A speech given by Pat Ambrose

June 2012

Although the Great Recession has been declared over for 36 months, you wouldn’t necessarily believe it if you’re a job seeker yourself, or you know someone who is one and are familiar with what they have been experiencing as such.  There continues to be no job available for three out of every four unemployed workers in our country--three years after the recession officially ended.  The main problem behind this is a big shortfall in aggregate demand, followed by a secondary problem of a mismatch between open jobs and the number of unemployed workers available with the skills needed to do them. A third problem, which is much harder to measure, but a no less vexatious one, is bias against the long-term unemployed in hiring.

With sovereign debt and banking system chaos in Europe and the looming “fiscal cliff” part of the economic landscape here, the Federal Reserve continues to test the limits of monetary policy in raising the growth rate of the economy and the possibility that more jobs will be created with it.  The clear, foreseeable limitations of monetary policy creates an urgent need for Congress to put ideology aside and step up and boost economic growth through an additional large stimulus program as there’s little evidence that the private sector will boost investment and hiring on its own.

I have long felt that the unemployed, as a group, need to be much more engaged in our country’s political life as not being so very much hurts them, since only the federal government has the scale to really mitigate the current jobs crisis.  As a group, the unemployed must look out for their interests in the political arena (which mostly center on job creation, unemployment insurance, and protection from discrimination in hiring), but unfortunately, there are the problems of not being listened and responded to. An article that appeared in the New York Times a year ago, entitled “The Unemployed Somehow Became Invisible” noted that the budget deficit, not jobs, had been dominating the conversation in Washington and that, to elected officials, the unemployed were a relatively small constituency. But aside from their low number as a percentage of the total U.S. population, the unemployed have been under considered in Washington for other reasons including:

• A lack of participation in elections. An estimated 35% of the unemployed Americans vote, compared with 46% of Americans who are employed.

• A lack of the intellectual leadership proved to be important in looking out for the interests of the unemployed in the past.

• A lack of labor union involvement today that played an important part in organizing the unemployed in the past.
• Technology that has enabled connectivity, but at the same time tends to create the ironic effect of isolating unemployed job seekers at home in front of their computers when they really should be out interacting and networking.

• Low self-esteem brought on by being unemployed that can work against trying to organize with others.

Will an additional stimulus program really help? Well, I’m reasonably well-schooled in Keynesian economics and I believe so, although skeptics of this approach abound.  But, it’s very clear to me four years after the financial crisis, that the U.S. economy will continue to experience disappointing, sub-optimal growth until the jobs crisis is moved from the back burner to the front burner in Washington.

As the economy was losing an average of 530,000 jobs per month following the market panic in September 2008, I foresaw an adverse feedback loop between rising unemployment, rising foreclosures, troubled mortgages, and contraction of the economy, and knew that a strong focus on employment needed to remain a high priority if sustained high unemployment was to be averted, even with the large stimulus from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).  Unfortunately, there really wasn’t a priority focus in Washington on mitigating unemployment during the following three years and sustained  high unemployment is exactly what resulted.  But to be fair, the Obama Administration did introduce the American Jobs Act last year which would have provided a $447 billion stimulus to boost growth, but little progress was made in passing it in Congress even after it was broken up into separate legislation.

Organizing the unemployed politically as a group will help them look out for their interests by better enabling them to push the legislators who represent them to do more through fiscal policy to boost growth and create the jobs that are critical for survival.  Organizing the unemployed will require credible advocate leaders to step up and use their visibility to educate the general public about the large, long-lasting social and personal costs of the unemployment experience.  These leaders will also need converse with legislators and their staffs about the need for immediate action on the jobs crisis and encourage unemployed voters and other voters affected by unemployment to do the same. Outreach initiatives by advocates for the unemployed can and should be organized by legislative district. Special attention should be given to reach the unemployed voter during voter registration activity that will occur between now and November.

Many unemployed, who can be relatively isolated from so many others who are like them, do not want to draw attention to the fact that they are unemployed and this tends to prevent them from thinking collectively and advocating for their common interests in the political sphere.  But there’s a good chance that would change if good, motivating, unifying leadership exists for them.