s new economic report estimates the economy would create an average of 95,000 jobs a month this year, rising to 190,000 a month on average in 2011.
Yet there must be 100,000 jobs created per month, just to stay even, let alone fill the gaping hole that is the nation’s unemployment crisis. The nation needs more than 10 million jobs to get back to 5 percent unemployment, the rate we had before the recession started.
The economy lost 20,000 jobs last month, and the rate of unemployment declined to 9.7 percent, a figure the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) describes as a statistical blip, not the beginning of a trend toward full employment because the January data was based on differing surveys. As EPI economist Heidi Shierholtz describes it, this apples-to-oranges comparison means the drop in the monthly unemployment rate
can largely be attributed to the higher volatility of the much smaller household survey. Given what happened in the establishment survey, one would have expected the unemployment rate to hold steady or increase slightly in January.
The White House is forecasting the jobless rate will average 10 percent this year. But the generic jobless rate—as bad as it is—hides a lot. Here’s a look at the hardest hit in the jobs crisis.
The workers losing jobs are those who had almost no income to begin with. As Bob Herbert pointed out this week:
The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to $149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.
Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.
The jobless rate of 16.5 percent for black workers is much higher than the national jobless rate of 9.7 percent. The Christian Science Monitor goes on to point out that the jobless rate is astronomically higher for black teens—43.8 percent—than for white teens, at 23.5 percent.
Long-term unemployment (those without a job for 27 weeks or longer), is off the charts. More than 40 percent of the nation’s unemployed workers are without a job for more than six months, a new record. In January, that means 6.3 million unemployed workers have been out of a job for more than six months.
The longer workers are out of a job, the harder it is for them to get one. With the massive numbers of unemployed workers, employers are more likely to hire a worker who is more recently unemployed, than one who has been out for months, skills and other factors being equal. This is why the group on the Hill needs to extend UI ASAP. According to National Employment Law Project estimates, of the nearly 1.2 million U.S. workers facing a cut off of benefits in March alone:
- 380,000 workers will exhaust their 26 weeks of state benefits without accessing the temporary EUC [emergency unemployment compensation] extension program or the permanent federal program of Extended Benefits.
- Another 814,000 workers will not be eligible to continue receiving EUC past their current tier of benefits.
Richard Duncan, who works for the Tennessee AFL-CIO technical assistance program, has met many unemployed workers. The assistance program helps union workers who have been laid off (see video above).
I’ve traveled the state of Tennessee and seen an enormous number of union brothers and sisters lose their jobs. Since 2006, I’ve seen the same people. They lose their job at one facility. Then they go to another facility, then there’s an additional layoff and they lose their job again.
This downward cycle must be broken. And the ice in brain and heart, melted.
This is a cross-post from the Firedoglake blog.
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3 Comments
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Because companies are moving overseas to exploit cheap labor and banks are withholding credit – possibly as a way to help the GOP back into power – we can expect unemployment to continue to rise for some time to come. Even when the economy rebounds workers will be in worse shape than we were before this recession hit. After every recession since the 70s workers have had to take jobs at lower wages or take part time jobs that don’t provide any benefits whatever. In some states, part-time workers don’t qualify for unemployment or workers’ compensation insurance. In time American workers will be at the same level as workers in third-world countries. But you know what? We almost deserve it because we’re not fighting back.
If we take a minute to consider the past, present and future conditions of working people in the U.S., we must realize that the economic and living conditions have continually pushed moved most of to mass impoverishment.
Here are introductions to two articles (links supplied to the full story) that working people individually are familiar. When will the “leaders” of organized labor go beyond rhetorical posturing to develop a new strategy to unite all working people, organized and unorganized, and call for a new political party?
From the World Socialist Web Site ( http://www.wsws.org ).
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f13.shtml
America, the land of inequality
by Tom Eley
13 February 2010
New studies reveal that the social divide between rich and poor in the US has grown much starker in the current economic crisis, and that even before it hit the country was the most unequal of the advanced economies, with great wealth and extreme poverty having become virtually hereditary conditions.
President Barack Obama has done nothing to reverse decades of wage stagnation, mounting poverty, and attacks on the social welfare system. On the contrary, following George W. Bush, he has seized on the crisis to redistribute wealth to a tiny financial elite through the ongoing bailout of the finance industry.
…
The vast polarization of wealth in the US will only intensify. According to the Obama administration’s rosy economic estimates, unemployment will not return to its pre-crash levels before the end of the decade. More realistic observers, however, acknowledge that mass unemployment will be a fixture of US life, and higher-paying jobs destroyed in the recession will never return. Combined with declining home values, skyrocketing health care and higher education costs, chronically high unemployment will result in steadily rising poverty.
…
The antidote to the plundering of society that has gone unchecked for decades is the nationalization of the banks and their transformation into public institutions, democratically controlled by working people. The ill-gotten gains of the lords of finance must be expropriated and used to put in place a program of full employment, free universal health care, free higher education, and infrastructure development.
The fight for this program requires the mobilization of the working class in the US and internationally, independent of the Democrats and Republicans and all the political formations that defend the existing capitalist set-up.
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(Link to full article here:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/jobs-f13.shtml
White House projects long-term mass unemployment
Democrats prepare paltry “jobs” bill
By Joe Kishore
13 February 2010
The White House Council of Economic Advisers released its Economic Report to the President on Thursday, outlining the administration’s economic projections and policies. The report shows that the White House is expecting mass unemployment to continue for years, with only minor decreases from the current rate of nearly 10 percent through 2012.
…
The jobs proposals are part of a deliberate policy of the Obama administration, supported by Congressional Democrats and Republicans. The bailout of the banks has created conditions for record bonuses and profits for Wall Street firms, while massively increasing government debt. Not only will there be no measures taken to alleviate the jobs crisis; the government is determined to pay off these debts at the expense of the working class.
Jerry Wells the answer to your question as to when labor leaders will do something besides posturing IS NEVER.The reason why is because they like our elected leaders do not have to answer to the rank and file.We the workers have absolutely no say in what they do and if on the rare occasion when we do get a voice we are ignored.We are only needed to provide their 6 fiqure salaries.They are not unlike the mighty bankers.I can’t think of one union member that makes 100 grand or has an expense account.So keep payin your dues we wouldn’t want any of them in the unemployment lines.