http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-sloan/the-last-sad-laughs_b_522138.html?view=print
The Last (Sad) Laughs
How much longer will America's 'gravest recession' last?
Of course, no one knows for sure, but a table produced by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, which since 1939 has tracked the increase or
decrease in non-farm jobs as reported in its monthly Employer Survey,
offers a very cautionary note.
>From its post-Great Depression base of 29.2 million, America added
109.6 million non-farm jobs until reaching the peak figure of 138.8
million in 2007. Since December 2007, when this Great Recession
started, non-farm payrolls have declined by 11.2 million, and
employment overall -- of all types -- has declined by 13.0 million
jobs.
Replacing these millions of jobs -- and adding the 140,000 a month
needed in order to keep pace with growth in the labor force -- must be
our nation's highest priority. And yet, sadly, it isn't.
The White House and Congress seem wildly disconnected from the jobs
crisis, perhaps because they spend so much time aiming a strobe light
on health care reform, Iraqi elections, a new START treaty, financial
industry reform, climate change, an amended No Child Left Behind,
Afghanistan and a balanced budget.
The BLS non-farm payroll table offers a focused summary of job
creation in the past and a strong sense of what may be possible in the
future: America's best three-year job creation total was 10.3 million,
which occurred from 1997 to 1999; its second best effort produced 9.4
million jobs between 2004 and 2006; and the third-best performance was
7.7 million new jobs in the years 1984 to 1986.
But America needs to find at least 11.2 to 13.0 million jobs right now
just to get us back to December 2007's employment level, which itself
was no great shakes, and 22 million new jobs if we want to have, as
morally we should, near full real employment. And for every month we
delay further, the total increases by 140,000 jobs, which, if measured
over three years, would total a further 5.0 million jobs.
Yet not once in seven decades have we ever added more than 10.3
million jobs in three years.
Economists can debate which single 'lever' can best add millions of
jobs a year for the next several years but, to date, we have used
almost none of the arrows in the nation's job recovery quiver.
Meanwhile 18 to 20% of America's workers have been unemployed or
extremely underemployed for 27 months. And the levers which we have
ignored most consistently are programs modeled after FDR's Works
Progress Administration which from 1938 through 1940 employed 5.8
million jobless Americans. That's roughly 17% of the then entire
non-farm workforce, a figure comparable to the task confronting our
nation today.
This White House and this Congress seem intent on proving that history
repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Their initial jobs
programs have been 'missing in action', and their use of phantom 'jobs
saved' versus 'real jobs not created' is beyond misleading.
Like the "unemployables" of the Great Depression before FDR came
along, America's jobless today face the cruelest of choices: hunger,
homelessness and declining heath. And their anxiety and anger are
growing even as their hope fades.
But the jobless are not completely destitute in a democracy -- they
still own their votes which can be 'spent' on election days or not.
And if the BLS total non-farm payroll history is any indication, the
jobless will have at least three election cycles -- 2010, 2012 and
2014 -- to spend those votes, and then, as embittered as they will be,
theirs will be 'the last (sad) laughs'.
Rick Sloan is Director of Communications of the International
Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and Acting Executive
Director of "Ur Union of Unemployed". Ur Union of Unemployed, or
UCubed, is a community service project of the IAM that offers the
unemployed a way to work together to help end the Great Recession of
2007.
Follow Rick Sloan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RickSloan
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