The President’s list has some very smart policies that could helping the nation’s unemployed. These include tax benefits for businesses that create jobs domestically; tax credits for smaller firms that add jobs; and financing for a Veterans Job Corps to help service members returning home from overseas. The President’s plan would also eliminate tax incentives for companies that ship jobs abroad.

These are all small ball. But ideally, this “to-do” list is just the start. Even if Congress passes the provision in full, there’s so much more to do.

For starters, lawmakers should also move to prohibit employers from discriminating against the unemployed. This is a practice that’s become increasingly prevalent as the recession lingers on — and it’s keeping many willing, talented Americans from landing a paycheck.

Most importantly, Congress should get to work on a modern-day Works Progress Administration to put millions of Americans back to work and reinvigorate our infrastructure, link our nation together, and modernize our industrial base.

Congress needs to recalibrate the national unemployment figure itself. As is, it’s deeply misleading.

The official figure only includes people that don’t have a job and are actively looking for employment. That calibration doesn’t tell the whole story. There are Americans who want a job but have simply stopped looking out of frustration. There are also those who have employment, but are overqualified for the job they’re in or can’t work enough hours to actually support themselves.

The plight of these groups should be reflected in the official unemployment rate. Currently, it’s not.

Unsurprisingly, House Republicans countered Obama’s to-do list with a note outlining their own wish list, which includes scaling back regulations and repealing Obamacare.

There’s zero evidence that the GOP’s proposals would actually bolster employment — they’re blatant policy kickbacks for the special interests that donate lavishly to Republican causes. And the GOP wish list could never generate paychecks for the nation’s jobless.

President Obama’s “To-Do List” sets goals for Congress. Federal policymakers need to act on them.

Hopefully, the GOP-driven Congress can make it through the list by November. If not, America’s jobless will have very good reason to replace the current crop of COP lawmakers with people who actually take their legislative responsibilities seriously.

In March 2009 Ben Bernanke, normally neither the most cheerful nor the most poetic of men, waxed optimistic about the economic prospect. After the fall of Lehman Brothers six months earlier, America had entered a terrifying economic nosedive. But appearing on the TV show 60 Minutes, the Fed chairman declared that spring was at hand.

His remarks immediately became famous, not least because they bore an eerie resemblance to the words of Chance, aka Chauncey Gardiner, the simpleminded gardener mistaken for a wise man in the movie Being There. In one scene Chance, asked to comment on economic policy, assures the president, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden. . . . There will be growth in the spring.” Despite the jokes, however, Bernanke’s optimism was widely shared. And at the end of 2009 Time declared Bernanke its Person of the Year.

Unfortunately, all was not well in the garden, and the promised growth never came.

To be fair, Bernanke was right that the crisis was easing. The panic that had gripped financial markets was ebbing, and the economy’s plunge was slowing. According to the official scorekeepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the so-called Great Recession that started in December 2007 ended in June 2009, and recovery began. But if it was a recovery, it was one that did little to help most Americans. Jobs remained scarce; more and more families depleted their savings, lost their homes, and, worst of all, lost hope. True, the unemployment rate is down from the peak it reached in October 2009. But progress has come at a snail’s pace; we’re still waiting, after all these years, for that “positive dynamic” Bernanke talked about to make an appearance.

And that was in America, which at least had a technical recovery. Other countries didn’t even manage that. In Ireland, in Greece, in Spain, in Italy, debt problems and the “austerity” programs that were supposed to restore confidence not only aborted any kind of recovery but produced renewed slumps and soaring unemployment.

And the pain went on and on. I’m writing these words almost three years after Bernanke thought he saw those green shoots, three and a half years after Lehman fell, more than four years after the start of the Great Recession. The citizens of the world’s most advanced nations, nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge–all the ingredients for prosperity and a decent standard of living for all–remain in a state of intense pain.

In the rest of this chapter I’ll try to document some of the main dimensions of that pain. I’ll focus mainly on the United States, which is both my home and the country I know best, reserving an extended discussion of the pain abroad for later in the book. And I’ll start with the thing that matters most–and the thing on which we’ve performed the worst: unemployment.

