Vol. 79/No. 3      February 2, 2015

This decline reflects the effects on workers of the long-term crisis in capitalist production and trade that opened in the 1970s. Bosses saw their profit rates begin to decline from what they had grown used to after Washington emerged from World War II as the top imperialist power. The propertied rulers began cutting investment in plants and production and put their capital into speculative investment, which led to balloons that swelled, then burst, followed by more of the same.

This cycle led to the 2008 economic crisis and stagnation since. The bosses have no answer, other than a relentless, grinding assault on workers’ wages, working conditions, job safety and social protections.

Government statistics point to an uptick in jobs today. According to the Labor Department the unemployment rate for December declined 0.2 percent to 5.6 percent.

At the same time average hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory workers dropped 6 cents to $20.68, with increasing numbers of workers making less. Over the past year hourly earnings rose 1.7 percent — more than offset by the rising cost of food, rent, health care and other necessities.

This hiring uptick has meant improved conditions for many workers thrown out of jobs over the last six years. It has helped boost the confidence of working people and lay the basis for the current step-up in working-class resistance today. Walmart, fast-food and airport contract workers are marching and organizing strikes, demanding $15 an hour, full-time work and a union.

While some hiring has picked up, it in no way has ended the crisis of joblessness, for which the capitalist rulers have no solution.

The Jan. 9 Wall Street Journal says 2014 was the “best year of [U.S.] job growth in 15 years.” But this gives a false picture of what workers really face.

The government defines the current 5.6 percent official unemployment rate as “full employment.” This includes 8.7 million workers without a job, nearly one-third of them for more than six months, as well as 6.8 million part-time workers — counted as “employed” but unable to get full-time work. Millions more too discouraged to look for work are not even counted by government statisticians. In December, the Labor Department reported that 252,000 jobs were created, but even more workers — 273,000 — were dropped from the workforce count. The U.S. workforce is shrinking. The proportion of men between the ages of 25 and 54 who are not working has more than tripled to 16 percent since the late 1960s. The number of women not working has gone down from 74 percent participating in the workforce in 1999 to 69 percent today.

Of the jobs created, nearly 40 percent of them are in retail trade, leisure and hospitality industries, temporary employment and home health care services, all of which pay low wages.

It took more than five years from the end of the 2008-2009 recession for the number of jobs to equal prerecession numbers. But this ignores the population increase of 15 million over the past seven years — 8 million of whom are of working age.

The actual percentage of the population with a job — a more objective way of examining employment conditions — dropped from 63.3 percent in January 2007 to below 59 percent by September 2009, and since then it has hovered around this figure. In December, it was 59.2, unchanged over the past three months.

Over the past decade the bosses have driven the average hourly pay of manufacturing workers down, the National Employment Law Project reported in November. Workers have been forced to accept widening gaps in pay by two-tier wage schemes and increasing use of temporary workers.

Workers with jobs in industry were among the better paid workers until the early 2000s. By 2013 production jobs paid almost a dollar an hour less than the average workers employed in private sector jobs receive.  
 
 
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