------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Feb. 6, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
JOBLESS INCREASE IN U.S. AND GLOBALLY By Heather Cottin They're cutting 45 workers at the departments of labor and motor vehicles in Connecticut. Not many, you say? But this is in addition to 3,800 other jobs that state's government is eliminating this winter. "This is the start of the next round of layoffs," an official told reporters. This is just Connecticut. With all 50 states now facing budget deficits running into the billions of dollars, public-service workers all over the country expect devastating cutbacks. According to the Census Bureau, 15 million people work for state and local governments, at jobs from teachers to transit workers, administrators to airport workers. Another 11 million people work for the U.S. government. All these jobs are now in jeopardy. States are cutting back public-sector jobs because they have less revenue. Over the past 20 years, new tax laws at the state and federal levels have given hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthiest people and corporations in the United States. Now a capitalist economic crisis has settled in, further cutting tax revenues. Even as the federal government has cut hundreds of billions of dollars in funds to the states, it has handed over comparable amounts to the military. Public services are less profitable than the high-tech military- industrial sector of the economy. But because they are more labor intensive, they provide more people with jobs. When the deindustrialization of the Midwest and other regions began in the 1970s, corporations and politicians promised workers there would be new jobs in the service sector to replace jobs in smokestack industries. Now the service workers--already lower paid--are under attack. Across the nation, services have been privatized or closed down and public workers fired. Today's unemployment crisis didn't start in the public sector. It has become critical in the private sector as well. In New York City, with an 8.4-percent unemployment rate, holiday sales were a bust. Layoffs by airlines and brokerage firms have accelerated. Almost 175,000 jobs have disappeared from the city over the last two years, including 11,700 in December. Unemployment plagues other areas as well. The number of workers employed in U.S. manufacturing has declined by 2.4 million since April 1998, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In capitalism's mad drive for profits, millions of jobs have been eliminated all over the world. The capitalists have closed down industries in the United States, Europe and Japan while expanding their operations in the Third World to exploit cheap labor power. Since the collapse of the socialist bloc, this labor market includes Eastern Europe. ELIMINATING HIGHER-PAID JOBS Capital is eliminating workers here in research, chip design, engineering, even financial analysis--jobs that have paid well in the United States but that, with the new Internet technology, can be done anywhere. For example, the Bank of America is slashing over 5,000 jobs. Its spokespeople explain that in India, for example, "work that costs $100 an hour in the U.S. gets done for $20." The Feb. 3 issue of Business Week magazine, in an article headlined "The New Global Job Shift," calls it "globalization's next wave." It means eliminating higher-paying jobs in the industrialized capitalist countries and moving the work to the Philippines, Hungary, Costa Rica, Bul garia, China, Romania, Russia, the Baltic states and South Africa. As information technology jobs flow abroad, layoffs decimate the work force here in banking and stock brokerage firms. This includes management-level jobs. "You will see an explosion of work going overseas," says Forrester Research Inc. analyst John C. McCarthy. He predicts that at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the United States, Europe and Japan to low-cost countries by 2015. The only beneficiary of this trend is the ruling class. Once again, the capitalists are taking advantage of the poverty and insecurity their system creates to rob the working class--even some of its highest-paid members--of their lives and labor. WORLD UNEMPLOYMENT AT RECORD LEVELS According to a Jan. 24 report issued by the International Labor Organization, unemployment around the world has reached a record figure of 180 million. That is 6.5 percent of the global work force. And, says the ILO, it is likely to continue rising. The ILO describes the world employment situation as alarming. Latin America is hardest hit by this capitalist scourge, but in some regions of Africa and the Middle East, 25 percent of young people are unemployed. Even university graduates cannot find work. The ILO notes that the number of working poor--people earning less than a single measly dollar a day--has risen dramatically, to 550 million people. In Europe, the economic crisis has driven the average unemployment rate up to 7.6 percent. The stores are filled with commodities. There is a glut of food. There is industrial overcapacity, plenty of factories, lots of inventory-- in short, capitalist overproduction. But people cannot afford to buy the products of their labor. WHAT STARTS A CRISIS? A capitalist crisis begins in the area of production, when the owners of capital are driven to expand tempestuously during a period of boom. But at the very peak of the boom, when everyone seems to be working two jobs and borrowing money to buy more on the expectation of even bigger earnings in the future, the crisis begins--usually in the area of capital goods. The present crisis is now several years old. It began in the area of computers, software, communications, fiber-optic cables, excess commercial building space and other elements of the high-tech economy. This in turn depressed the market for the materials used in these products. Now the crisis has spread to service workers--both those employed by the state and people in retail sales, food service and similar jobs. Thus, at a time when science, technology and human industry have created the possibility of decent lives for all workers, a world economic crisis entirely propelled by the irrationality of capitalism creates unemployment and misery for billions. Acting in the interests of their billionaire cronies, the political establishments in Washington, Bonn, London and Paris keep military spending up to protect their irrational capitalist system by expanding their imperialist control over the rest of the world. It is an irremediable system, designed to provide profits for one half of 1 percent of the population while the needs, rights and lives of billions of people are ignored. Globalization is a contradiction in itself, with a potential to unite the working class. The global economy is in contraction, and the capitalists, riding upon the backs of the workers of the world, are heading into another economic crisis. The spurs of the international bourgeoisie and the governments that operate in their interests are digging into the workers' flesh. Human productive activity can be put on a rational and planned basis so that human need, not profit, is the basis of the economy. But not under capitalism. Capitalism is at present exhibiting its most contradictory and brutal manifestations. Only the working class can intervene to get rid of this insupportable system of capitalist private property. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
