Whaddya mean, things are better?
A condensation of Michael Yates' article on unemployment, "Workers Looking for Jobs, and Unions Looking for Members," by Joseph Woodard
Things are hard for workers, hard to find decent jobs. Hard and getting harder.
That's not true. Look, all the papers say things are picking up. The
economy's improving. Maybe not great, but getting better. Just last week,
April 29th, the good news was even on the BBC. The news service ran a story
with the headline, "US growth solid but not sparkling." It said,
"The US economy is growing at a solid but scarcely scintillating pace,
Commerce Department figures have shown."
The article went on to say, "US gross domestic product (GDP) was up 4.2% year on year in the first three months of 2004, somewhat shy of the 5% forecast by many economists."
April 2, 2004, just a couple of weeks before, the BBC reported, "US job creation finally under way."
The US 'jobless recovery' could be over after the economy added an extra 308,000 jobs in March - almost three times more than had been expected.
The rise is the highest monthly gain for four years and could help President George W. Bush in an election year.
Most of the new positions were created in the service sector (230,000) followed by construction (71,000) and retail (47,000).
Manufacturing posted no change, but ended 43 months of layoffs in a row.
So things are getting better. Stop whining. What's your problem?
The problem is that things are getting better for somebody, maybe, but not ordinary workers. Michael D. Yates lays out the facts in his article, "Workers Looking for Jobs, Unions Looking for Members." (Monthly Review, April 2004) You don't see these facts in the daily news. Michael takes his information from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Economic Policy Institute, the Gallup Poll, and well authenticated publications by economic researchers he names in his article.
What are the facts he refers to?
In January 2004, of a U.S. labor force of 146,863,000, officially 8,297,000
were unemployed, meaning they weren't working but had looked for work
within the last 4 weeks. That made the official unemployment rate 5.6%,
down a bit from the rate of 5.7% in December. But for Blacks, the official
unemployment rate was 10.5% in January. For Hispanics, 7.3%. The
unemployment in some places was worse than the average. In Oregon, 7.3%
unemployment in December 2003. In Washington, 6.8%. The official rates were
down a bit from a year before. Homelessness abounds.
But these rates don't explain unused labor. People who can't find
full-time work and so work as "involuntary part-time workers" numbered
4,714,000 in January 2004. People who've stopped looking for work recently
but have looked within the last year numbered 1,700,000 in January.
They're classified as "marginally attached" workers. 432,000 of them were
classified as "discouraged workers," those who've stopped looking because
there are no longer any jobs for their profession. If we add the
involuntary part-timers and marginally attached to the pool of unemployed,
we get 14,714,000 people in January didn't have a decent job. That's an
dis-employment rate of 9.9%. We could add the numbers of people who've
fallen to social security disability as their source of income or ended up
in jail because they couldn't get a decent job. That jacks the figure of
unemployed up another 6 or 7 million. (And remember, a lot of prisoners are
working, doing data entry for Chevron, making telephone reservations for
TWA, raising hogs, shoveling manure, making circuit boards, limousines,
waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria's Secret, for genuine slave wages.
This big labor surplus exists 27 months into an economic recovery! This is a jobless recovery. And by these calculations, by comparison to other recoveries, jobs that should be there aren't. So many are missing that Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley points out that 2.4 million workers should have jobs if the economy was recovering as it did a decade ago.
Yates' article analyzes different ways of computing unemployment and concludes that we are really in a "jobless recovery."
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So anemic has recent job growth been that President George W. Bush is
poised to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end a term in
office with less national employment than when his term began.
Wage growth is down. Workers in the U.S. now work longer for less. In fact, in 2001, at the end of a 10-year economic expansion, 23.9% of all employment in the U.S. paid a wage inadequate to support a family of four above the poverty level. 31.2% of Blacks were working full-time year round and still not making enough to reach the poverty level. 40.4% of working Hispanics were earning less than poverty line incomes. That's 2 out of 5.
And people who are working are scared of losing their jobs. Why? Don't we have a lot of good jobs. Nope. Read Yates' article.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the ten occupations with
the largest job growth between 2000 and 2010 will be food preparation
and service workers, customer service representatives, registered
nurses, retail salespesons, computer support specialists, cashiers,
general office clerks, security guards, computer software engineers, and
waiters and waitresses.
Most of these jobs are McWork types. Even jobs likes nursing and software engineers are pinned down by cost-conscious managers. A lot workers also work part-time jobs to make end meet. A lot work extra hours on their full-time job for free to make sure they won't be fired. Manufacturing jobs have been dropping for 42 months.
Well, there are good times and bad times. But where workers are organizing to defend their rights, things are better. That's why it's better to be unemployed in Sweden that the United States. Unions help. And they help the nonunionized workers as well.
The union movement in America is weak. It's fallen apart over the last couple of decades. But where there are unions, people know they can help. They'd be more effective and draw membership if they took a stand for the working class and didn't act like shop foremen for the Capitalist class.
Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20%. They raise benefits, like health care coverage. They raise wages for non-union workers by setting pay standards. The impact of unions on total nonunion wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages.
That's why we have to support unions. But not blindly. Unions have to
support us. They've got to talk about the real problems: the owners of
capital are getting rich off the backs of working people. Unions have to
help workers fight for housing, health care, education, an end to sexism
and racism, and justice in the courts, in the workplace, and on the
streets. They have to end support for the war which is a war to make the
rich richer. Current union leaders, the top ones, are not going to do this.
We have to do it. We have to create the alternative unions, or we have to
make the current unions act alternatively.
Read Yates' article to dig into the details of this argument. We can create an alternative.
