2003-10-28 - Unemployment, Anxiety, Hunger and the Recovery

California and six other states' unemployment insurance on the ropes,
jobless "recovery" spells misery.

Hunger, unemployment deepens in Oregon and Washington State.

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Tuesday Oct 28, 2003 SF Chronicle reported the state unemployment
program near bankruptcy.  Six other states are applying for federal
loans to cover their unemployment insurance programs.  75% of workers
loosing jobs do not find another by the time their unemployment runs
out.  There is a million less jobs than when the recession supposedly
ended two years ago.  Three million have lost jobs since 2000, and the
economy must produce 1.5 million new jobs per year to absorb new
people entering the workforce.   The economy cannot provide jobs even
when gross national product increases.  Increased production without
increased jobs or hours worked means we are working harder for less.
30% of US jobs pay below poverty-line wages.

New York Times, October 27, 2003

There's a Catch: Jobs

By BOB HERBERT

The president tells us the economy is accelerating, and the statistics
seem to bear him out. But don't hold your breath waiting for your
standard of living to improve. Bush country is not a good environment
for working families.

In the real world, which is the world of families trying to pay their
mortgages and get their children off to college, the economy remains
troubled. While the analysts and commentators of the comfortable class
are assuring us that the president's tax cuts and the billions being
spent on Iraq have been good for the gross domestic product, the
workaday folks are locked in a less sanguine reality.

It's a reality in which:  The number of Americans living in poverty
has increased by three million in the past two years.  The median
household income has fallen for the past two years.  The number of
dual-income families, particularly those with children under 18, has
declined sharply.  The administration can spin its "recovery" any way
it wants. But working families can't pay their bills with data about
the gross domestic product. They need the income from steady
employment. And when it comes to employment, the Bush administration
has compiled the worst record since the Great Depression.

The jobs picture is far more harrowing than it is usually presented by
the media. Despite modest wage increases for those who are working,
the unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, which represents almost nine
million people. Millions more have become discouraged and left the
labor market. And there are millions of men and women who are employed
but working significantly fewer hours than they'd like.

Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute,
has taken a look at the hours being worked by families, rather than
individuals. It's a calculation that gets to the heart of a family's
standard of living.

The declines he found were "of a magnitude that's historically been
commensurate with double-digit unemployment rates," he said. It was
not just that there were fewer family members working. The ones who
were employed were working fewer hours.

According to government statistics, there are nearly 4.5 million
people working part-time because they have been unable to find
full-time work. In many cases, as the outplacement firm Challenger,
Gray & Christmas noted in a recent report, the part-time worker is
"earning far less money than his or her background and experience
warrant - i.e. a computer programmer working at a coffee shop."

Economists expect some modest job creation to occur over the next
several months. But there's a "just in time for the election" quality
to the current economic surge, and even Republicans are worried that
the momentum may not last. The president has played his tax-cut card.
The spending on Iraq, most Americans fervently hope, will not go on
indefinitely. And President Bush's own Treasury secretary is talking
about an inevitable return to higher interest rates.

Where's the jobs creation miracle in this dismal mix?

Meanwhile, these are some of the things working (and jobless)
Americans continue to face:  Sharply increasing local taxes, including
property taxes.  Steep annual increases in health care costs.  Soaring
tuition costs at public and private universities.  Families are living
very close to the edge economically. And this situation is compounded,
made even more precarious, by the mountains of debt American families
are carrying - mortgages, overloaded credit cards, college loans, etc.

The Bush administration has made absolutely no secret of the fact that
it is committed to the interests of the very wealthy. Leona Helmsley
is supposed to have said that "only the little people pay taxes." The
Bush crowd has turned that into a national fiat.

A cornerstone of post-Depression policy in this country has been a
commitment to policies aimed at raising the standard of living of the
poor and the middle class. That's over.

When it comes to jobs, taxes, education and middle-class entitlement
programs like Social Security, the message from the Bush
administration couldn't be clearer: You're on your own.

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World Socialist Web Site, October 29, 2003


Hunger deepens in the Northwest US

By Hector Cordon


The Northwest corner of the United States-the states of Washington and
Oregon-has the highest percentage of hunger and unemployment in the
nation. Recent data shows this situation worsening.

