BY SETH SANDRONSKY
SACRAMENTO — In President George Bush's USA, 122,000 people became temporary workers in the last nine months. Temporary workers are less likely to have a steady pay-check and health-care benefits than permanent workers.
Nine million US residents officially out of a job make it a buyer's market for most workers' labor-power. Economic growth in the US in 2003 has yet to change this equation.
On October 31, the New York Times reported, "The news that the economy had expanded in the third quarter at a 7.2% annual rate — the best performance since 1984 — gave Mr. Bush and his party a compelling piece of evidence to back their assertions that they have put the nation back on the road to prosperity a year before Election Day."
Prosperity for whom, is the $64,000 question.
The day before in Columbus, Ohio, the president had promoted his policy of tax cuts as the path to eventually creating "jobs aplenty for those looking for work". No mention of the growth in temporary jobs.
"Global Insight expects the recent buildup in temporary help payrolls will soon translate into some slow but steady employment gains, with the more significant job creation delayed until the spring of 2004", wrote Mark Ulmer in that firm's August 21 newsletter. It "provides the most comprehensive economic and financial coverage of countries, regions and industries available from any source".
Yet recent data does not back Ulmer's view on temporary employment.
A total of 75,000 temporary jobs were created between last February and June, according to US Labor Department figures. Yet no jump in overall hiring followed, noted Dean Baker, an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Bush's three federal tax cuts have not turned anything around, according to an October 3 report by the Economic Policy Institute titled "Bush administration's tax cuts falling short in job creation".
"The Bush administration called the tax cut package, which took effect in July 2003, its 'Jobs and Growth Plan'. The president's economics staff, the Council of Economic Advisers, projected that the plan would raise the level of growth enough to create 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004 344,000 new jobs each month, starting in July 2003. In September, the jobs and growth plan fell 287,000 jobs short of the administration's projection. The cumulative shortfall since July 2003 — the amount by which the projected jobs exceeded actual job growth in August and September — is now 672,000."
Bush's strategists know that steady unemployment with or without economic growth makes him vulnerable in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. Case in point is the 2.7 million manufacturing jobs that have disappeared since his 2000 election.
So what is the spin? Administration officials are partly trying to convince some of the electorate that China is to blame.
Input from union and non-union workers, active and retired, in anti-war coalitions, churches, mosques and synagogues can help to find a real solution. How many people want to shift their taxes from occupying Iraq to meeting domestic needs?
What is my policy suggestion? Re-create a federal Works Progress Administration-type jobs program for the American people, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1935.
"Some 34.6 million Americans were living in poverty last year, 1.7 million more than in 2001, according to the Census Bureau", the November 2 New York Times reported. Working people need relief well beyond temporary employment.
Today.
[Seth Sandronsky is a member of Peace Action and co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 12, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.