The official unemployment rate inched up to 8.5% it was reported last week. But that’s only half of it, literally. There are millions of people working sporadically or in half time employment. The ranks of this group has grown by some 80%, in the last year to almost 9 million people and 750,000 workers lost their jobs in March. The real unemployment is closer to 20% of the workforce.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a real unemployment rate called the U6, sounds a bit like a German submarine and is just as explosive which is why it is not popular news. Plus, millions more homeowners are expected to lose their jobs in coming months which will add to the unemployment statistics along with the 689,000 people who filed for unemployment in the first week or so of April. This will also intensify the foreclosure trend putting further strain on public services that politicians in both capitalist parties are eagerly enacting;
This will continue even during the recovery one “expert” announces. The expert, a bourgeois academic, defines recovery, as do all strategists of capital, in terms of stock activity, housing starts and GDP growth or non-growth. Most workers would not describe human beings being deprived of their means of subsistence and their shelter as a growth period.
Absence of an Alternative
As I headed for the coffee shop to read the papers the other morning, I spoke to a city worker and asked him what he thought of the new contract. He wasn’t very pleased, he said there were no raises but the only alternative were layoffs or furloughs. These are the two alternatives the employers offer and are brought to the rank and file Union members by the Union leaders. I suggested there could be a third alternative; we could fight back as some of the French workers have been doing. Naturally, living in the country with the most censored press in the industrialized world, he was unaware that French workers had two general strikes in the last few weeks and that individual bosses had been held hostage in plants forcing them to negotiate-----a tactic that produced some results. The employers aren’t going to make an issue of this in their media.
The next two folks I spoke to were teachers. They were disgusted with the situation as they have been under attack and in many states across the nation are being forced to take unpaid leave, euphemistically called a furlough, They also never considered any alternatives other than cutbacks of one sort or another. The NEA, the Union to which they belong, is the largest Union in the US with over 3 million members. It has some 330,000 members in the state of California. Yet the strategy of the top Union leadership is the same as they accept completely the employer’s view of the world and the sanctity of the market. The money isn’t there, they argue, echoing the bosses’ propaganda, we have to take concessions. They organized rallies at which members would wear pink to protest layoffs of teachers and try to pressure the bosses to be a little less aggressive. Pink symbolizes pink slips which are layoff notices in the US. Naturally, due to these pathetic responses from the heads of organized Labor to a major assault on their members the result is these affairs being sparsely attended and accomplishing nothing.
Further cuts are on the way as the 3 trillion the Democrats and Republicans have handed over to their banker friends will have to be paid for by increased taxes and cuts in public services.
While there is no doubt that people are cautious and somewhat afraid of losing more of what they worked so hard to get; this is not the main obstacle to a fight back. Most people do not know where they can go; there is not yet any organized and significant objective force that offers a way out. The see that the trade Union leadership is collaborating completely with the big business politicians in their efforts to save capitalism and profit making. Even at the local level, where the stifling grip of the bureaucracy can be weaker, few local leaders are openly challenging the collaborationist policies offered by the heads of organized Labor and offering an alternative strategy. Many just have no plan, no perspectives and consequently no solution.
The Labor leadership put all their eggs in the Obama basket and the shells are cracking already. But the collapse of the Anglo Saxon economy, a collapse of the US model of capitalism, has not gone unnoticed, nor has the capitalist’s response to it. Consciousness lags behind events, and as the economic crisis deepens, a reality a headline in the Wall Street Journal confirmed recently, the anger that simmers beneath the surface of US society will become more pronounced. People are looking for answers while others will act.
The actions of June Reyno, the courageous woman who chained herself to her house in San Diego and has been arrested on numerous occasions, are ahead of the game, but people watch and learn. US working class history is not one of passivity and meek acceptance; moments of apparent calm have been interrupted by huge explosions from below. This economic crisis has been historic in its scope. It has not only changed the United States, it has changed the world and the role of US capitalism in it.
It is also changing the working class in the US and throughout the globe. The working class here in the US is not immune, just leaderless, but struggles and movements of resistance throw up new leaders and change old ones. History proves that.
If you like what this blog has to say, and want to fight back contact us:
LA Arturo 323-428-5711 or Julia 310-474-6729
Bay Area: 510-595-4676 email erin@bringdownbush.org
Chicago: email LMVchicago@yahoo.com
Toronto: 416-323-0620
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