The Jobs Drought

Economists, the old line goes, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And you know what? There’s a lot of truth to that accusation: since economists mainly study the circulation of money and the production and consumption of stuff, they have an inherent bias toward assuming that money and stuff are what matter. Still, there is a field of economic research that focuses on how self-reported measures of well-being, such as happiness or “life satisfaction,” are related to other aspects of life. Yes, it’s known as “happiness research”–Ben Bernanke even gave a speech about it in 2010, titled “The Economics of Happiness.” And this research tells us something very important about the mess we’re in.

Sure enough, happiness research tells us that money isn’t all that important once you get to the point of being able to afford the necessities of life. The payoff to being richer isn’t literally zero–citizens of rich countries are, on average, somewhat more satisfied with their lives than citizens of less well-off nations. Also, being richer or poorer than the people you compare yourself with is a fairly big deal, which is why extreme inequality can have such a corrosive effect on society. But when all is said and done, money is less important than crude materialists–and many economists–would like to believe.

That’s not to say, however, that economic affairs are unimportant in the true scale of things. For there’s one economics-driven thing that matters enormously to human well-being: having a job. People who want to work but can’t find work suffer greatly, not just from the loss of income but from a diminished sense of self-worth. And that’s a major reason why mass unemployment–which has now been going on in America for four years–is such a tragedy.

How severe is the problem of unemployment? That question calls for a bit of discussion.

Clearly, what we’re interested in is involuntary unemployment. People who aren’t working because they have chosen not to work, or at least not to work in the market economy–retirees who are glad to be retired, or those who have decided to be full-time housewives or househusbands–don’t count. Neither do the disabled, whose inability to work is unfortunate, but not driven by economic issues.

Now, there have always been people claiming that there’s no such thing as involuntary unemployment, that anyone can find a job if he or she is really willing to work and isn’t too finicky about wages or working conditions. There’s Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for the Senate, who declared in 2010 that the unemployed were “spoiled,” choosing to live off unemployment benefits instead of taking jobs. There are the people at the Chicago Board of Trade who, in October 2011, mocked anti-inequality demonstrators by showering them with copies of McDonald’s job application forms. And there are economists like the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan, who has written multiple articles for the New York Times website insisting that the sharp drop in employment after the 2008 financial crisis reflected not a lack of employment opportunities but diminished willingness to work.

The classic answer to such people comes from a passage near the beginning of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (best known for the 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston): “Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”

Quite. Also, about those McDonald’s applications: in April 2011, as it happens, McDonald’s did announce 50,000 new job openings. Roughly a million people applied.

If you have any familiarity with the world, in short, you know that involuntary unemployment is very real. And it’s currently a very big deal.

How bad is the problem of involuntary unemployment, and how much worse has it become?

The U.S. unemployment measure you usually hear quoted in the news is based on a survey in which adults are asked whether they are either working or actively seeking work. Those who are seeking work but don’t have jobs are considered unemployed. In December 2011 that amounted to more than 13 million Americans, up from 6.8 million in 2007.

If you think about it, however, this standard definition of unemployment misses a lot of distress. What about people who want to work, but aren’t actively searching either because there are no jobs to be had, or because they’ve grown discouraged by fruitless searching? What about those who want full-time work, but have only been able to find part-time jobs? Well, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tries to capture these unfortunates in a broader measure of unemployment, known as U6; it says that by this broader measure there are about 24 million unemployed Americans–about 15 percent of the workforce–roughly double the number before the crisis.

Yet even this measure fails to capture the extent of the pain. In modern America most families contain two working spouses; such families suffer, both financially and psychologically, if either spouse is unemployed. There are workers who used to make ends meet with a second job, now down to an inadequate one, or who counted on overtime pay that no longer arrives. There are independent businesspeople who have seen their income shrivel. There are skilled workers, accustomed to holding down good jobs, who have been forced to accept work that uses none of their skills. And on and on.

There is no official estimate of the number of Americans caught up in this sort of penumbra of formal unemployment. But in a June 2011 poll of likely voters–a group probably in better shape than the population as a whole–the polling group Democracy Corps found that a third of Americans had either themselves suffered from job loss or had a family member lose a job, and that another third knew someone who had lost a job. Moreover, almost 40 percent of families had suffered from reduced hours, wages, or benefits.

