I think that companies have learned to do more with less (layoffs in response to the recession, automation, offshore outsourcing) and are seeing greater profits because of it. There’s no need to hire when you’re breaking the backs of your existing staff “who should be grateful to have a job” (to echo another commenter).

I see hoards of people at restaurants and I have a hard time finding parking spots when shopping–people are spending money, just not as much as they used to because they’re actually being responsible whether by choice or because their credit cards have been capped. Fewer dollars spent per transaction = further reason not to create new jobs.

Unemployment desperately needs reform. The above commenter didn’t qualify for it when she needed it. Yet I have more than one friend who has collected unemployment while traveling the world for months and even a year, sending out applications to jobs they had no intent of taking. There’s too much entitlement.These friends felt entitled to collect unemployment because they paid into it. Many feel entitled to make the same salary (was it ever really deserved?) to pay for the house and things they felt entitled to (could they afford them in the first place)? I don’t think teachers should have to work at McDonalds but I also don’t think they should have to get a comparable teaching job or else be forever supported.

I would love to see small business grants to stimulate job and economic growth. Close corporate tax loopholes and then offer more incentives for job creation and bringing jobs back onshore. I think that would be helpful.

Even though requiring employers to hire legal workforce would create jobs that are badly needed, for Americans, people seem to prefer the current way cos the most important thing is that the prices won’t go up. So prices of certain products and services are based on illegal workforce. Yet ‘it’s OK’. Baffling, indeed.

As for workers in a capitalist economy, capitalism suggests that if workers have perfect information and perfect mobility, they will be able to maximize their income by going where the job that pays the most for a certain skill set is. Even beyond the silliness of the perfect information issue, the idea of workers selling a house in America and travelling to China to become a factory worker (and thus displacing a Chinese worker) is very silly, at the very least in terms of language.

Honestly I am not sure about how much of an internal or export market exists for American goods and/or services. I believe it has been said here that America has some of the lowest business taxes, but I don’t remember who was being compared, and anyway any country can offset taxes with subsidies if the government wants to promote any particular industry.

But there are other variables in employment. I at least occasionally hear about how illegal aliens (my favorite term for undocumented workers) are taking American jobs. I think there is some truth to that, and I think American citizens would perform those jobs, but not as they are presently structured. Jobs like the canonical fruit and vegetable picking (or cleaning offices or hotel rooms) involve punishing work and long hours, so American would probably want higher wages to do that. By contrast, work in meat processing plants or as roofers might well pay enough for Americans, but currently likely do not meet OSHA requirements. Again, that would likely cause prices to rise for roofs or chicken or hamburgers.

I maintain that the undocumented worker problem could be largely eliminated in a couple of weeks if employers were fined massively for hiring illegals. After all the IRS has made available an online tool to verify social security numbers against names. So today the only employers who hire undocumented workers with fake or made up social security numbers are employers who want undocumented workers. There might be five million or more jobs that could be made available to low skill, high school drop out American citizens. But since the government does not heavily fine companies (big or small) who hire these workers, the government is complicit in this problem.

But we want lower prices more than we want poorer people to be able to find jobs.

I’m not sure how plausible that is, honestly. A huge % of the Chinese population is still rural. Even up until a few years ago, earlier this decade, a majority of the population was rural and worked in the agricultural sector. If we assume that China will continue to adopt Western agricultural methods and technologies, which generally means that only 10% of the population (max) is needed to run the entire agricultural sector, then there are still hundreds of millions of people who will migrate from the countryside to the cities and look for urban (often industrial) work over the next several decades. That also presupposes that Central Africa, the Andean region, Central Asia and a few other regions don’t make any economic progress or experience any industrialization and instead stick to the natural resource-extraction/subsistence agriculture model that has kept them so poor. In short, I think the global industrial labor pool will continue to expand for quite a while.

I think we have to keep in mind that for much of this century the U.S. was one of the biggest exporters on the planet. Part of that was for historical reasons. In the 1950s, most of Central and Eastern Europe was literally in ruins (and much of its farmland had gone up in smoke), Asia and Latin America were mostly subsistence economies. The U.S. made (still does, but less so) an outsize % of global GDP considering its % of the global population. Whats happening now is that other countries are finally developing independent, surplus-generating economies that don’t need to be as reliant on the U.S. economy as they used to be. Concurrently, we’ve experienced a profound transition from the biggest exporter in the world to the biggest importer.

What I’m getting at is two points. First off, as bad as things may be, we actually have it pretty good here. Sure, if you compare us to Scandinavia (pop: ~42 million) then the U.S. seems backwards. But if you compare us to the third world (pop: ~4.5 billion) then we’re fantastically wealthy. A lot of people here receive fantastic salaries to do what most of the rest of the world would categorize as “leisure.” Someone who makes the poverty threshold for a single person in the U.S. (~$11,000 a year) is still among the 15% wealthiest people in the world. If the rest of the world does continue to develop economically and catch up and global inequality ebbs, then that probably necessitates a downward revision in the standard of living for the average American, even working class ones.

The other point is what I said in my other post. A world where the ability to survive is inherently tied to work is a world where much of the global population is going to starve to death because we’re entering a phase where there will be more people than work available. That’s going to require a revision of who has to work and who doesn’t and how resources will be divvied up globally. I say all of this not to excuse the rampant corruption and misdeeds that our political and economic elites commit (which is criminal in my opinion) but because I think solely focusing on that aspect allows us to ignore the really troubling structural challenges that the global economy is going to face in the next few decades.

“DUH!”

Especially related to this phrase in the article “Economic policy is not responsive to workers’ needs. Instead, it is heavily driven by what is best for corporations.”

Isn’t this the foundation of capitalism? I can make money at the expense of the workers? This premise appears to me to be the basis of how capitalism works; we are not a community, but instead individuals striving to do best for ourselves, rather than realizing that what is best for all of us is better for “society” as a whole.

Idealistic, I know, but this is how I feel.

We need to create small business jobs where the owners care about the communities they employ and serve. Lord knows the current corporations don’t care what happens to Main Street, as long as they show a profit on Wall Street.

Even if you’re right, it’s still the case that with our economic and policy conditions, corporate profits have been enabled to rebound much more quickly and drastically than jobs have. It doesn’t have to be this way, though – the fact that it “makes sense” under these conditions does not mean it couldn’t and shouldn’t be another way.

We need unemployment benefits extended, in some kind of *permanent* fashion. Europe has had to deal with (relatively) high levels of permanent structural unemployment for a while now. We are too now, unless we start inflating bubbles and heading into fantasy land again. Long-term though, we need to restructure the entire monetary system. Make it so that it rewards wealth-production and not legalized gambling that allows millions to appear out of thin air.

A tangential point related to unemployment – let’s say we have 10-15% structural unemployment in the U.S. right now. That might seem like an aberration from the mean considering it’s not TOO high from the perceived norm of 4-5%. I actually think this percentage will KEEP growing thanks to automation, technology, new efficiency standards and so on. It is not inconceivable that by the end of the century 50% of the working-age population could manage and run the global economy. That means we’re going to have to rethink the capitalism schema that says that you have to work to survive.

Provocative hypothesis? Only if you haven’t cracked open a newspaper in the past 30 years.