[lbo-talk] OWS Demands working group: jobs for all!

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Fri Oct 21 18:02:42 PDT 2011


On 10/21/2011 7:02 PM, Voyou wrote:


> this strategy was, I think, predicated on, or required by, a)
> technical changes that made things like global supply chains more
> successful and b) political action from groups who had been excluded
> from the benefits of these policies, which made the particular way the
> policies had been implemented up to that point politically impossible
> to maintain.

Mike Beggs will hopefully respond to this - especially since he just finished a whole dissertation on the politics and economics of postwar full employment. But to me your stance seems to be rooted in an assumption that full employment is always "really" just a mask for exclusionary full employment for some privileged group - e.g., white men. I can see how this might follow from certain strands of "theory" that "interrogate" the concept of "universality" (sorry for all the quotes), but if that's the case it just shows the uselessness of theory when it comes to questions that require empirical verification.

Here is an empirical fact (or actually a stylized fact, an empirical regularity) that I doubt anyone who's studied this stuff would seriously challenge: when the economy approaches full employment, the *primary* beneficiaries are always those groups that previously were most excluded - e.g., blacks or those with less formal education. You would see this, for example, by looking at a historical graph of unemployment by education level - the less educated always have higher unemployment, but the gap always narrows as the aggregate unemployment rate falls (i.e., as full employment is approached). See Table 1., p.35 of this for a slightly different way of presenting the data: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.165.2947&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The last time we approached full employment in the US was a few years in the late 90's. Unemployment fell from a high of 7.8% in June 1992 to a low of 3.8% in April 2000 (lowest since the 1960's). Who benefited most? Well, the percentage of whites with jobs rose 3.0 points (from 62.3 to 65.3). But the percentage of blacks with jobs rose 6.3 points (from 55.1% to 61.4). This closed more than *half* the black-white gap in employment rates. And this had a remarkable effect on wages, too. From 1992 to 2000, the black-white ratio of median earnings (for full-time workers) rose spectacularly - from 79.7% to 95.3% for women. (By 2010 - a time of mass unemployment - the ratio had fallen back to 80.2%.) For men the increase was much more limited (70.6% to 73%, and now back to 71%), and mass incarceration probably has a lot to do with this. But the gain was still real.

SA



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