Politics & Government

America's Employment Crisis

Even in a city like New Brunswick, which has a lower unemployment rate than other communities, the economic cracks are evident.

There are two ways you can look at the news that is lower than other New Jersey cities.

You can, as some business owners and officials say, point to the city’s business climate and say the city knows what it takes to attract businesses.

Or, you can acknowledge that the job mix in the city is the kind that has been less susceptible to the vicissitudes of the current economic malaise.

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Both views are accurate and good news for city taxpayers and residents, because it means that New Brunswick is weathering the current storm better than most while continuing its comeback from the kind of urban collapse that has left cities like Newark and Trenton in such distress.

New Brunswick’s success, however, also offers a glimpse into the larger economic woes the nation is facing.

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Consider what Glenn Patterson, New Brunswick’s director of Planning, Community and Economic Development, told New Brunswick Patch this week:

 “New Brunswick has many jobs in sectors that have been holding very steady – education and health care,’’ he said. “You haven’t seen major job losses in those areas as you have in other sectors in recent years.’’

This is good news for cities like New Brunswick, which are home to large, regional hospitals and academic institutions, but it underscores the failure of our economy to rebuild its manufacturing sector. New Brunswick is, after all, a former manufacturing hub that can trace much of the economic difficulties it has faced to the loss of manufacturing jobs. Cities without healthcare and educational sectors had much higher May unemployment rates than New Brunswick’s 8.5 percent: Perth Amboy was at 17.2 percent, Plainfield at 11.2 percent, Trenton at 13.1 percent, and Newark at 15.7 percent.

So while companies like Unitex, the commercial laundry operation that opened on Van Dyke Avenue in New Brunswick at the end of May, are finding the local business climate inviting, New Brunswick’s economic health is not something that will be easily replicated by eliminating red tape or cutting taxes, as conservative politicians regularly claim.

The national unemployment rate now stands at 9.1 percent, as about 117,000 jobs were added to the nation’s payrolls. But that still means that one in 10 Americans who are working or looking for work remain without a job – and that does not take into account the millions more who have stopped looking, who are working part-time or at jobs for which they are overqualified. Estimates generally place this “underemployment figure” at between 16 and 20 percent, meaning that one in six or one in five Americans are “underemployed.”

Several trends have intertwined over the last several decades to create what should be viewed as an employment crisis: the decay of the nation’s manufacturing base, the shift to service-sector jobs, the growth of the healthcare sector and, perhaps most significantly, the triumph of the financial sector.

These connected trends mean that we do not make things in the United States any longer, or we make very few things. Instead, major corporations create profit by playing financial shell games and widespread gambling on various aspects of the economy. Speculators – rather than supply and demand – dictate food and energy prices, healthcare and pharmaceutical costs, and housing prices. And, as record corporate profits show, the speculators win when the rest of us lose.

New Brunswick’s relative health – its unemployment rate is lower than the state’s – is good news for the Hub City and the surrounding communities, but we have to consider this within the larger economic narrative of which New Brunswick is very much a part.


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