Nearly three million U.S. workers. That’s how many people have been out of
a job 15 weeks or more, said the Labor Department, an increase of over 50 percent
from last year.
A Sept. 9 article in the New York Times asserts, “While the job market remains
unusually healthy for the end of a recession, with the unemployment rate below
6 percent, the number of people who have been jobless for months has climbed to
a level more typical of a deep downturn.”
Moreover, it is noteworthy that the 50 percent jump in long-term unemployment
happened as the fiscal 2002 federal budget was going from a surplus into a deficit.
Additional defense-related spending helped play a part in making the red ink flow
for Uncle Sam.
Yet apparently waging war for peace against Evil isn’t creating jobs the way
it has in the past for U.S. workers. In fact, the wife of the jobless couple profiled
in the Times article had last worked at Boeing (a leading Pentagon contractor).
As a long-time Boeing worker, the woman, age 59, earned $45,000 annually. Out
of work for five months, her search for employment has been in vain.
Her husband, age 58, has been jobless for nine months, having previously worked
in manufacturing and earning a high wage. Trade agreements designed to help corporate
America lower the cost of production and create cheaper commodities are helping
to hasten the exodus of such manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
In addition, the two million Americans languishing in the nation’s jails and
prisons are uncounted in the official unemployment rate of 5.7 percent in August.
These incarcerated people represent surplus labor-power, workers in excess of
those required to create new value for employers.
Those locked up disproportionately come from communities of color. There, inferior
hospitals, schools and shelter are the norm for people whose participation in
the labor market is not much needed.
The ranks of the officially unemployed also don’t include discouraged workers.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 372,000 of these people
across America who had given up seeking employment in August.
The couple out of work for five months featured in the Times article, and the
women and men behind bars are surplus workers. They are the unfortunates who live
on the margins, some of whom show up in government statistics.
Increased defense spending is no jobs boom now for surplus workers. They were
hired in large numbers to work in defense plants during World War II, but such
is not the case now.
And as the November elections approach, Democratic and Republican politicians
nationwide are giving scant attention to the sour situations of the long-term
jobless. Here is another socio-economic crisis off the radar screen of political
circles of power but very much in the lives of the U.S. working class.
Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive
newspaper. Email: ssandron@hotmail.com
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