Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Disoccupazione USA

Oggi il NY Times si e' deciso ad ammettere quello che l'"estrema
sinistra populista" negli USA
(e, modestamente, io in questi newsgroups) diceva da anni:   Il tasso
di disoccupazione negli Stati Uniti e'
a)  Molto piu' alto di quello ufficiale e
b)  Simile ai paesi Europei, Italia inclusa.   Paesi con garanzie del
posto di lavoro, 35 ore, e tutte le altre
    cose che, secondo Berluska e compagnia liberista bella "aumentano
il nostro livello di disoccupazione".
E questo non soltanto durante la crisi post Bush, ma nell'intero
"boom" degli
anni '90 (durante il quale, guarda caso, i profitti sulle azioni sono
saliti vertiginosamente
e gli stipendi sono, in termini reali, calati).
La flessibilita' "all'Americana" NON RIDUCE LA DISOCCUPAZIONE.  
L'unico suo effetto e'
ridurre diritti e aumentare poverta'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/29/weekinreview/29LEON.html?pagewanted=print&position=bottom
September 29, 2002
Out of a Job and No Longer Looking
By DAVID LEONHARDT
      HE American welfare state was supposed to be dead, victim of the
free-market economy and its success in creating a job for anybody who
wanted one.
      While European countries maintained huge social-service programs
and paid for them with high unemployment, the United States sharply
curtailed its best-known welfare program in the mid-1990's and the
jobless rate just kept
dropping. Even today, two years into an economic slump, the labor
market appears healthier than it was for most of the last three
decades.
But the current downturn is beginning to expose an uncomfortable
truth: the American economy looks more like Europe's than most people
ever imagined during the triumphal 1990's.
Millions of people, particularly men, have dropped out of the labor
force over the last decade, apparently unable to find work that pays
near what they once earned in the blue-collar jobs that have since
moved to lower-wage countries.
Unwilling to take new jobs that pay far less, neither employed nor
looking for work, they are not counted in the jobless rate, and a
surprising and growing number of them instead depend on a government
check to get by.
Once these statistical nonpersons are counted, the labor market of
today looks all too similar to those of supposedly bleaker past
decades, according to a number of recent studies by economists. Even
when the unemployment rate was
near a 30-year low in 1999 and 2000, men from the ages of 18 to 54, as
a group, spent 11 percent of the year not working, roughly the same as
in the late 1970's and late 80's, according to one study.
Things are considerably worse today. In the last two years, the
official jobless rate has risen and an additional two million people
appear to have dropped out of the labor force. Today, the real level
of unemployment for men probably
approaches the level of the recession-mired early 80's. 
THE unemployment rate doesn't mean what it did 20 years ago," said
Robert H. Topel, an economist at the University of Chicago and author
of the most detailed recent study of the changes. "Employment
opportunities for the less skilled
are not what they used to be, so people just leave the labor force."
To pay their monthly bills, many of these missing workers have turned
to disability insurance, a government program under Social Security
that has become the centerpiece of the new American welfare state.
Since 1990, the number of
people receiving disability pay has nearly doubled, to 5.4 million,
and the government now spends far more on the program than it does for
food stamps or unemployment insurance.
People who once may have worked through injuries or chronic pain,
particularly those without a college education, are increasingly
making a choice economic planners did not foresee. They have decided a
government benefit, in the form of
the roughly $800 in average monthly disability pay, is more attractive
than any job.
They make up the biggest group that has left the labor force and help
depress the unemployment rate. The growth of the prison population -
to about 2 million today, up from 1.1 million in 1990 and 500,000 in
1980 - has made another large
group of people dependent on the government. And while prisoners
themselves do not suffer many of the consequences of joblessness, like
eviction or lack of health care, their relatives often do.
OTHER labor-force dropouts are harder to count because the government
does not support them. Some have moved in with friends or family,
economists say. Still others, caring for children or retired, while
their spouse works, are properly
not counted as unemployed.
Overall, however, the rise in the number of missing workers calls into
question the great achievement of the 1990's economy: the best job
market since 1970. According to the official numbers, the jobless rate
generally rose from the 1960's
through the early 1980's, reaching a peak of 10.8 percent in 1982.
Since then, it has generally fallen, dropping to 3.9 percent two years
ago. Last month, after a year and a half of widespread layoffs, it
remained at just 5.7 percent.
Certainly, the decline was no mirage. With the economy growing
quickly, businesses needed to woo people into the labor force or out
of another job, and they offered the first significant raises in 30
years. Income inequality, the poverty rate
and the gap between the wages of whites and minorities all fell.
"You had employers chasing workers," said Jared Bernstein, a senior
economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group
in Washington. "People who were seeking work found it."
Some of the biggest beneficiaries were women, who poured into the job
market and whose wages crept closer to men's. Today, 63 million women
hold a job, up almost 9 million from a decade ago, according to the
Labor Department.
But even the strong economy of the late 90's failed to reverse the
gradual overall increase in the number of men dropping out of the
labor force. It also could not halt the long-term rise in the duration
of unemployment for those people who
kept looking for work and therefore appeared in the official
statistics.
Many of these workers have now been out of the job market for long
enough that they may never come back. If they do, they are almost
certain to make much less than they once did, economists say.
"People used to drift in and out of the labor force," said Mr. Topel,
whose co-authors were Chinhui Juhn at the University of Houston and
Kevin M. Murphy at Chicago. "Now, leaving the labor force is more like
death - you leave and you
don't come back."
A clear sign of the labor market's quiet troubles has long been
evident, though its significance was obscured by the official jobless
rate. While unemployment was supposedly falling over the last 20
years, pay barely increased for the
typical worker. Since 1982, the median hourly wage has grown only
about 6 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Labor
Department.
Reflecting workers' meager bargaining power, the Census Bureau said
last week that income for the typical household had fallen in 2001 for
the second consecutive year. The poverty rate rose.
With scant reason to think that the economy will grow rapidly in the
next couple of years, the labor market's woes present a serious
challenge for government.
The country can cut benefits at a time when joblessness is rising and
leave relatively unskilled workers to fend for themselves. Or it can
maintain and expand a safety net that is already larger than many
people had thought, possibly giving
more discouraged workers reason to depend on a government check.
LAST week, a mostly Democratic group of senators introduced a bill
that would extend unemployment benefits to the same length as in the
recession of the early 90's. As for the disability program, even
without any legislative changes its
costs will rise 15 percent to $69 billion this year, according to the
Social Security Administration. Containing those costs would require
cracking down on people with bad backs or carpel-tunnel syndrome and
few good job prospects.
"Everyone would admit that there are lots and lots of people we really
want to help," said Kevin A. Hassett, an economist at the American
Enterprise Institute, a Washington group that often argues for
free-market policies, of disabled
workers. "So you're not going to have a five-years-and-out rule." 
Instead, the country faces a series of difficult decisions balancing
the ideals of a free market with those of a humane economic policy.
Only a few years ago, compromises did not seem necessary.

Giusto un confronto tra i tassi di disoccupazione, ma perché non compari
anche quelli di occupazione?