Jobs Continue to Disappear
– A Little Hell Needs to Break Loose!

Jan 24, 2010

With double-talk spouting out of every mouth, government officials declared the job situation “stabilized” – since the official rate of unemployment didn’t go up in December! They even dared to say it with a straight face – despite the fact that the “job market” had 589,000 fewer jobs than it had the month before.

What produced this statistical miracle? Government statisticians ignored an additional 661,000 people who didn’t look for jobs last month. They didn’t look because there are almost no jobs to be found. Even officially, there are six applicants for every job opening. More of the unemployed, tired from a fruitless search, didn’t look for work last month – and so don’t count as being unemployed!

With such sleights of hand, the government can disappear anything it wants, and often does – the unemployed, the big gifts it continues to rain on Wall Street, or the wars it carries out in countries around the globe.

Employment stabilizing? Bull feathers!

In the two years and one month since the recession officially started, employers have cut 8.6 million jobs – NET. And that’s only half the story. To keep up with the increase in the size of the work force, they should have created five million MORE jobs. In other words, just to get back to where we were in December 2007, employers would have to create almost 14 million jobs MORE than they cut.

The Federal Reserve acknowledged this reality when it recently admitted that the job market won’t improve anytime soon. Many economists say it won’t get back to where it once was until 2013. And others say we won’t ever get back many of those lost jobs.

And that’s true – so long as the bosses are able to push to put out more production with fewer workers. In the third quarter of 2009, the speed-up was so intense that the rate of productivity increased an astounding 8.1%! Even when production increases, this push for productivity will still result in job losses.

The bosses are using the crisis they themselves created, using the threat of unemployment to make everyone else work harder, longer, and for less money – that is, to reorganize work for their own benefit. So long as the bosses get away with stealing more and more of the workers’ labor, our situation won’t improve.

In 2005, even before the recession started, over one quarter of the work force were already “irregularly scheduled” workers, either temporary, part-time, on-call or so-called “independent contractors.” Business Week magazine says this is the wave of our future, calling them “disposable workers.” The bosses want “just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot.” So says this magazine that speaks for business.

Not since the early 1930s have the bosses been so ferocious in trying to reorganize work. Just as then, the bosses today are using a severe crisis to carry out what they had wanted to do all along: take a bigger share of the wealth the workers’ labor produces, increasing the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else.

By the mid-1930s, the bosses were discovering how such calculations could backfire. With workers taking over factories, with the unemployed clogging up the streets, with neighbors refusing to let their friends be tossed out of their homes, all hell began to break loose – and continued for the next few years.

Well that’s what we need today, a lot of hell breaking loose. It’s the only thing finally that threw the bosses backwards in earlier periods. It’s still the only language they understand.