unemployment crisis?

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

considering the source, this is pretty radical:

August 7, 2003/New York Times
Despair of the Jobless
By BOB HERBERT

The folks who put the voodoo back in economics keep telling us that
prosperity is just around the corner. For the unemployed, that would
mean more jobs. Are there more jobs just around the corner?

This alleged economic upturn is not just a jobless recovery, it's a job
loss recovery. The hemorrhaging of jobs in the aftermath of the recent
"mild" recession is like nothing the U.S. has seen in more than half a
century. Millions continue to look desperately for work, and millions
more have given up in despair.

The stories have been rolling in for some time about the stresses and
misfortunes that are inevitably associated with long-term joblessness:
the bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions, the dreams deferred, the
mental difficulties - anxiety, depression - the excessive drinking and
abuse of drugs, the family violence. There are few things more miserable
than to need a job and be unable to find one.

How bad is it? The Economic Policy Institute in Washington reported last
week that "since the business cycle expansion began in November 2001,
payrolls have contracted by 1 million (1.2 million in the private
sector), making this the weakest recovery in terms of employment since
the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] began tracking monthly data in 1939."

John A. Challenger, who runs the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray &
Christmas, said it is taking an average of 20 weeks for job seekers to
find employment, and many are unable to match their previous salary.
"Employers have all the cards," he said. "Not only are they sharpening
their salary pencils, but the screening of candidates is probably the
toughest it has ever been."

The official jobless rate, now 6.2 percent, does not come close to
reflecting how grim the employment situation really is. The official
rate refers only to those actively seeking work. It does not count the
"discouraged" workers, who have looked for jobs within the last 12
months but have given up because of the lack of offers. Then there are
the involuntary part-timers, who would like full-time jobs but cannot
find them. And there are people who have had to settle for jobs that pay
significantly less than jobs they once held.

When you combine the unemployed and the underemployed, you are talking
about a percentage of the work force that is in double digits. That's an
awful lot of lost purchasing power for a society that needs broad-based
wage growth among its consumers to remain economically viable. Most
Americans depend on their paychecks to get from one week to the next. If
you cut off that paycheck, everything tends to go haywire.

Right now there is no plan, no strategy for turning this employment
crisis around. There is not even a sense of urgency. At the end of July
the Bush administration sent its secretaries of commerce, labor and
treasury on a bus tour of Wisconsin and Minnesota to tell workers that
better days are coming. But they offered no real remedies, and the
president himself went on a monthlong vacation.

The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's
primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the
fundamental interests of workaday Americans. On the business side of
this divide, increased profits are realized by showing the door to as
many workers as possible, and squeezing the remainder to the bursting
point. Productivity (based primarily on improvements in technology) is
way up. Hiring, of course, is down. Part-time and temporary workers are
in; full-time workers with benefits are out.

And then there's the ominous trend of sending higher-skilled jobs
overseas to low-wage places like India and China, an upscale reprise of
the sweatshop phenomenon that erased so many U.S. manufacturing jobs
over the past quarter century.

Working Americans need jobs just to survive. But the Bush administration
equates the national interest with corporate interests, and in that
equation workers can only lose.

There are ways to spark the creation of good jobs on a large scale in
the U.S. (I will explore some of them in a future column.) But that
would require vision, a long-term financial investment and, most
important, a commitment at the federal level to the idea that it is
truly in the nation's interest to keep as many Americans as possible
gainfully employed.   

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company 

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Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine