Earlier government reports indicated there had been a growth in the number of jobs available in April. But the U.S. Labor Department issued revised figures showing job losses for each of the first three months of the year. Among the 41,000 people hired last month a substantial majority were temporary workers in the service industry.

Bosses in construction cut the most jobs last month, putting 79,000 workers on the street. The 19,000 manufacturing jobs eliminated in April marked one of the lowest monthly cutbacks since the employers began a wave of layoffs in July 2000 that led to 1.7 million factory jobs being wiped out.

These and other figures concerning the economic recovery in the United States show that for working people an upturn has yet to begin.

"Our major emphasis continues to be on implementing restructuring," said David Farr, chief executive for the manufacturing giant Emerson Electric Co., referring to the company’s plan to close down 30 of its production plants this year. The appliance manufacturer posted a 27 percent drop in profits for 2001, ending a 43-year streak of uninterrupted profit growth.

Other large employers, like San Francisco-based apparel manufacturer Levi Strauss & Company, have announced they will be laying off workers. Levi Strauss is closing down six of its U.S. factories, laying off 3,300 workers. This is the company’s third round of cutbacks since 1997. By the time the shutdowns are completed in October, the company will have two plants left in the country.

Delphi Corp., the biggest manufacturer of auto parts, said in April that it would cut 6,100 more jobs this year. Since March 2001 the company has eliminated 17,540 jobs. At the same time the company has driven through a 3 percent productivity increase this year.

For around two decades the capitalists have been unable to expand their productive capacity enough to trigger the kind of economic boom that would reverse the downward trend in industrial profit rates. They have instead sought to boost their returns by "downsizing," reorganizing production for "just-on-time" de--livery, and use of technology to produce more with less workers. This remains the main feature of the current tentative U.S. recovery from the recession.  
 
Productivity increases
The U.S. government is reporting record rises in labor productivity the past two quarters. Productivity, or the amount of goods and services produced for each hour worked, rose at a 5.2 percent annual rate in the last three months of 2001 and at an 8.6 percent rate in the first three months of 2002. Meanwhile, the number of hours worked by production workers and other non-management employees dropped by 0.3 percent last month.

"If productivity is rising as robustly as the Labor Department’s latest report suggests, it means businesses are squeezing more and more output out of fewer workers," wrote the Wall Street Journal.

Capitalist economists have pointed to investments made by the employers in the 1990s in labor saving machinery as a major factor in being able to carry out the "faster-than-usual" payroll cuts and the resulting productivity gains. "It is not a situation where we’re producing more with less, we’re producing less with a lot less," David Ingram, from Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, told Investor’s Business Daily. "Firms will try to meet an increase in demand by working their existing labor force harder, until managers are convinced that the upturn is real," added Ingram.

The New York Times reported April 24 that "American business is beginning to increase spending on new machines and equipment," but noted that "the reason for investing in these tools of production is to cut costs rather than expand output. And despite a modest uptick in company payrolls, large-scale hiring is still off in the future."

It pointed to Intel, which spent $12.8 billion the last two years on capital improvements to build two new factories. "The driving force behind Intel’s latest expenditure, however, is not to expand sales but to cut costs," the Times noted. Intel cut another 5,000 workers from its payroll last year, bringing the number of people it employs to 82,000.

Likewise, in its takeover of the Compaq computer company, bosses at Hewlett Packard plan to lay off 15,000 people to make the combined company more "efficient" and profitable.

The capitalist class is watching capital spending closely because purchases of machinery, computers, trucks, aircraft, and other such expenditures account for $1 trillion a year in the U.S. economy. A 1.75 percent decline in capital spending in the fourth quarter of 2001 helped limit economic growth to 1.7 percent.  
 
Profit levels hard hit
The April 1 Wall Street Journal highlighted the fact that despite the 2001 recession turning out to be one of the mildest on record in terms of a downturn in gross domestic product, "it was one of the harshest in memory when measured in changes in profit levels." The capitalist daily reported that even though the gross domestic product (GDP) grew last year by 1.2 percent, corporate profits declined by 15.9 percent, one of the worst drops since World War II.

Likewise, Forbes reported that the coun-try’s 500 most profitable firms showed a 23 percent drop in total profits last year, the worst performance in the 34 years the magazine has been keeping track of such trends.  
 
 
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