The pain, then, is very widespread. But that’s not the whole story: for millions, the damage from the bad economy runs very deep.

Click here to read the original article.

But a new report in the Wall Street Journal finds that several major American corporations are creating significantly more new jobs abroad than at home.

U.S. consumers should hold accountable those companies that are hiring overseas but not at home. Shoppers need to be more conscientious about where they spend their money. Major conglomerates will start rethinking their hiring strategies if sales plummet because customers start paying attention to their outsourcing practices.

And politicians must eliminate the incentives for companies to outsource in the first place.

President Obama has proposed a tax credit for companies who bring outsourced jobs back to America. This would be a good start. But there needs to be even stronger provisions to prevent further hemorrhaging in the U.S. job market. And the President has rightly criticized presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for reportedly outsourcing jobs to other nations during his time as Governor of Massachusetts.

Republicans have opposed measures that would end tax breaks for companies that send jobs abroad. Romney has been a vociferous opponent of any measure to keep jobs in the States.

The GOP is engaged in rank hypocrisy. On one hand they criticize Obama for his failure to solve the jobs crisis. On the other, they constantly block legislation that would help bring jobs back to America.

Many in Washington simply aren’t attuned to the depths of the American jobs crisis. And they’re not taking the necessary legislative steps to encourage domestic employment growth. Programs like a national manufacturing policy that discourages outsourcing and a 21^st century Works Progress Administration (WPA) that would employ America’s 26.7 million jobless are what’s needed to rebuild this country.

Voters can stem the tide of job loss not only by avoiding the biggest outsourcers — they can also end the careers of politicians who fail to stem the bleeding.

Despite an official employment rate that dropped one-tenth of a percent and the addition of 115,000 jobs in April, America’s jobless have heard this story before and they know from personal experience those numbers are meaningless.

“In their lives, the only numbers that matter are the stack of unpaid bills, the balance in their dwindling checking account and the dollars they can scrape together for food and fuel,” said UCubed Executive Director Rick Sloan. “Their biggest fear is hitting a ZERO – zero income, a zero balance at the bank and zero bills paid.

“When the real number of unemployed workers increased in April by 295,000 to 26.7 million and the real unemployment rate became 16.6 percent, America’s jobless knew who the real zeros were,” said Sloan.

Our Summary of U.S. Real Unemployment includes everything that BLS leaves out.  It also identifies the Real Jobs Gap which needs to be closed in order to be at 5% full employment in real terms, job openings, and average weeks unemployed.  As of March 31:

• The number of Real Unemployed Workers, in all categories,  increased by 295,000 workers to 26.7 million, which is well more than twice BLS’s figure of 12.5 million.  (The number of Real Unemployed Workers has increased by 10.0 million since the start of the Recession in December 2007, and by 2.2 million since the Inauguration.)

• The Real Unemployment Rate was 16.6%, which is more than twice BLS’s official rate of 8.1%.  (March’s Real Unemployment Rate was 16.4%.)

• The Real Jobs Gap is 18.6 million jobs (compared to Job Openings of only 3.5 million.)

The Real Unemployment Rate, the Real Jobs Gap and the post-Inauguration job-loss figure (of 2.2 mm) are critical statistics as we now race toward the 2012 Elections.  Viewed historically, the so-called ‘dividing lines’ in any quadrennial national election have been (i) an official rate of unemployment of around 7.3% (today, it’s 8.1%) and (ii) a Real Unemployment Rate of no more than around 10.0% (today it’s still a daunting 16.6%).

Although most of the national press now refer to Real Unemployment, some (esp. the WSJ and the NY Times) still leave out “discouraged workers”.  Yet as I always note, discouraged workers, having abandoned the workforce, are arguably the ‘most unemployed’ of all workers and shouldn’t be so excluded.  March’s overall Real Unemployment Rate of 16.6% drops to 14.5% if these particular workers are not included.

