Millions of unemployed need jobs or income now [View All]

Millions of unemployed need jobs or income now

Source: People's Weekly World Newspaper

Author: Eric Brooks

Date: 07/30/09 11:56

Unemployment and underemployment are causing misery, homelessness, hunger, and fear in the lives of tens of millions of working class people and our families, devastating communities, and impacting people of color, particularly African-Americans, Latinos, and most of all Native Americans disproportionately.

Those with money, the rich and the powerful, may find the masses of the unemployed an annoyance but, as Franklin Folsom writes in “Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed 1808-1942,” for the unemployed ourselves, leaving “a job means leaving a center and moving toward a periphery. It means leaving a collective pattern and entering formless isolation. Uniting under a boss or against a boss is a clear, understandable concept, but uniting against bosslessness is a very different matter.”

For the unemployed, watching our meager bank accounts drain away, experiencing the loss, one by one, of those sustaining resources— electricity, telephone, home, car, food—that keep our children and our spouses and ourselves whole and active is like sitting in a room out of which the air is being pumped, and knowing that each breath leaves less of what we need to survive.

In the midst of these challenges, community and collective struggle counteract the shame and fear that one may experience, and provide a path to expressing just demands for work or bread, jobs or income now. As 30 million unemployed and countless more underemployed working class people and our families struggle to survive today, it is urgent to demand that our society respond with aid that meets our needs and by providing work to all who want employment. The unemployed united, together with our allies, can fan with the breath of struggle the embers of hope that burn in our hearts.

Read more: http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/16575/