Nifty article but doesn't catch the sheer cold bloodedness of the problem in America where Greenspan, in the late mid 1980's, before and after he was head of the Federal Reserve, called for deliberately raising unemployment to keep workers from asking for raises and benefits. The claim was that wage raises caused inflation and, of course, there's been no inflation in America since then. The key again is end offshoring, outsourcing and illegal immigration and let the employers compete for workers. A surplus of labor leads to national misery, a shortage of labor leads to national prosperity.---rng
from n+1
by Benjamin Kunkel
4 June 2010
The inherent right to work is one of the elemental privileges of a free people.
—FDR, radio address, 1937
Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state, and so on—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least. From the establishment of FDR’s war economy through the end of the so-called golden age of capitalism in the early 1970s, the US matched other major economies in functioning at close to full employment (at least as the term is defined by economic orthodoxy, on which more later). In the troughs of recessions, the unemployment rate might touch 7 percent, but otherwise it wavered between about 3 and 5.5. And even with the onset in 1973 of what Robert Brenner, in the commanding economic history of the period, called the long downturn—a decline across the system in rates of growth and profit, persisting to this day—the US touted a distinctly better record of job creation than its main European rivals. The average unemployment rate for the ’70s came to slightly above 6 percent; for the ’80s, above 7; and for the ’90s, just below 6—a marked deterioration since the end of the golden age, but not bad by international standards. The years from 1997 to 2006 saw an average stateside rate below 5 percent, achieved though this was with the decisive aid of serial financial bubbles.
Europe meanwhile has never dispersed the cloud of structural unemployment that settled over the ’70s. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain registered unemployment rates around 10 percent as late into the last expansion as 2004, and last year’s recession has erased most gains since then across the Continent. The situation remains far worse in poor countries, whose vast cities have never gathered into formal paid employment the populations displaced from the land by the postwar commercialization of agriculture. As a result, some two-fifths of economically active humanity now ekes out its subsistence in an “informal sector”—essentially a euphemism for unemployment—often marked by salvage, racketeering, and violence.
