Tomorrow the Federal Government will release the figure for unemployment in September. It is likely to pass the 15 million mark. This figure is a bit deceiving because when you give up looking for work you are no longer counted as unemployed. But there is a difference between having a job and losing hope of getting one, they are 2 completely different entities.
This week I hit my 29th week being jobless this year, after 10-years without a missing a week of work. The union officials at my local of the Carpenters Union also regularly massage our local’s unemployment figure. We were a union of 3400 members, including 700 retirees and we’ve lost 500 members in the last year (overwhelmingly due to unemployment.) I am #235 on the out of an out of work list of over 400 carpenters. Yet their math put our unemployment rate at 10%!
But if the figures aren’t enough: this morning at the union Hiring Hall there were carpenters selling tools, that’s how bad it’s got. Selling, as one guy used to call it, their money-makers. I even had a neighbor this week, who together with his cousin own an old dump truck, advise me to join him in collecting cans and bottles from others recycling. He leaned in and told me, “Sunday and Monday nights are best!” Things are looking rough.
This month is our family’s last month of health benefits. They run out October 31st. That’s Halloween, isn’t it? Ironic.
And last night at our Back to School night the Principal was boasting that our teachers get paid till 3 but are often here to 7 or 8 0’clock. How about hiring some Teachers? The $874 billion spent on defending the USA from the threat of rural Afghanistan and Iraq could’ve been spent on hiring 1.6 million teachers. But then unemployment and the poverty of our public schools are not a serious emergency for capitalism.
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