Americans Give Up Looking For Jobs
by Xavier Connolly
20 January 2010
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: economy, economics, jobs, employment, vacancies, openings, career, American, British, skills, industry, agriculture, business, money, worker, unemployment, Thatcher, government, labour, disability, comment, opinion, society
Xavier Connolly
New figures out today underline what the Daily Stirrer has been saying since we came online almost a year ago about the true and truly dire state of the American economy. The report shows that millions of well educated, well qualified people with good experience and a solid career record are simply giving up looking for jobs.
America's economic downturn, like that of Britain started a long time ago. In the 1980s there was an abandonment of industry and agriculture in favour of candy floss industries like financial services, people becoming self employed by setting up service businesses specialising in ironing shirts, the digital economy in which candy floss businesses traded with candy floss money and a host of other ventures that had little or no substance.
In the 1980s real unemployment went off the scale of course. Older workers who would have expected to work to age 65 were effectively put out to grass at 55 as the Thatcher government, mistakenly believed by many still to have changed Britain for the better but in reality the most centralising and financially profligate government ever, encouraged doctors to diagnose perfectly able people are long term incapacitated by minor illness and put them on disability benefits.
It was a stupendously expensive way to massage the unemployment figures and also took a vast pool of skills backed by experience out of the labour market. Thatcher's insane obsession with destroying the working class not only dismantled the industrial base but the skills pool too. Now we have to import skilled workers from Eastern Europe and the east while British workers man banks of phones, cold calling unreceptive members of the public and trying to sell them insurance or double glazing.
And even the non - jobs in call centers are being exported buy a Labour government that is more Thatcherite than Thatcher.
At the same time unemployment statistics are being massaged at the other end by driving more and more school leavers into higher education with the promise that a University Degree will lead to a better job. Young people have no option but to believe this because there are so few openings for them. How many degree holders does a society need though. Ten per cent? Fifteen percent? We do not need fifty percent of people entering the job market to hold degrees, there is simply not enough work available at that level.
Dishonest politicians like Blair and Brown can talk of "the knowledge economy" but in reality when knowledge is so easily available as it has become it has little commercial value. One does not need a University degree to work as a mechanic, cook, building tradesman or a nurse. These are hands on jobs where experience and practical training are more important than academic learning. The only point of pushing school leavers through higher and further education is to keep them off the employment statistics for up to five years.
In the end of course throughout the English speaking world, because this problem does seem to be concentrated in nations with a predominantly Anglo - Saxon culture all our leaders are doing is putting off the problems for another day and another government. They are financing this procrastination with borrowed money however. That is another problem being stored up for the future that we have warned of time and again in the pages of The Daily Stirrer.
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