Anyone who hasn’t fully absorbed bourgeois economic “science” as taught in colleges and universities in the United States and most other countries must be seriously puzzled by the latest employment report issued Aug. 7 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Now, how is it possible that the unemployment rate dropped, indicating less unemployment, at the same time almost a quarter of a million jobs disappeared? To add to the mystery, it’s a well-known fact that to keep the unemployment rate steady, around 150,000 jobs need to be added each month just to keep up with population growth.
So, in effect, there was a deficit of some 400,000 jobs in July, but the unemployment rate went down! What gives?
While “seasonal adjustments” can sometimes skew such numbers, the answer probably lies in the definitions used by the BLS for who is in the work force and who is considered to be unemployed. The work force, according to their definition, consists of those with full- or part-time jobs plus those unemployed who are actively seeking employment—that is, knocking on the doors of potential employers, scanning want ads, attending job fairs, submitting job applications, and so on.
The BLS does not include “discouraged workers,” who, according to its definition, are available for work but not actively seeking it because they think they have poor prospects of finding a job. Such workers, naturally, are also not included in the unemployment rate.
The reason the BLS omits from the work force and official unemployment rate all unemployed adults not actively seeking employment derives from the notion in bourgeois economic theory, referred to in academia as “neo-classical marginalism,” that all such workers, except for those severely disabled, have voluntarily opted for leisure.
And so, from this standpoint—that is, from the standpoint of the capitalist ruling class— a very sizable portion of the 400,000 or so workers who either lost jobs in July or weren’t hired in the first place—and weren’t counted by the labor statistics bureau through their household surveys as “actively seeking employment”—have simply opted for leisure.
A corollary of the theory is that far fewer workers would opt for leisure if unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps and the like were eliminated. Also, if minimum wage laws and unions didn’t exist, “artificially” propping up wages, more jobs would become available.
In other words, if leisure meant outright starvation, and wages were slashed to the barebones minimum, workers would stop choosing leisure over working. All those finding themselves temporarily out of a job would “actively seek work” leading to full employment.
That’s the promise if workers would only see the light. What a convenient theory for the billionaire exploiters of our labor!