Figures from the Oregon Food Bank's latest report on hunger show that
demand on its services has risen 10 percent in the last year and 82
percent since 1996. Growing by almost 75,000 in the last year, the
number of children, elderly, unemployed or working poor forced to rely
on emergency food boxes now stands at 780,000. Children account for 40
percent of those needing emergency food.

In Portland, the increase in emergency food requests grew 12 percent,
while requests in rural Yamhill and Jackson counties jumped by 20
percent over last year. Suburban Hillsboro, a center for the high-tech
electronic industry as well as agricultural production, saw demand
triple in the last three years.

Washington State residents requiring food assistance numbered 1.2
million between July 2001 and July 2002. This figure represents one
out of every five residents-the same as Oregon-and an increase of 13
percent over the previous year. Boeing has recently laid off 30,000
workers, with another 5,000 layoffs planned for next year. In western
Washington, where the majority of the population lives, the cost of
living is rising at the second highest rate in the country, 65 percent
in the last five years.

Both Oregon and Washington have registered the highest hunger rates
nationally for several years. According to a US Department of
Agriculture study for 1999-2001, 5.8 percent of Oregon households said
they experienced hunger at least once in the previous year. Washington
's hunger rate was tied with Utah's at 4.6 percent. About 25 percent
of that number reported being chronically, frequently hungry. Oregon
and Washington emerged as high hunger states with the first national
survey by the Census Bureau in 1995.

Opponents of this ranking pointed to Oregon's and Washington's
moderate poverty levels and average per-capita income in an effort to
question the accuracy of the study. The Oregonian newspaper ran a
front-page article last May emphasizing that sampling errors could
place Oregon as low as 13th. It also downplayed the federal definition
of hunger as "substantially removed from the...distended bellies of
Third World hunger." A subsequent study, performed by ECONorthwest,
reinforced the high ranking and cited three factors underlying the
high hunger rate:

* The high cost of housing: According to Michael Leachman of the
Oregon Center for Public Policy, in the decade from 1990 to 2000,
median Oregon rents jumped from $408 to $620 a month. Data from the
2000 Census showed that 19.3 percent of Oregon renters spend more than
50 percent of their income on rent, with 40 percent of renters
spending over 30 percent. In Washington, 17.8 percent spent half their
income on rent. The minimum "housing" wage required to afford a
two-bedroom apartment was set at $14.83-an-hour for Oregon and
$14.77-an-hour for Washington.

* A high unemployment rate: Oregon's unemployment rate last month
stood at 8 percent, while Washington had a 7.6 percent unemployment
rate. Generally, the unemployment rates for both states have stayed
about 2 points above the national average. An Oregon Employment
Department survey on September 13 found 100,000 workers receiving
unemployment benefits. In 2000, that number was 34,000.

* The study cited mobility as another key factor in fostering hunger.
Between 1999 and 2000, 21 percent of Oregon residents moved within or
into the state. For Washington the figure was 20.2 percent. Nationally
the median was 16.1 percent. Relocation can isolate the mover by
severing the support of friends or family. Some of the mobility is the
result of seasonal employment, with rural workers relocating after the
harvest to seek new jobs.

The growth of inequality during the late 1980s and 1990s in Oregon has
been particularly striking: four times the national average. The
income of the richest fifth increased by 34 percent, while the poorest
fifth saw their income drop 6 percent. In real numbers, that
represents a gain of $39,798 for the upper fifth, while the lower
fifth lost $2,067.

The 1980s also marked the beginning of the restructuring of the
regional economy that saw many of the higher paid manufacturing jobs
wiped out and replaced with low-paid service-economy jobs. In the
lumber and wood products industry, mergers and automation and then the
advent of wood substitutes resulted in the loss of many jobs.
Overfishing and tighter federal regulations led to a decline in the
salmon industry in the early 1990s, and then the groundfishing
industry in the latter part of the decade. Big consumers of
electricity like the aluminum industry closed their doors when the
wholesale cost of electricity skyrocketed on the West Coast in 2000.

In all these articles, reports and studies, what is left unstated by
the media, politicians and endless consultants is the scandal of the
very existence of hunger in a region with a huge agricultural sector.
The Northwest produces and exports a wide variety of farm products,
but the production of food under the capitalist profit system has
nothing to do with feeding the poor, as these studies on hunger show.