Reviving Manufacturing . . . One Cheeseburger at a Time

The article below caught my eye from the Spring 2004 issue of Internationalism, the American publication of the International Communist Current.

For some reason, this short article is not on their website - though 'What Bordiga Ate For BreakFast: A Symposium In Ten Parts' probably is - so I had to type the bugger out, but I thought it was worthwhile for the wee snacktoids of information of how the American Capitalist Class has gone about massaging its unemployment figures down the years.

In the early eighties in Britain, when the number of people out of work started to rise to post-war record levels, the powers at be came up with the ploy of obscuring the true level of those unemployed by putting a whole generation of men and women in the old manufacturing regions of the North East of England, South Wales, Merseyside and the West of Scotland, where the recession hit hardest, on sickness and incapacity benefit. By doing this, they could vanish them from the real unemployment figures in Britain. (In London, to massage the unemployment figures, they did not go for the same option. They chose that age old alternative for hiding the true level of unemployment in London, best known as 'mini-cabbing'.)

As a member of The Socialist Party, the ICC see me as someone in "the swamp", "a parliamentary cretin" and having a "fetish for democracy" amongst other inelegantly phrased political insults but its a good article, and I hope they don't mind too much me posting it up. They will probably interpret it as a fiendish ploy on the part of the bourgeoisie to catch the revolutionary proletarian current off its guard with sweet words - they are only half right.

But to be honest, insults from the ICC are water off a duck's back: there is something comical in being savaged by a political organisation whose members look like refugees from a 1970s London Comprehensive School Staff Room, 'cos I choose not to share their liking for that armchair barricadist karaoke classic, 'Let's Smash the State'.

'Reviving Manufacturing . . . One Cheeseburger at a Time'

"American capitalism has long had a knack for creativity in its use of statistics to put a positive spin on an otherwise dismal reality. For example, the US government calculates unemployment by counting only those workers without a job who have actively applied for work during the previous 30 days. The so-called “discouraged workers,” those who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, are not considered unemployed - they are considered to have dropped out of the workforce. According to the government they are no longer workers. In another example, up until the early 1980s, the unemployment rate used to be calculated on the basis of the civilian workforce. But then the federal government decided that nearly 3 million members of the armed forces would thereafter be considered as employed workers (previously they had been considered as outside the civilian workforce). It proved to be a very effective means of lowering the unemployment rate. When the Department of Labor estimates the number of jobs in the economy, any job employing a worker for a minimum of 10 hours a week counts the same as a fulltime job – this explains all those outlandish claims about millions of jobs being created all the time. In this twisted way of “counting” joblessness and jobs, it is quite possible that a worker who lost his fulltime job and then scrambled to find three low-paying part-time jobs in order to survive, would be counted as one unemployed worker in the unemployment statistics, and as three jobs in the tally of new jobs created in the new economy!

In February, in the annual Economic Report of the President, Pres. Bush floated an innovative idea, suggesting that fast-food workers at places like McDonalds should no longer be considered service workers, but should be reclassified as manufacturing employees. Bush’s chief economic advisor, Gregory Mankiw wondered, “When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a ‘service’ or is it combining inputs to ‘manufacture’ a product?” Having lost 2.6 million manufacturing jobs in the economy since January 2001, government economists have finally come up with a plan to revive the manufacturing sector workforce – one cheeseburger at a time! Of course, the Democrats and the talk show comedians had a field day poking fun at this absurdity. There hadn’t been such a blatantly clumsy manoeuvre since the 1981 Reagan administration suggestion that ketchup should be considered a vegetable in calculating the nutritional value of school lunch." - JG