But that was it. Thus as one might have predicted, the G-7 ministers focused less on the needs of the unemployed than on the needs of their potential employers . For the first time since the Great Depression, the industrialized nations, as well as developing nations, are facing long-term, persistent unemployment. Different factors have contributed to the crisis in different ways. Technological change has been a major contributor.
Human labor continues to be supplanted by newer, more capital-intensive processes.
But the far more important contribution has been political. It is in the sharpening divergence between the needs of capital and the needs of the growing mass of the world's peoples who are of little or no use for production on terms that are acceptable to capital that the global unemployment crisis takes on its decidedly modern hue. Quite the contrary. These days, what's best for Corporate America's bottom-line are more foreign sales and lower production costs. There's no time to let up.