Not much from Rudd for those losing jobs or coming onto the job market as unemployment is set to soar. Professor Bill Mitchell discussed the crucial question: What does the $42 billion do for the unemployed who will be worst hit by the current downturn? The answer is: not much.
Bill Mitchell on ABC radio and in his blog outlines how we could produce 560 thousand jobs at minimum pay for $8.3 billion if we introduced a Job Guarantee. The Government is stuck in the neo-liberal supply side treatment of the unemployed and has to shift paradigms and become a significant direct employer of labour again – as it was when we last had full employment – in the 1945 to 1975 period.
PM Rudd’s response to soaring unemployment has yet to examine the full employment policies from Professor Bill Mitchell from the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (known as CofFEE). This is an official research centre at the University of Newcastle and seeks to promote research aimed at restoring full employment and achieving an economy that delivers equitable outcomes for all.
Bill Mitchell argues that the $42 billion does not address fully the crisis. See his Billy Blog
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/
See the responsible arguments for a Job Guarantee.
http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/index.cfm
An introduction to Bill Mitchell is the Podcast February 6 – ABC Radio National Interest Program http://www.abc.net.au – Bang for mega bucks. How many jobs can $42 billion buy?
November Quarter 2008 – deterioration is now showing – 9.3 per cent overall underutilisation rate (posted January 16, 2008)
The latest CLMI for November 2008 confirms that the labour market is beginning to deteriorate. The total labour underutilisation has worsened slightly from 8.9 per cent in August 2008 and is now around 9.3 percent. The official unemployment is starting to rise but the real “canary” has been the labour force participation rate which started to decline before the other aggregates moved. The other warning is coming from underemployment which has risen from 3.5 per cent to 3.8 per cent in the 3 months to November 2008. This reflects the sharp drop in full-time employment and rationing of hours as employers adjust to falling sales and rising inventories. We expect the deterioration to become more systematic in the first 3 months of 2009 as the “extraordinary” spending period associated with the summer season works it way out of the system. The economy is now starting to pay for the years of debt buildup and fiscal surpluses that failed to underpin any gains in productive capacity. With the world economy now in serious financial trouble and signs that the crisis is spreading to the real economy we expect all components of the CLMI – official unemployment, underemployment and hidden unemployment to rise relatively sharply over the coming 12 months.
Sadly, the years of growth have been squandered by neo-liberal governments on both sides of politics – we never got close to full employment in the long boom.
See also:
W.F. Mitchell and E. Carlson (2001) (eds.) Unemployment: the Tip of the Iceberg, CAER/UNSW Press, Sydney.
E. Carlson and W.F. Mitchell (2002) (eds) The Urgency of Full Employment, CAER/UNSW Press, Sydney.
W.F. Mitchell and J. Muysken (2008) Full Employment abandoned: shifting sands and policy failures, Edward Elgar, Aldershot.
Many research articles on job creation and job destruction, Buffer Stock Employment models, the Job Guarantee, Costs of Unemployment, Phillips curve studies, Capital adequacy in banking, public policy, Large-scale macroeconometric modelling, Regional models of unemployment and Spatial Econometrics and more.
Job guarantee requied
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