According to the BLS, the number of workers unemployed a half year or longer is 5.1 million.  In real terms, however, an estimated 8.0 million workers (around 30% of the overall Real Unemployed) have probably now been out of full-time work for more than a year.  This latter figure especially and even BLS’s are much better measures of the nation’s real employment condition than is BLS’s weekly “initial jobless claims” figure (last week 365,000), which is particularly unreliable near the bottom of what is still, in macro terms, a largely jobless recovery.

Compared to the other nine recessions and economic recoveries since World War II, real recovery this time remains hindered by (i) our nation’s $600 billion-plus ongoing trade deficit in oil and in manufacturing with China (split about 50/50), (ii) federal tax policies that fail to incent meaningful job creation here at home, and (iii) the absence both of a large leveraged National Infrastructure Bank with buy-domestic requirements and of specific initiatives for the current 5.0 million or so out-of-school unemployed youth.  President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Speech addressed all of these job growth opportunities, and it needed to, for as it is, the nation’s 35 largest U.S. based multinational companies added only 113,000 jobs here at home between 2009 and 2011 while adding three-times as many jobs – 333,000 – overseas.

As a final note, it is important to remember that the economy also needs to evidence at least 3.0% annual GDP growth in order to keep up with population increase.  However, actual GDP growth in Q1 ’12 was just 2.2% (when 2.7% was expected) and only 1.7% in all of 2011.  Despite robust consumption in Q1 ’12 at a strong annualized rate of 2.9%, GDP growth was adversely impacted by inventories again piling up and the federal government cutting spending.  The strong consumption added 0.2% to the overall GDP growth rate, but its growth was largely achieved through rising consumer credit, with consumers saving at only a 3.9% rate, which of course is not a sustainable combination.

How about Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who introduced S.1517, the 21st Century Works Progress Administration (WPA) Act? Or Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), John Reed (D-RI),  Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Mark Begich (D-AK) who cosponsored S. 1517?

Lautenberg’s WPA 2.0 authorizes $250 billion to employ individuals who have been unemployed longer than 60 days. Workers would be hired to work a host of public works projects, including residential and commercial building weatherization; highway, bridge and rail repairs; school, library and firehouse construction; and manufacturing projects. The program would be paid for through an excise tax on millionaires of 5.4 percent.

Or maybe Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)?

Last year Congresswoman Kaptur introduced the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Act, H.R. 494. Her bill has 30 cosponsors. The $16 billion proposal envisions a renewed emphasis on putting unemployed and underemployed Americans to work immediately planting trees, ending erosion, preventing forest fires and massive flooding and improving rural communities. The bill also calls for more housing, medical and transportation assistance.

Notably both Tom Harkin and Marcy Kaptur are the senior Democrats on their respective chamber’s Appropriations Committee. There they have been fighting for food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and job training — all key programs for the jobless.

How Congress will spend $3.5 to $4.0 trillion during the next fiscal year? Well, I can’t think of a better way than shoe-horning the concepts contained in S. 1517 and H.R. 494 into one of those must-pass appropriations bills.

Click here to send a letter to Congress urging their support of the 21st Century WPA Act. And click here to urge their support of the 21st Century CCC Act.

To have an immediate impact on those bills’ prospects, THANK the Senators and Members of Congress who are sponsoring and cosponsoring them.  After all, UCubed has been advocating for these measures for the last three years.

And THANK them publicly! Start by clicking here.

“[N]o one is hiring for entry level jobs, temp services are taking advantage and not even finding steady positions for people, the wages are so low and college graduates are not finding work in their chosen fields…yet the politicians want to play the old “blame game”; it is sickening.” —unemployed woman on UCubed’s Facebook page, April 27.

The Republican Party has collectively cast more than 8,000 votes against the interests of America’s unemployed workers, says Rick Sloan, director of the International Association of Machinists’ (IAM) “UCubed” (“Ur Union of Unemployed”) program. The union started the initiative in 2007, as the recession began to hit.

Generally, GOP politicians have accompanied votes for public-sector cutbacks and against extended unemployment benefits with blame-the-victim vituperation directed at the jobless. The Democratic retort has been largely lackluster, Sloan says.

