Unemployment: Capitalism’s Killing Fields

As CHALLENGE has long reported, unemployment is a capitalist killer. Now the NY Times (2/25) has surveyed a number of studies proving this point — although, naturally, this bosses’ mouthpiece doesn’t trace unemployment to the profit system. It simply states that, “A growing body of evidence suggests that layoffs can have profound health consequences.” It then reports:

     • A Yale study “found that layoffs more than doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke among older workers.”

     • An Albany, NY State University 2009 study “found that a person who lost a job had an 83% greater chance of developing a stress-related health problem.”

     • A 2009 paper published by a Columbia University economist and a Chicago Federal Reserve researcher concluded that “during the recession of the early 1980s…death rates among high-seniority male workers jumped by 50% to 100% in the year after a job loss.”

Even the Threat of Job Loss
Causes Death

Furthermore, fear of losing one’s job can be more deadly than the actual layoff itself. The Times quotes a 2009 University of Michigan study which “found that ‘persistent perceived job insecurity’ was itself a powerful predictor of poor health and might even be more damaging than actual job loss.”

This was supported by events at the ArcelorMittal steel plant in Lackawanna, NY: “The anxiety among the 260 workers…actually began months, even years, before the company announced in mid-December 2008 that it was closing.” Even before it closed last April, it was discovered that “at least a half-dozen workers…had coronary problems dating back to 2006.” Three, all in relatively good health, died of heart attacks within weeks of one another.

All these latest studies only confirm a 1976 Congressional report which attempted to “estimate the cost of human suffering of people being out of work.” (NYT, 10/31/76) The report, based on 40 years of statistics from the Great Depression in the 1930s through 1973, concluded that when unemployment rose 1.4% in 1970 it led directly to the death of over 30,000 workers in the next five years, from stress-related ailments (strokes, heart and kidney) plus suicides. In fact, Committee testimony stated that, “The national rate of suicide in the U.S. can be viewed as an economic indicator,” so close is the link between joblessness and workers’ violent deaths.”

Consider, if a 1.4% rise in unemployment leads to 30,000 deaths over the following five years, how many deaths will result from the present Great Recession. Its recent 10% rate is more than double the prior 4.5% (supposedly “normal” for capitalism). That would mean 100,000 dead over the next five years. Do the math!

That’s only the “official” jobless rate. The real rate is over 20% (see CHALLENGE, 3/3).

Racist Unemployment

The overall figures become twice as devastating for black, Latino, Asian, immigrant and Native American workers, because racist discrimination, dating back to slavery and before, causes double rates of joblessness for these groups. The unemployment rate for Native Americans hovers around 80%! Racism nets the bosses extra trillions in profits because it enables them to pay these workers a good deal less than white workers.

This is also true for the long-range related effects of joblessness on workers’ families, through malnutrition, mental anguish and untreated sicknesses because of the unemployment-caused loss of health insurance. Infant mortality rates show dramatic increases within one to two years of a recession. Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Harvey Brenner told Congress that “short-term general hospital admissions…respond very sharply to adverse changes in the economy as do mental hospital admissions, for an unbroken period of about 127 years in the U.S.”

Unemployment is integral to capitalism and has existed since the birth of the system. Bosses compete against each other for maximum profits. Each one tries to produce as much as possible to capture the market. This inevitably causes overproduction: the market cannot buy all that’s produced. So bosses must resort to curtailing production, meaning mass layoffs — the “boom-and-bust” cycle — to try to maintain profits.

Unemployment can only be eradicated by eradicating capitalism. That requires a violent communist revolution. Building Progressive Labor Party to achieve this goal is a continuing struggle until we finish them off, ending bosses and profits and their overwhelming mass violence that destroys hundreds of millions of lives through unemployment, racism and wars.