When Capitalists Count, Up is Down, Down is Up

The unemployment figures coming out of Washington are as a phony as a three-dollar bill. By reporting that the unemployment rate went “down” in January to 9.7% from the previous month’s 10%, the Obama administration is trying to spread the notion that the great recession is receding. Bullshit! No matter which way capitalism twists the figures, unemployment and underemployment is the highest since the Great Depression. Consider the following:

• Firstly, when taking into account “discouraged” workers who’ve given up looking for non-existent jobs (not counted in the phony 9.7% statistic), plus part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs (also not counted), the actual rate is 21.2%. (Shadowstats.com) In fact, one reason for the “lower” 9.7% rate is that more workers stopped looking for jobs, conveniently reducing the number the government counts as unemployed.

• Secondly, how do they square the “fact” that unemployment is decreasing if the government reports another 20,000 jobs lost. And this is only the initial figure. Often when the current month’s figures are announced, they are “revised” once the following month’s numbers are reported, usually revised downward. They’ve already lowered their December employment level downward by 1,363,000. One wonders what the revised January figures will be a month from now. It’s hard to keep up with the half-truths and outright lies.

• Thirdly, long-term unemployed — those out of work more than a year — are no longer even counted in the “discouraged” category (courtesy of the Clinton administration’s “re-definition”). The number of long-term unemployed is the highest in 70 years.

• Fourth, unemployment among 12 million undocumented workers is hardly included in these totals.

• Finally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics assumes that employment in new businesses more than offsets layoffs by firms going out of business. (And the number of “new businesses” is also an assumption.) But if the folding businesses don’t report their payroll elimination, the BLS just counts those workers as “still employed.” Shadowstats.com estimates because of this and other “quirks” the BLS undercounts monthly job losses by about 150,000.

The Racist Nature of Unemployment

Of course, the headlines don’t shout out the racist unemployment rates among black and Latino workers, or youth. Because of racist discrimination, black and Latino unemployment is well over 30%. And youth unemployment hovers around the 50% mark — one out of every two young workers can’t find jobs.

In cities like Detroit — which has been in the throes of a depression for years and where an overwhelming majority of the population is black —— the overall unemployment rate of the entire working class is 50%. In states like California, it’s nearly 30%.

The “official” jobless rate, hovering around 10%, represents over 15 million workers. So the unemployment and underemployment rate plus “discouraged” uncounted workers totaling over 21% means there are well over 30 million workers who can’t get full-time jobs. And there are nearly 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are not counted as part of the labor force. Without these two imperialist wars, a goodly percentage of these “jobholders” would be jobless. Not to mention a good portion of the 2.4 million inmates in prison.

Unemployment itself is a killer. According to a 1971 Congressional study, it leads directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands from stress-related heart disease and other recession-related afflictions.

Capitalism has never had full employment. It’s inevitable “boom-and-bust” cycles breed unemployment in periodic recession/depressions, not to mention breeding wars which kill millions of workers worldwide (another way to “lower” unemployment?).

A mass movement to fight racist unemployment must be the order of the day. Communists in such a movement would be linking this horror to how the system needs and uses unemployment to weaken the whole working class. Such a movement could become a real “school for communism.”

Building the PLP out of this “school” can help lead to a revolution that would destroy the bosses, their system, and evils like unemployment, racism and war, replacing it with workers’ power — communism.