Public Employee Press

Part 4 in a series on jobs and unemployment

Jobs crisis: 15 million still out of work

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

While mainstream economists and apologists for the disastrous failures of our capitalist economic system say the Great Recession may be ending, the stubborn jobs crisis suggests that the economic malaise may last for years.

With 10 percent of Americans out of work, claims that the economy is recovering fall flat. Consider:

• Unemployment among 16- to 24-year olds is nearly 20 percent.
• African American unemployment could top 17 percent by the fall, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, and is already 25 percent in some major areas.
• Close to half of the 15 million jobless Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer.
• Last year, President Obama’s stimulus package saved or created 2 million jobs and helped state and local governments avoid mass layoffs and deep service cuts. But the threat of widespread downsizing looms this year as states and cities face deep revenue shortfalls and less federal aid.

Six workers are available for each new job that opens up. All told, 8 million jobs have disappeared since the recession started in December 2007.

Needed: 11 million jobs

With 2.7 million people added to the workforce since then, we would need to create 11 million new jobs to return to pre-recession rates. “To turn the corner toward creating more jobs, we need emergency aid for families, cities and states,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts.

Job creation occurred three months after recessions ended in the 1960s and the 1970s, but lagged after those of the 1990s and the 2000s and probably won’t occur in the United States for at least two years after the current recession, said Katherine Newman, director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

Newman was among four speakers at a March 26 forum, “The Jobs Crisis and What to Do About It,” sponsored by the City University of New York’s Murphy Institute and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

In the last two decades, we have experienced “jobless recoveries.” Profits return, and stocks go up, but solid union jobs with decent benefits continue to disappear. Most of the new jobs offer low wages, and most of the productivity growth goes to the economic elite.

Insecurity, not job stability, is the economic condition today’s workers face, said moderator Ed Ott of Cornell University.

No jobs for college grads

“Students coming out of college are unable to connect with the economy,” said panelist David Pedulla of Princeton University’s Sociology Dept. He said a growing number of workers are employed in jobs below what they should expect based on their educational attainment.

Only 48 percent of last year’s college graduates were employed in September 2009, and having a college education has not protected workers from staying unemployed for more than a year.

“We are going to have a whole generation of the country affected by this and the effect is not going to go away,” Newman said.

Rutgers Law School professor Philip Harvey said the New Deal of the 1930s offered a blueprint for a way out of the joblessness in the United States. By his estimate, a $590 billion jobs program could create over 17 million full-time jobs with decent wages and benefits.

“We have to strike while the iron is hot,” said Adelphi University sociology professor Gertrude Goldberg, who chairs the National Jobs for All Coalition. The coalition sponsored a conference on the jobs crisis in the fall with the support of DC 37 and is working with others to create a nationwide full-employment and living-wage movement.

The AFL-CIO is pushing for a $15 billion jobs package, which would be funded through a tax on bankers’ bonuses and Wall Street transactions. In mid-March, the federation launched a nationwide campaign, “Jobs Now — Make Wall Street Pay,” to push for the legislation.