Date: 	Tue, 23 Sep 1997 14:41:29 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: M-I: proletarians


In response to Doug

In Living Marxism, August 1994, Phil Murphy noted that the British Govt has
simultaneously posted a decline in unemployment *and* the number of workers
and exposes the trick of official statistics  as an understimatation the
number of people without jobs. Discouraged workers, workers shifted from
unemployment to sick leave, workers who no longer qualify for unemployment
insurance, part-time workers are all not counted among the unemployed (in
the US it would be important to include those in prison and those
"seasonal" workers who recross the border as well, to say nothing of
permanent grad students), while those in phoney training programmes and
other schemes are. While Murphy notes that the ILO's definition of
unemployed is not burdened by all the same arbitrary limitations as
official British stats (it does include employed male spouses of working
women to take an example that comes to mind), he does point to the ILO's
apologetic ejection of the so-called economically inactive from the ranks
of the unemployed.

Of course, I will have to look at the ILO report for proof of the continued
employment-intensity of economic growth; for proof that growth has been
rapid enough to absorb the technologically unemployed, the displaced and
new entrants (or the truth of the compensation theory Marx set out to
refute); for proof that there has been no relative increase in the size of
the surplus population (which would include the economically inactive of
course); for proof that employment is as stable and immune to cycles as
ever.

I very much appreciate Doug's reference to the ILO report, and will attempt
to track it down. If anyone has a website address, please forward it to me.

Just as the booming stock market may be a poor indicator of the underlying
health of American, much less global, capitalism (given how the standard
index is biased towards the best companies, see WSJ cover story yesterday),
the employment statistics may be a bad guide to the real magnitude of the
problem of joblessness on a global scale.

Rakesh




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