Tom Walker wrote:
>There's nothing fishy about the *numbers* -- they measure what they're
>intended to measure. There is something fishy about the *relevance* of those
>numbers in terms of the lives of working people. A family in which one adult
>is working full time and earning enough to support the entire household
>contributes one active participant to the labour force. A family in which
>two adults have to be working full time to earn a similar level of income
>contributes twice as many participants to the labour force and thus
>"improves" the employment picture.
Surprisingly enough, I not only know this, but I've written about it many
times. American society is sick with overwork, at least as much as it's
plagued by deprivation, and stagnant and/or declining real hourly wages are
a big reason for this. But the kind of analysis I was responding to - a
cliche of left writing, which features "part-time" work, and the
undermeasurement of unemployment - can't make this point.
>It's magic: lower incomes + higher labour force participation = a lower rate
>of unemployment. This precisely confirms the right-wing nostrum that there
>is no such thing as involuntary unemployment. At a low enough wage, there is
>a job for everyone who wants to work. Kick out the "barriers" to "labour
>flexibility" and unemployment will fall.
The "right-wing" analysis is not entirely untrue. Provide no welfare state,
or dismantle an existing one, and you can force lots of people to work any
kind of crappy job at any kind of crappy wage. The problem with this isn't
its untruth but its brutality.
Doug
