Arthur Delaney writes: Fed up with a long jobless spell, Kian Frederick raged against economic injustice during a protest in New York City.
“We’re tired of blaming the victim,” Frederick said during a speech before she and three others were arrested for blocking the street. “If you’re not in the richest 2 percent, you’re struggling. We have to ask the question, why are corporations, major corporations, sitting on millions and billions of record profits by their own account yet they’re still not hiring? We have to ask the question why our government continues to fight itself and ignore our needs.”
Her speech and arrest happened last November, nearly a year before the Occupy Wall Street protests became an international sensation. Way before many of the occupiers took up the cause of the 99 percent, there were “99ers” — the very long-term jobless. Their protests were smaller, and they got less attention. Now several 99ers and the long-term jobless, including Frederick, have joined the Occupy Wall Street cause.
The only way to reduce joblessness is to completely abandon the concept of worker ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’. These benefit nobody but the rich, who receive the profits from slimmed down, downsized companies. It is time to return to the old ways where the quality of a product was worth more than the quantity produced (which only contributes to waste and resource depletion.)
Read Chandran Nair’s book “Consumptionomics” (ISBN 9781906821494) about the economic and financial changes the Asian countries MUST make in order to not only raise their people out of poverty but even to stave off social collapse. When the society has millions of unemployed then the priority for industry is the number of people an enterprise can provide jobs for. The situation in the States is every bit as bad as in some of the poorest Asian countries; it’s time to pay a little more for something made by your neighbour instead of contributing to Walmart’s profits.
(You may not find the book in the local big box store; mine came directly from Britain, where it’s published, to Canada (shipping free) through the online used book outfit Abe Books.) (Better bargains than Amazon.)