Recession: Why can't everyone have a job?
1992Joseph Ryan 1992-02Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 1 →
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The current recession is the longest on record since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some capitalist economic experts are calling this recession a "contained depression"-and they aren't wrong. For working people in America, the "New World Order" is turning into a "New World Ordeal."
Official government statistics say that the unemployment rate is 7.1 percent. However, the real unemployment rate is well over 10.1 percent when you count discouraged workersthose who are no longer actively looking for jobs.
In a dire, almost apocalyptic, business news article titled "Is Your Job Safe?," U.S. News & World Report (Jan. 13, 1992) predicts that hard economic times for working people will be a permanent feature of the next decade. Several economic experts quoted in the article forsee a permanent 10 percent unemployment rate going into the next century.
Since July 1990, almost two million jobs have been lost in this country. In 1991, 25 million workers—20 percent of the work force—were unemployed at some time. Job losses—jobs that are cut by belttightening corporations, like the layoff of 74,000 workers by General Motors Corp.— average 2600 a day. Over 854,000 service-sector jobs have vanished, the majority of them permanently.
Crisis of overproduction
The reason? U.S. News & World Report, a publication that is certainly not of Marxist origin, hits it right on the head: the crisis of overproduction.
"The heavily burdened economy," U.S. News & World laments, "is saddled with too much productive capacity and too few orders."
And the magazine states that the current economic situation isn't likely to change: "At best it will take years for the nation to lighten its debt load and absorb its factory glut."
Meanwhile, working people are expected to grin and bear the hard times ahead, which will only mean a worsening of an already catastrophic situation. It's predicted that between 1988 and the year 2000 over 650,000 industrial jobs will be eliminated In the last 10 years, the median income for families with children declined by $1600. Between 1989 and 1990, the net worth of U.S. households fell by $890 billion in real terms. This is the largest drop since 1947, which was an inflationary year.
Hundreds of thousands of unionized industrial workers who lost their jobs during the 1980s have seen their incomes drop by 20 percent to 30 percent at new jobs.
For the first time since the Depression of the 1930s, the average standard of living for American families-and this is with two wage-eamers—has declined Furthermore, the capitalist economists are unable to formulate any particular remedy for kick-starting the economy. The (continued on page 8)