We need a national "milk carton" campaign to
spread awareness of these lost workers.
Wall Street analysts,
corporate lobbyists, and front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce form an
exuberant cheering squad for maintaining the status quo of America’s do-nothing
jobs policy.
“Hooray!” they shout
to our lawmakers, “The unemployment rate is improving!” Waving pom-poms of
campaign cash and doing statistical backflips, the pep squad instructs Congress
to forget a national jobs program, raising the minimum wage, extending
unemployment benefits, etc. “Push ‘em back, Push ‘em back!” they yell.
Well, yes, the official jobless rate has edged down to 7.2 percent, but don’t get giddy, for that’s not the total score. In December 2007, when Wall Street’s reckless greed crashed our economy, the unemployment rate stood at only 5 percent, the average length of being unemployed was half of today’s, and far fewer people were forced into part-time work or had to find multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Plus, family income
was higher back then for all but the richest 1 percent of
Americans.
But there’s an even
more telling statistic that we rarely hear about: the
employment/population ratio. This indicator tells us the number of
working-age adults actually in the workforce, meaning they’re employed at least
part-time or are looking for jobs.
This important number
has plummeted by five million people since the crash. They’re not working, and
they’re not counted as unemployed.
That’s five
million American workers who — poof — have just disappeared. If
we added these “missing workers,” as they’ve been dubbed, to the number of
unemployed and underemployed Americans, no one could cheer Washington’s
do-nothing jobs policy.
We need a national
“milk carton” campaign. Let’s spread the photos and names of each of these five
million missing workers so widely that even Congress would finally recognize
that it must do something to boost jobs and wages in our country.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the
populist newsletter, The Hightower
Lowdown. OtherWords.org