Waiting for jobs
Levison, Andrew
Waiting for jobs THE FULL EMPLOYMENT ALTERNATIVE by Andrew Levison Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 252 pp. $10.50. One of the few "constants" in American economics, at least for several decades,...
...The widely shared image of the shiftless bounder ever on the public dole is simply mistaken...
...More than 60 per cent of the work force is doing rote manual labor on nine-to-five schedules...
...There are not plenty of jobs," Levison writes, "for those who need stable employment...
...What explains the buoyancy of his mood...
...and a commitment to economic security (not to sundry wars on poverty) that would place jobs rather than income at the center of policy-making...
...And yet the talk there of lowering growth and expectations could bring about labor-management-government cooperation on a scale heretofore unknown...
...It would be foolish to think that Levison's point could pierce the armor of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys...
...The want ads are bulging even as the recession deepens...
...No matter...
...That number has been increasing, it is widely alleged, not for base political reasons, but because rapid economic changes in the 1970s have made a higher national unemployment rate more tolerable...
...No one doubts that today's jobless are measurably better off than those out of work in the 1930s...
...And they also serve who only stand and wait for optimum job opportunities...
...The American perception of that experience, unhappily built on popular cliches, is again at odds with reality...
...The May labor strikes in Sweden and that country's most recent failure to compete in export markets may force Levison to recant his sanguine view of Sweden as a haven for noninflationary full employment...
...Levison is at his best in showing that both of these groups are coping, but barely so...
...The "full employment alternative" decorously lifts and sifts the best of these European elements and fits them to the American frame: a call for economic policy planning patterned after a fashion on the French model...
...a rejection of wage-price guidelines for a social contract (along German lines) between labor, business, and government...
...Most are more discreet than Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein, who believes that "unemployment runs in the genes just like bad teeth...
...But the publisher ought to be encouraged, in support of the public weal, to send a copy of The Full Employment Alternative to Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve and to Margaret Thatcher at Whitehall...
...Finally, according to this rationale, most teen-agers and women, so much larger a part of the total labor force today, can rely on other breadwinners (males) in the household...
...In human terms the difference can be stated simply: those who wait and those who have nothing to wait for...
...Now to the fore comes Andrew Levison with The Full Employment Alternative, as bracing a tonic against this regnant silliness as one could hope for...
...In The Working Class Majority—a National Book Award nominee in 1975— Levison unraveled census figures to show that the working class is not a figment of Marxian fancy...
...Such was the hope of the 1942 British Beveridge plan and the reality of the Swedish economy for the past forty years...
...Today's job seeker is wiser, better informed, unwilling to take "just anything," evaluating work prospects as carefully as a track tout eyeballing the fillies...
...No, the new viewers say, if joblessness is "unnaturally high," the source of distorted labor markets must come from external malevolence: excessive trade union demands, or government meddling, or both...
...On close examination, he demonstrates that Germany's "economic miracle" can in no way be attributed, pace Milton Friedman, to a free enterprise system, but to national investment planning and worker "co-determination...
...Some may now equate "the British disease" with socialism, but "socialist" England has been run by the Tories during most of the postwar period...
...It is certain that Levison has produced another winner...
...Only the permanently sentimental can continue to associate unemployment with hardship...
...Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter have complied with this conservative "new view" of unemployment which rests on three planks: First, jobs are always plentiful...
...One of the few "constants" in American economics, at least for several decades, was the 4 per cent jobless rate as a synonym for full employment...
...When this story is told in the antiseptic technical journals, it is informed by a certain spiritualism...
...Such a move, were the principals to read this heady stuff, might just slow the pace of our wanton gallop toward double-digit unemployment...
...Patrick Lewis (J...
...As for the liberals, their misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of unemployment has led them inexorably to a policy impasse: There is no alternative but to trade off inflation for unemployment...
...He puts himself at a safe distance from any radical agenda...
...Seldom does he builc his case on quotes from anything to the left of Business Week...
...and the presence of more women and youths in the labor market does not change the fact that the official unemployment rate understates, rather than overstates, the real extent of hardship...
...In short, the European experience...
...The conservative new viewers claim a "natural'* rate of unemployment exists which cannot be reduced by the will of mere mortals...
...It is not poor work attitudes or the "culture of poverty" that causes the rapid turnover in welfare rolls, but the remorseless tedium of dead-end jobs at below poverty-level wages...
...In the presence of this bone-tired gloom, why isn't Levison agonizing...
...Social stress, mental illness, incidence of disease and suicide are all highly correlated with the unemployment rate...
...The waiting is almost painless, a pesky inconvenience because, secondly, fat benefit checks have turned layoffs, for both the idle and the idlers, into virtually paid vacations...
...unemployment compensation has not eliminated distress...
...But understanding the American labor market demands a delicacy of distinction conservatives seem willfully to ignore...
...The reality of modern unemployment is at a considerable remove from the view of the new conservative whose stock remedy for idleness is really quite old: Return to laissez-faire...
...In his new book, Levison's analysis is again intelligent and persuasive...
...In a few residual quarters, the unemployment rate is held to be biologically determined...
...He seems too ready to accept the results of opinion polls purporting to show how truly reform-minded Americans are...
...Levison's prescriptions are wise, if slightly worn, and are securely in the reformist tradition...
...Patrick Lewis, an economist, teaches in the department of integrative studies at Otterbein College in Ohio...
...But discouraged workers founder on more than bad genes...
...Nor is there a long-suffering industrial reserve army...
...Even if "nature" is numerically malign, the truly distressed among the unemployed number not in the millions, but merely in the tens of thousands...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
