The bosses’ media, and their two flunky parties are flooding us with glowing accounts about “low jobless” figures and rising prosperity for the working class. Yet this “prosperity” completely ignores the fact that every rise of 1.4 percent in the jobless rate leads directly to the deaths of over 30,000 workers in the following five years from stress-related ailments, suicide and homicide!
A 1976 Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee attempted to “estimate the cost in human suffering of people being out of work (N.Y. Times, 10/31/76). Think of what that translates into from the recent Great Recession when the jobless rate reached 10 percent, seven times the 1.4 percent figure. To say nothing of the loss in wages, and homes due to the inability to make mortgage payments, incurred by the millions of unemployed. How does that figure into the alleged “prosperity”? So any time a company lays off thousands of workers, it is contributing to masses of deaths over the following five years.Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University testified to that Congressional Committee that, “The national rate of suicide in the United States can be viewed as an economic indicator,” so closely is the link between joblessness and workers’ violent deaths due to capitalism’s constant and inevitable recessions.
The report was based on 40 years of statistics and found “a consistent relationship in the unemployment rate” that affects “all ages, both sexes, for whites and non-whites.” And none of this deals with the related effects on the families of the jobless workers, in terms of malnutrition, mental anguish and sickness. The study said that infant mortality rates show dramatic increases within one to two years of an economic recession. Brenner said “short-term general hospital admissions in the U.S. 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.” Death by suicide rises within the first month or two of a recession Heart disease peaks three to five years after the start of a recession.
Racism doubles the toll
And the government’s own statistics show that jobless rates for Black workers are twice the rate for white workers, and result in increased rates for Latino workers as well. So all the categories cited above fall doubly harsh on the lives of these workers.
The millions of workers sent to an early grave as a direct result of joblessness over the years of the Great Depression and the multiple recessions since then could probably rival any mass killing anywhere in the world. But, of course, added to this are those affected by the same economic downturns in the rest of the capitalist world. Capitalism is an international phenomenon.
None of the above includes workers killed on the job in industrial “accidents”—about 100,00 a year in the U.S.—because bosses refuse to spend profits on safety. Nor does it account for millions hurt or made sick (some terminally as in ”cancer alley” in northeastern New Jersey) by their working conditions.
Phony figures
Never mind that—as CHALLENGE has reported—the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) so-called U3 U.S. unemployment rate of 4.0 doesn’t count workers who have stopped looking for a job after four weeks of unemployment (which would double that 4.0 to 8.0, the BLS’s so-called U6 rate); doesn’t figure in millions of workers who take part-time jobs because full-time ones are unavailable (the so-called underemployed); doesn’t count workers removed altogether from the unemployment rolls after being jobless for six months, nor those who join the military because they can’t find a job, nor those who can’t look for a needed job because day-care for their children is out of reach; nor the first-time job seekers just graduating high school or college. Shadowstats.com, which accounts for much of this, puts the true unemployment figure at 21.3 percent.
You best believe that capitalism is a murderous system. To eliminate these horrors, only a communist revolution—abolishing bosses, profits, a divisive wage system, racism and sexism—can do the job.