As US jobless toll tops 15 million: Unemployment crisis shows the failure of capitalism

[Hannah Bell]

The staggering figures released Friday on the US labor market demonstrate that what has developed since the Wall Street crash one year ago is not a conjunctural downturn or recession, but an historic assault on working class living standards...

September marked the 21st consecutive monthly decline in jobs — the longest continuous drop in US employment since the Labor Department began collecting such figures in 1939. Some 15 million American workers are unemployed, nearly double the number out of work when the recession began at the end of 2007. The average duration of unemployment is 26.2 weeks, more than half a year, the highest figure since the Labor Department began such statistics in 1948. One third of the unemployed, more than five million, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. This is another Labor Department record...

Virtually every sector of the economy showed job losses in September... There are now six unemployed workers for every job opening in America...

In his weekly Internet address Saturday, President Obama said he was considering “additional options to promote job creation.” ...extended unemployment benefits and tax credits for laid-off workers to buy health coverage...The White House has rejected calls for a second stimulus package, and the same position was voiced by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan...

Maintaining unemployment at the highest levels since the Great Depression is a deliberate policy of both big business parties and the ruling class as a whole.

While Democratic politicians and union bureaucrats invariably blame the economic collapse, particularly in manufacturing, on foreign competition and imports, the jobs crisis is of global dimensions. According to the OECD, which groups the 30 largest industrialized nations, the jobless rate for all 30 countries will approach 10 percent in 2010 — just about the projected average for the United States...

The jobs crisis demonstrates the failure of the capitalist system — not only in the United States, but internationally. Not a single capitalist government, in any of the OECD countries, has lifted a finger to create jobs or put the unemployed to work. In each country, the ruling elite is using mass unemployment as a club against the working class, to enforce demands for the destruction of wages, benefits and working conditions...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o05.shtml