Unemployment rate

The bigger the lie...

The capitalist state and its henchmen are always crowing about their so-called success in the battle against unemployment: “Unemployment is falling! We're on the road to full employment...”

Leaving workers to wonder where the windfall of this steady bombast of “good economic news” has blown. Who the hell can speak of economic recovery, when poverty in our neighbourhoods is rising everywhere we look? And with the job situation tight as ever, where is the reduction in unemployment? Recently released figures for a region in Northern Quebec, Abitibi-Temiscaming (whose economy is based on extraction and primary transformation of natural resources), sheds some light on the credibility of bourgeois pretensions in the matter of statistics. 153,905 people inhabit Abitibi-Temiscaming, according to Statistics Canada . 157,966 by the Quebec Government's count. In an interview granted to a regional weekly (1), a spokesman for the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation declared that between September 1997 and September 1998, 4800 jobs were lost in the region. Statistics Canada numbers for just about the same period, roughly confirms this. The “active population” (2) declined from 79,100 in November 1997, to 74,000 in November 1998 . quite a drop for a territory of less than 160,000!

Abracadabra!

But, by bourgeois sleight of hand, the state announced that in the same region, during the same period, the number of unemployed had fallen. Now, how could a region with no decrease in population, boast of less unemployment, when so many jobs have been lost? Divine intervention, or marvels of bourgeois science? Let's take a look at the “scientific method” used by the majority of states (including Canada) to determine the unemployment rate. Canada, in fact, excludes from the ranks of the unemployed all those without work “wanting to work but not looking for jobs, as they are convinced they won't find any”.

Thanks to these methods, capitalists can artificially exclude millions of workers from unemployment rolls. Thus, according to a study by the United States Labour Statistics Bureau cited in an article of the December 1993 Le Monde Diplomatique, Japan could claim that its unemployment rate was 2.2% in 1989, while in reality it was 7.2%! This is no isolated case because, with the same bogus method and for the same year, Italy declared an unemployment rate of 7.8%, rather than the actual 15.8%, and the United States, a rate of 5.3% rather than 7.9%...

As the economic crisis deepens, capitalism proves ever more hopeless at directing modern productive forces, in particular the main productive force.the working class. Capitalism's alleged progress against unemployment, is just another spin in its desperate manoeuvres to hide its obsolescence, and go on screwing us for as long as it can. There's nothing that this decadent, parasitic system won't pull to keep from going under. It's up to us to send it belly-up, before it drags us all down.

(1) La Frontière, December 23, 1998.

(2) Even though the definition of Statistics Canada excludes from the “active population” the discouraged workers. With this level of job loss, we can legitimately presume there must have been a whole lot.