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Vol. 79/No. 39 November 2, 2015
Jobless numbers hide jobs
crisis facing workers
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
The Department of Labor reports that unemployment is at a seven-year low
— 5.1 percent for August and September. But this paints a false picture
of the real jobs crisis facing millions of workers today. Government
statisticians blithely eliminated more people from the workforce count
in September than the number of jobs created, many who the government
says are “discouraged” and no longer looking for work. As a result, the
labor force participation rate actually declined last month to 62.4
percent, the lowest point since October 1977.
Depression conditions today, including the large number of unemployed
and underemployed, are rooted in a prolonged decline in capitalist
production and trade worldwide. The propertied rich either turn their
funds into unproductive speculation or drive to boost sagging profit
rates by attacking workers’ wages and hours, speeding up production and
slashing safety on the job.
There are fewer workers employed in manufacturing today than at the
beginning of the year. Over the past two months alone 27,000 production
jobs have been eliminated. Plant capacity utilization fell to 77.5
percent in September.
Average real wages for production jobs, adjusted for inflation, have
been stagnant for decades. They peaked in January 1973 at $22.41 per
hour in today’s dollars, and have mostly remained at or below $20 ever
since. The bosses’ success in instituting two-tier wages, a major issue
auto workers are fighting against in “Big Three” negotiations today,
have lowered weekly pay for many workers.
The numbers of women in the U.S. workforce has also declined, a big
reversal from trends over the past several decades. Last year the labor
force participation rate “of prime-age American women fell behind that
of Japan,” reported the Financial Times, as well as “Sweden, France, and
even Greece.”
This matches drops among men in the “prime” 25-to-54-year-old working
ages. For them, “only Italy and Israel have lower participation rates
among 34 countries tracked by the OECD [Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development].”
As bosses gut pension plans that guarantee monthly payments for life,
they’re “nudging” workers to put more money into 401(k) investment plans
or, when they can get away with it, just doing it for them. A number of
companies like Google are simply putting 10 percent of workers’ pay into
401(k) accounts. In a growing number of cases, they do so without
increasing company matching contributions, placing a greater and greater
share of the “burden” of longer life on the backs of working people.
Rising health insurance premiums and deductibles are also slashing into
workers’ paychecks. Since the Affordable Care Act — better known as
Obamacare — was instituted in 2010, the average annual premium for a
family policy has risen by about $1,000 to nearly $5,000.
Over the past five years deductibles have increased more than six times
faster than workers’ earnings. Policies offering lower premiums set high
deductibles, some as much as $6,000 per year, discouraging workers from
seeing a doctor when they get sick.
Starting next year monthly premiums for about one-third of the millions
of people on Medicare are set to rise as much as 52 percent.
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