“[I]n the crucial swing states, look at the raw numbers of the officially unemployed—it’s been larger than winning margin over the last several elections,” he says. “The Democrats haven’t figured out that their voters are the ones being hammered,” he asserts. “A New York Times poll last fall showed that just 15 percent of the jobless are Republicans. Until Democrats figure out that they must speak to these folks… this is political sucide, as shown by the 2010 elections.”

Stepping into this void has been UCubed, a largely online effort which Sloan says aims to serves as “a megaphone for the jobless,” both union and nonunion. The program tries to build a progressive framework for the jobless to interpret their plight, intensify pressure for a sweeping Works Progress Administration (the Depression-era jobs program launched by FDR), and motivate the unemployed to support candidates who are aligned with their economic interests.

In 2010, UCubed boasted 276 “cubes,” or local units, in 41 states. “We have grown dramatically in last six months, with 897 cubes with leaders and 4,750 job activists and 90,366 Facebook fans,“ Sloan enthuses. He says UCubed can claim the “largest union presence on Facebook.”

“Our followers skew heavily female [55%], 61% are 35 or older, and we’ve got members in every state. We expect to go from 90,000 fans to 150,000 by Election Day.” Each fan represents another 300 readers, according to Facebook estimates, suggesting that U-Cubed’s Facebook reaches a total of 24 million people.

In contrast to unemployment organizing efforts of the 1930s, 1970s and 1980s stressing direct action, UCubed is focused on a broad educational effort using Facebook messages to steer the jobless in a consistently progressive direction despite their ongoing frustration.

“Our niche is a space that no one else is focusing on,“ explains Sloan. “We’ve figured out that the jobless of this generation are not like the jobless of the 1930s. There’s a pent-up fury that is omni-directional—they hate all politicians, feel they’ve all failed them.

“Nobody’s speaking for the unemployed, so we try,” he said. A key function is fighting the understandable cynicism, or “gallows humor, as Sloan puts it, about elected officials in both parties who have failed to address the pressing needs of the unemployed.

The urgent need to address the unemployment crisis has grown as U.S. economic growth has slowed slightly; GDP growth for the first quarter of the year was revised downward to 2.2 percent from 3 percent As Common Cause leader Gary Ferdman notes, the situation of the jobless continues to remain discouraging and precarious:

Our current unemployment rate is 8%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the figure goes up to 14% if those Americans who are no longer actively searching for jobs and those working part time not by choice are included…

The New York Times reports that 11 state legislatures, including the politically crucial state of Florida, have passed laws reducing levels and/or duration of unemployment benefits, and that federal job training money is drying up.

The unemployed continue to exist on a narrow precipice, hoping to avoid the “domino effect” of their joblessness leading to home foreclosure and bankruptcy. Less than 40 percent of the jobless now receive unemployment benefits, says Sloan. “The jobless have undergone a mass migration down the economic escalator.

“No one’s speaking to the unemployed except the Republicans, stoking that ice-cold fury,” said Sloan, noting that conservative activists John McLaughlin and Hailey Barbour issued a strategy paper last week, based on focus groups, about how to tap the resentment of the jobless.

Facebook and the Internet are crucial means of reaching the jobless, Sloan believes. “They are hard to poll, because they don’t have phone lines any more, or they won’t pick up the phone if they suspect it’s a bill collector.”

At this point, Sloan feels more certain about UCube’s ability to influence the jobless through the Internet than by enlisting them in direct action. Many liberal political observers and strategists (like the author Frances Fox Piven; see here and here) are encouraged by the young and jobless people participating in Occupy demonstrations and hope to see much more direct action by the unemployed and poor. Sloan, however, is less optimistic about UCubed supporters taking that route. Most of the jobless remain socially isolated from each other and get connected to each other solely through the Internet, he says.

Moreover, many jobless people lack a tradition of collective action and also fear that they may be blackballed by employers if spotted at public demonstrations. “They want to go back to work, and are…reluctant to join [visible] organizations, to march, to be in the public square, because they know that photos of demonstration are being monitored, and scrutinized,” Sloan says. “I don’t see them linking up in mass numbers.”

