According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 159,000 jobs were lost in September—the greatest loss in five years. It is the ninth consecutive month of decline in employment this year, for a total of 760,000 jobs slashed from payrolls.
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These figures, based on employer surveys, understate the problem. Undocumented workers are either undercounted or not counted at all. Additionally, workers who have given up looking for a job are not accounted for in unemployment figures.
Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm in Greenwich, Conn., said: “There’s really nothing good about this report at all. We’ve lost jobs in nearly every area of the economy, and this is going to get worse before it gets better because the credit markets have deteriorated basically on a daily basis for the last few weeks.” (New York Times, Oct. 3)
The unemployment rate remained steady at 6.1 percent in September, but economists said that was primarily because people who have given up looking for work are not counted as unemployed. Economists with Goldman Sachs pointed out a broader figure that includes part-time workers who would prefer to work full time rising to 11 percent, a 14-year high. (Bloomberg, Oct. 6)
Over the last year, the unemployment rolls have swelled by 2.2 million to 9.5 million. Goldman Sachs forecasts that the jobless rate will reach a whopping 8 percent by the end of 2009, which would be the highest in 25 years. (New York Times, Oct. 3)
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in the goods-producing industries have lost 51,000 jobs, sharpening the decline in factory jobs to 442,000 during the last 12 months. A total of 35,000 jobs were lost in construction. Service workers in the retail trade lost 40,000 jobs. The financial sector slashed 17,000 jobs for a grand total of 172,000 jobs since 2006.
Sean Schwartz, 26, told the New York Times that he has been out of a job as a construction worker in Charlotte, Mich., for almost two months. With his weekly $750 paycheck now gone, he is trying to make ends meet on a $620.10 unemployment check that comes every other week. His wife works at Wal-Mart, and the couple has a two-year-old daughter and is expecting a baby in December. “We’re not getting the bills paid,” Schwartz said. (Oct. 3)
The unemployment rate is one of the fundamental indicators of the health of the economy. For workers, it is a more meaningful measure of the seriousness of the economic crisis than the obscure financial indexes and other measures of market trends thrown around by media pundits. It comes close to home for those of us who depend on our jobs to pay our bills and feed our families.
More fundamentally, the latest unemployment figures and expected cuts in the coming months underscore the severity of the economic crisis. Wall Street will pocket its bailout money, but things are not looking up for the working class.
Just as easily as it handed over hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds to Wall Street, the federal government could have used that money—our money—to create much-needed jobs and ensure that people were able to keep their homes and maintain decent living conditions. That would have been a reasonable expectation from a government that claims to be “by, of and for the people.” Instead, Washington unashamedly displayed its true class allegiances for all workers to see.
The absurdity of rising unemployment when people’s needs are going unmet is characteristic of capitalism. Workers go idle as people’s needs for homes, schools, health care and a variety of other necessities go unfulfilled. Put simply, people’s needs do not fuel capitalist production; profits do.
The capitalist class will gladly continue to let working-class people pay the price for its excesses. It is now up to us, the workers, to gather our strength, organize and fight back.
