Workers are earning less and losing benefits and access to health care, and a growing number of unemployed workers are not being counted by the official unemployment figures, according to government reports.

A recent U.S. Census Bureau report on income and poverty indicates that 1.3 million more people fell below the official poverty line in 2001 than the previous year--an increase from 11.3 percent to 11.7 percent of the U.S. population. This is the first increase in the poverty rate since 1993. Overall, the median income dropped 2.2 percent, indicating the broader impact of the crisis.

In a registration of the crisis facing farmers and other rural toilers, most of the increases in the poverty figures were in rural and suburban areas, particularly in the South. For Blacks and Latinos, the rate is roughly double the national average, at 22.7 percent and 21.4 percent, respectively.

One sector of the population did not see a drop in income. The wealthiest 5 percent earned 22.4 percent of the nation’s before-tax income in 2001, up from 22.1 percent the preceding year. Those figures do not include the unreported income of the wealthiest U.S. families.

Under the impact of the assault by the bosses on wages and working conditions over the past decade, a growing number of jobless workers have fallen outside the rising official government unemployment rate, currently at 5.7 percent. Workers whose bodies have been permanently damaged by the grinding speed-up that employers demand, and those locked up in prisons are among those who have swelled the ranks of the uncounted unemployed.

Some 5.4 million unemployed workers are living on disability insurance--a figure that has doubled since the early 1990s. No statistics are kept on millions of other unemployed workers who do not receive some form of government aid--those relying solely on family support and those who have left the workforce to care for children and relatives.

The number of workers behind bars has skyrocketed in the past two decades. The U.S. prison population more than doubled under the Clinton administration and today exceeds more than 2 million. If all of these workers were added to the unemployment figure, reported a New York Times article, "the real level of unemployment for men probably approaches the level of the recession-mired early 1980s."

The 2001 Census Bureau report also revealed that 1.4 million workers in the United States were added to the ranks of those lacking health insurance last year, bringing the total to 38 million, or 14.6 percent of the population.

Employers have been taking away an increasing share of the health benefits for retirees. Some 19.5 percent of private companies had health benefit programs for retirees over 65 years old in 1997. By the year 2000, however, that figure had shrunk by almost half, to 10.7 percent.

Those employers who do offer benefits are forcing retired workers to pay more. In 1980 a 60-year-old worker with 10 years on the job had to pay an average of 39 percent of total lifetime retirement medical costs not paid by Medicare. By last year that figure had shot up to 68 percent.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration is proposing far-reaching cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals for a wide range of drugs and medical devices used to treat elderly and disabled workers. These cuts will make it more difficult for working people to obtain lifesaving medicines such as cancer drugs, and devices such as cardiac defibrillators.  
 
 
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