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Some
of the first victims of the austerity drive in Washington are our
friends and neighbors, the unemployed. Unfortunately, the mainstream
media has picked up the narrative of some rightist politicians that
there really are jobs available—but that the unemployed are “enjoying”
their state-paid vacations!
Tom
Corbett, Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, said
recently, “The jobs are there, but if we keep extending unemployment,
people are just going to sit there. … I’ve literally had construction
companies tell me, ‘I can’t get people to come back to work until—they
say, “We’ll come back when unemployment runs out.”’”
Corbett
isn’t the only one trying to sell this idea of the “lazy” unemployed.
Tea Party Republicans Rand Paul and Sharron Angle have made similar
statements. Paul said, “As bad as it sounds, ultimately we do have to
sometimes accept a wage that’s less than we had at our previous job in
order to get back to work and allow the economy to get started again.”
All
of these politicians are ignoring the dire situation that the
unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed, face—foreclosures,
higher rates of suicide, broken marriages, and higher rates of child
and spousal abuse.
The
sad truth is that neither capitalist party is doing much to address the
problem of unemployment. Although they can bail out big banks and
corporations with government funding, they insist that unemployment
must be solved by the so-called free market. Without turning up the
heat on the politicians, we can expect no concrete action to help
working people.
At
the very outset of the recession, the economy began to hemorrhage jobs.
Right now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (June report) counts 14.6
million unemployed, or about 9.5% of the workforce. The number of
long-term unemployed (often left uncounted in official
unemployment-rate statistics) is at 6.8 million. The number of
“involuntary” part-time workers (those who want full-time work but
can’t find it) is at 8.6 million. The unemployment for Blacks, at
15.4%, is roughly twice that of whites (8.6 %), and joblessness amongst
Latinos is at 12.4%. This of course does not figure in the large
numbers of undocumented workers who have lost jobs in the slump.
The
establishment media is reporting only the rosiest scenarios of
recovery. For instance, a Philadelphia Inquirer report of July
21 claims that “to recoup the jobs lost in the recession, the economy
would have to create 280,000 jobs a month for the next 5 years.”
Yet
taking into account the 160,000 workers who enter the workforce every
month, the number of jobs that needs to be created is much higher; 9.6
million new workers (160,000 X 60 months), plus the 14.6 million
already unemployed, means 24.2 million new jobs are required over a
period of five years. This demonstrates that in excess of 403,000
jobs a month need to be created.
Of
course, meeting this goal would only be possible according to the most
optimistic estimates of growth. But different scenarios have been
posited by the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). They
state that even if job growth attained the rate of the fastest four
years of the most recent economic expansion period, the recovery of the
jobs lost in this recession still would not take place until 2021 (www.cepr.net).
The
bosses got a bail out; we need one of our own. Working people need to
mobilize for the creation of jobs now! We don’t have another decade to
wait for the “free market” to come to our rescue. We need to demand the
creation of good jobs at good wages as well as other measures, as
explained in Socialist Action’s “Workers Action Program to Meet the
Economic Crisis” (see a summary of some of the key demands on page 2).
A
good start will be the March for Jobs called by the NAACP and the
AFL-CIO for Oct. 2. All local unions and labor councils should be
mobilizing their members, employed and unemployed, for a massive march
on Washington, D.C
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