But the jobless can be harnessed to press for an updated version of Roosevelt’s jobs plan—WPA 2.0—that would modernize the nation’s sagging bridges and roads, crumbling water systems and other infrastructure, like building a broadband Internet network across the nation.

The November election is a crucial arena where UCubed is determined to make a difference in reaching potential voters.

“The most effective action we can produce is getting people to cast a ballot 190 days from now,” Sloan says. “If [the jobless] see it in their self-interest to vote for a particular politician, they will do it. We’re trying to change the conversation.”

To read original article, click here.

With graduation ceremonies beginning in earnest next month, that’s not the sort of news that young people preparing to enter the job market will want to hear.

Indeed, if our leaders don’t work to expand the number of job opportunities in this country — and soon — America could end up with a “lost generation.”

If young people can’t gain on-the-job experience in their chosen disciplines at the beginning of their careers, they’ll be professionally handicapped for years to come. That could have disastrous consequences for their future earnings.

The dismal job prospects that America’s youth are facing are not new. Since the recession began in 2008, observers have chronicled the lack of jobs for recent college graduates.

And since 2000, the number of employed Americans between the ages of 16 and 29-years old has declined by 12 percent.

This is an issue that not should linger any longer. America can’t afford a class of unemployed and underemployed young people, unable to provide for themselves and for their growing families. Today’s underemployed young people could be tomorrow’s long-term jobless. And with each passing year of inadequate job growth, the ranks of unemployed and underemployed young people keep expanding.

America has long been recognized as the “Land of Opportunity.” Yet what does it say about our nation when we cannot even provide our young adults with their first job opportunity?

Isn’t it time to stop talking about jobs and start hiring again?

The UCubed Thank You page allows the jobless to post a personalized message to a senator, governor, Member of Congress or state legislator.

“The political impulse this year is clear: vote against ALL incumbents,” said UCubed Executive Director Rick Sloan in an email to UCubed’s more than 90,000 members. “Their policies failed to get us back to work. Or worse yet, their policies made our lives even more miserable. Case closed. Or is it? What about those who did more than ‘talk, talk, talk’ about jobs? Who fought for extended unemployment insurance? Who argued for a Tier V for 99ers? Who pushed legislation that could create jobs? Who made the case that the jobless needed more lifelines and fewer breadlines? Is it ‘case closed’ for them, too?”

Although UCubed does not endorse candidates, its members can. UCubed believes those personal endorsements carry real weight.

“An all-inclusive, vote-the-bums-out approach, as gratifying as that might feel, does more harm than good,” said Sloan. “We are smarter, shrewder and savvier than that. We can save our friends. And we can focus our ice-cold fury in order to end the careers of our foes.”

See the UCubed Thank You page here.

The political impulse this year is clear: vote against ALL incumbents. Their policies failed to get us back to work. Or worse yet, their policies made our lives even more miserable. Case closed.

Or is it?

What about those who did more than “talk, talk, talk” about jobs? Who fought for extended unemployment insurance?  Who argued for a Tier V for 99ers? Who pushed legislation that could create jobs? Who made the case that the jobless needed more lifelines and fewer breadlines?

Is it “case closed” for them, too?

An all-inclusive, vote-the-bums-out approach, as gratifying as that might feel, does more harm than good. We are smarter, shrewder and savvier than that. We can save our friends. And we can focus our ice-cold fury in order to end the careers of our foes.

The Union of Unemployed does not – and cannot – endorse candidates. But YOU can. As UCubed leaders, you have credibility. If you believe an incumbent deserves a THANK YOU, then your personal endorsement carries real weight.

Try it. Click here to post a THANK YOU to your senator, governor, Member of Congress or state legislator. These are not anonymous posts. You will need to provide your name, zip code, state and email address so we can check if it really is you.

Once we are certain it’s you, then UCubed will publicize your personal THANK YOU. So craft your message succinctly and for public consumption. We will see it gets the attention it deserves.

The policies putting millions of Americans back to work are driven by politics. But politics left to its own devices often produces unintended consequences. We had better re-elect our friends even as we work to defeat our foes.

In Unity — Strength,
Rick

Rick Sloan
Executive Director
Ur Union of Unemployed