WOLFF: The fear of so-called maximum or full employment seems to go back to your
[point on] discipline. In other words, if there's lots of jobs, if the unemployed is small,
then your ability to discipline your workers is reduced because they know
they can get another job if you fire them. GOLDBERG. You need a reserve army of the unemployed, as they used to say.
WOLFF: But that means that capitalism as a system seems to require having, in this
in this country, to have millions of people necessarily sitting idle.
GOLDBERG: I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the things I think that
really thwarts us in our work is the idea that this is very small number of people
that are unemployed and they're probably you know not very good, or able to work or
something something like that. And you know if
you want to really push a social problem you have to really have magnitude. You
have to say it it affects a lot of people and it's severe in its
consequences. And actually both are true. And since the unemployment statistics
change every month I hope you'll excuse me if I go to a note. But actually
this so called this 3.6% unemployment which is so very low, low as
official unemployment, is really just the tip of the iceberg, to use a very
original expression. But it means that 5.9 million people are officially
unemployed. Now six million people is not nothing at all but that's really low
unemployment, and low official unemployment. And that means that these
are people who are working at all during a week that they're that they're
actually interviewed. It is part of a large survey that the Department of
Labor conducts. And it doesn't matter how long they're employed or whatever but
just so they're employed during the week or maybe working in a family business a
certain number of hours. And so that's the 3.6% unemployment.
But it doesn't count a number twice that size
actually. Because you take people who are part-time for economic reasons, that
means that they'd like to work full-time but they can't get a job. Now there are
some people who are voluntarily part-time unemployed and
actually they're probably not so involved so voluntary anyway because
they might actually lack childcare or they might like transportation. But
anyway, another 4.2 million people added to that 5.9 are these people who are
part-time for economic reasons. Part-time and unemployed. WOLFF: Which means not only that
they don't have the job but they don't have - GOLDBERG: They don't have the income
WOLFF: Which pinches their family's resources. GOLDBERG: Absolutely. And then there are another 4.9 million
people who are job wanters. They're not actively looking. In order to
be unemployed (I forgot to say this) you have to say "I've actively looked for work."
These are people who would like a job if
it came along but they're not actively looking, and it could be that they are
also discouraged. But that's another 4.9 million. So instead of
5.9 million, this 3.6%, you've got 15 million people.
And I might say too that if you take even the official unemployment numbers,
they're not, you know, equally distributed among the population. White's are
3.1% unemployed. Blacks 6.0%. Usually about twice as much.
The gap has narrowed a little bit. And if you take teenagers, young people
who are starting their working life, you've got something like 12%,
and black teenagers 22%. And then, of course, we also
look at job vacancy rates. We've got 2.3 people looking for every available job
who want jobs. And then, of course, we have this whole thing of
the number of people who work year-round full-time for less than the four person
poverty standard, and that's actually only about $25,000 a year.
So we really need full employment to to fill this gap.