Juliet Schor in The Nation: "Now that we're in the endgame of financial reform, and a second stimulus is off the table, it's looking more and more as if the nation's jobless will be fending for themselves. The punditocracy has declared that the recovery is for real, so 26 million officially unemployed and underemployed Americans will be getting a promise of future growth. But a return to business as usual—"jobs and income will trickle down via growth"—is a disaster, on economic and ecological grounds.
"First, it won't work. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that we'd have to add half a million jobs each month for three years to get back to the pre-crash unemployment rate. Given that the biggest monthly job growth number we've seen in this recovery has been 162,000, with a hefty chunk of that attributable to temporary Census jobs and stimulus spending, half a million is an order of magnitude larger than what we can realistically expect. Globalization means that many of the new jobs will be created offshore. Even more significant, growth-induced productivity increases and labor-saving technical change are reducing employers' need for workers. Robots are being used to clean up the gulf oil spill; customer service representatives are no longer people but machines. This is mostly a good thing, but only if the displaced find a livelihood. As Robert Pollin recently argued in these pages, the aggregate output, or overall growth, approach won't get us back to 5 percent unemployment until 2017. "The other flaw in the "grow our way out of unemployment" approach is that it's ecological suicide... http://www.thenation.com/article/beyond-business-usual _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
