Hi folks. I'm a long-time reader here at DK since about 2003 but haven't posted in a while. But I'm back to activism and I wanted to talk about an action plan for unemployment. Unemployment is about the stupidest fricking thing that exists. Social and physical needs are everywhere you look, and millions of people cannot get jobs. I have a plan for short-term, medium-term, and long-term solutions. We need to renew the federal unemployment benefits now, then we need to extend federal unemployment benefits automatically as long as there's more jobs than people, and then I think we need a job guarantee law. I know it sounds impossible but lots of things do until they happen.
Everyone knows the job situation in this country has gone to shit. There's some high-paying professional and technical jobs, some middle-class jobs that are slowly disappearing underneath people's feet, then there's tons of low-wage and minimum-wage jobs for everyone else. We've got over 3 million long-term unemployed who are never going to get decent paying jobs again, without some kind of help.
We've currently got around 10.5 million people unemployed, with only 4 million jobs: http://www.epi.org/.... At the rate of 200K new jobs a month, we'll get all the jobs we need in, oh say, 30 months, as long as we have no additional people coming into the workforce, which we know won't be the case. That's not even close to enough jobs. I don't know if it's a failure of capitalism, or a failure of American capitalism, or just a failure of American managers and politicians, but that many people out of work is a f*cking failure of some kind.
Something else that I don't think is being captured by any of these stats is the freelancers who are only marginally making it. The SF Bay Area at least is now full of freelancers and artists who are scrounging for work and are living a very precarious existence.
So I came up with a plan. Short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. These are intended to strike at the heart of the so-called "austerity agenda" that far too many elected politicians, left and right, subscribe to.
Short term: we have to pass the federal unemployment extension (twitter hashtag for this effort is #RenewUI). I'd like to ask everyone who cares about the unemployed to call their representative this week, and Reps Boehner and Cantor. The bastard Republicans have called another recess so you'll be leaving a message til they return on April 28th. You can reach any representative or senator via the US Capitol switchboard, 202-224-3121. Try it, it's kinda fun to be able to call anyone in Congress this way! Then put that number on speed dial on your phone if you have a phone that does that. You want to be able to call that number repeatedly, and also share it with your friends. Rep Cole said last week that Republican House members weren't feeling very much pressure over this. We have to turn that around if they're going to even budge on this issue.
Medium term: we need to pass a law that automatically extends federal unemployment as long as there aren't enough jobs. This is beyond ridiculous that we even have to have this fight. Congress has never before failed to extend federal unemployment benefits when unemployment was this high; most times that they extended it, the unemployment rate was lower. Congress actually extended federal unemployment benefits five times under Pres GW Bush, each time the unemployment rate was lower than it is today. For some reason the Republicans have a dramatically different attitude towards the situation under Pres Obama.
Long term: And this is the big one. We need to pass a job guarantee law. I think anybody who wants a job should be able to get one and I don't think this should be a radical idea. This should be along the lines of any child who wants a primary-school education can get one. The federal govt should first restore all the stupid cuts to infrastructure and education, and fund all needed projects fully. Then they need to start subsidizing community service jobs. It's insane to me that there are millions of people who want to work but cannot, when we have bridges ready to fall down, mass transit that hasn't been upgraded since 1970, schools without enough nurses or librarians, police depts without enough police. Think of all of those needs going unmet, then think of the millions of people who are out of work because there aren't enough jobs. It's crazy! And it's mean. In a country where we require able-bodied adults to have a job to survive and don't provide any effective safety net, it's just mean to deny people any way to support themselves.
If you support a job guarantee, please take a look at my petition for it: http://petitions.moveon.org/....
And if anyone reading this lives in the Bay Area and is interested in helping out with this project, please contact me! I'm working with Working America to get this started but we need some local activists to form a core working group. I have a more detailed plan posted at the Oakland wiki: http://oaklandwiki.org/....
Thanks for reading!
Some links about a job guarantee:
Article by L. Randall Wray in The Nation, 6/27/2011: http://www.thenation.com/....
Interview with Pavlina Tcherneva on job guarantee programs, 1/21/2014: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/....
The recent Rolling Stone article by Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) that brought the idea of a job guarantee to many for the first time and was widely debated: http://www.rollingstone.com/...
And the follow-up article in Huffington Post detailing some responses to the Rolling Stone article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/....