With 14.5 Million Unemployed, How Many Jobs
Can Labor Create? And How Will We Do It?

At just about every labor rally anywhere in the United States, speakers are talking about jobs, good jobs, union jobs, “green” jobs. Our newly elected AFL-CIO leaders are urging us, with “feel good” speeches, to work together and “fight for jobs,” So what are we to do to get those jobs? Will anyone tell us?

There are currently 14.5 million people who are officially unemployed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number is increased to 30.2 million Americans if we count those who are involuntarily working part-time or who have given up looking for a job because they can’t find one. Discounting the rhetoric, how does organized labor propose to create the millions of jobs that will rescue American families from poverty?

At the recent AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, with the support of several construction unions, proposed a “JOBS NowI” campaign, whose principal objective is to get the federal, state and local governments to create millions of jobs, along the lines of the New Deal of the 1930s.

But how many jobs can various government agencies create, when they are strapped for funds, and many of them are still eliminating, rather than hiring new employees? The JOBS! Now campaign has not much to say about the nation’s businesses, which create most of the jobs in our economy.

How Tens of Thousands of Jobs Could Have Been Saved

While the nation’s major corporations went on a jamboree of layoffs of their employees in multiples of thousands, unions rarely questioned those figures or sought by various means to reduce the number. By adopting a hands-off attitude, AFL-CIO and Change to Win and their affiliates actually encouraged companies to boost the number of layoffs (mostly in round figures).in decisions made in corporate boardrooms.

In earlier decades, unions made the practice of layoffs very difficult for an employer by demanding that he justify the job cuts or accept an alternative option. Abroad, on every continent, workers are aggressively resisting layoffs, even to the point of occupying a factory or an institution.

In contrast, American workers are more passive when they are laid off, even those with 15 or 20 years of service. They do not often create strong protests, even though they may inwardly feel bitter and angry.

Economists predict that layoffs will continue well into 2010, as employers will be reluctant to rehire workers until it is reliably profitable for them to do so. More layoffs mean fewer jobs—just as we are talking about creating millions of jobs,

Can we ever come close to “full employment,” the goal of the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s?. We may be able to come close, but only if we have the vision and courage to make fundamental changes between the working class and the employing class.

Article 2 of “Labor Talk” will open up the many-sided discussion about jobs with a summary analysis of the current status of American workers. Read our posting on Thursday, October 1, 2009.