Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Saturday, September 28, 2013

America’s Jobless Generation By Jeff Madrick

The New York Review of Books - September 3, 2013

In his speech commemorating the Martin Luther King March on Washington last week, President Obama got it partly right. It’s not only about civil rights. It’s also, crucially, about jobs. Of the marchers back in 1963, Obama said, “They were there seeking jobs as well as justice—not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity. For what does it profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he can’t afford the meal?”
The need for gainful work is desperately important now, with overall unemployment, even after recent improvements, still stubbornly high, and blacks, as has long been the case, around twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. Indeed, Obama’s speech heralded the arrival of a bleak Labor Day, at a time when so many young Americans cannot find work.
But then Obama got it wrong. “The twin forces of technology and global competition,” he said, “have subtracted those jobs that once provided a foothold into the middle class, reduced the bargaining power of American workers.” This is the centrist economist in Obama talking, who buys into current economic orthodoxy: technological advances in many industries, so the explanation goes, have in many cases replaced a human labor force with an automated one; and thanks to global markets, what human labor is needed is moving to countries where wages are low.
What about government policy? Many aspects of our current employment crisis have less to do with technology or globalization than with the administration’s failure to adopt policies to strengthen the labor force, and more precisely, those parts of the labor force that are most crucial to the nation’s long-term social and economic health.

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