On The Dole

I love ths headline, speaking truth to power as they say, too often unemployment appears to have no apparent cause but it does of course, the bosses decide....Canadian employers wipe out 71000 jobs

Even though the bosses were given HR advice not to do this, they can't help themselves they have no plan to deal with the recession so they fall back on the old tried and true, lay off workers.

Fears of a million layoffs a month in corporate America

And as usual the cheery economic advisors to the bosses didn't expect this.
Canada lost 70600 jobs in November, about three times more than many economists had expected, Statistics Canada reported on Friday.

As strategist Ed Yardeni wrote, "the latest batch of economic indicators is so bad that we are either spiralling into a depression or we are within a few months of a V-shaped recovery."
Put Mr. Abramson, 42, firmly in the V-shaped camp. He doesn't believe a years-long slump is lurking in the shadows, although the markets have been trading that way.
"It's been a rough economy, which we underestimated," he says. But the market response reflects a "psychological meltdown" that has taken stocks down to ridiculous valuations.
"We've been fully invested for a period here, because we didn't believe this was going to go as far down versus valuation and economic reality as it has. We thought this was going to be a normal 20-per-cent correction." Oops.

So while Harper created a political crisis to avoid addressing the economic crisis, it slapped him in the face like a wet fish. Indeed can you say recession, the word he refuses to use. And he has no plan to address it, so he creates a political crisis to distract us from the bad news.

Harper shuts down Parliament while unemployment hits recession levels

We are in a recession, and the dark clouds of depression creep over the horizon.

Canada loses 70600 jobs in a month, most since '82
Ontario's crumbling manufacturing sector is a major reason why the 66000 of the 71000 jobs that disappeared in Canada in November did so in this province. ...

Yep the oil crash of '82 was when we had one of our worst recessions.

Good News — Conditions Resemble 1973-74!
The recession of 1974-75 was the worst since the 1930’s Great Depression. The 1973-74 bear market in anticipation of that recession was the worst bear market since that of the 1929-32 bear market (which led to the Great Depression). The mid-1970’s were indeed a miserable period.

And that was just last months unemployment figures the news continues to be bad across Canada.

GM to lay off 700 more workers in Oshawa

AbitibiBowater to shut mills, axe 1100 jobs

Closed mines, broken dreams in the town that nickel built

However we are not alone in this sudden realization that the economy is crashing, like Harper the other recession denier sits in the White House south of here.

US Loses 533000 Jobs in Biggest Drop Since 1974

The U.S. Labor Department reported Friday that last month, companies around the nation shed jobs at the fastest rate since the early 1970s, pushing the unemployment rate to its highest level in 15 years.
The figures suggest the year-old recession will approach or even exceed the 1981-1982 downturn in severity and support expectations that Federal Reserve officials will soon lower interest rates to levels not seen in a half century.

That was just the monthly unemployment rate it gets worse in the U.S. which does not have our style of EI as the unumber of unemployed or underemployed workers not on unemployment payments ballons.

Broader Unemployment Rate Hits 12.5%

One in Ten Americans Now Uses Food Stamps as Unemployment Continues to Rise

But still there are those economists who claim that the glass is half full, same guys that said there was no recession....

Unemployment hurts, but it's not a crisis yet

And some are down right optimistic......

Recession over by June?

And they are just plain wrong like they have been for the past year.

If recent downturns are any guide, it may be well into 2010 or perhaps even 2011 before unemployment peaks, which means the global economy should not count substantial U.S. consumer spending rebound any time soon. "The economy is now locked in a vicious downward spiral in which employment, incomes and spending are collapsing together," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.

Along with the credit melt down unemployment is also a global problem.

OFF THE CHARTS A domino effect in the global work force
THE world recession is spreading, and the employment outlook is turning down almost everywhere.
Even in countries like China, the latest surveys of companies show they are reducing their work forces, providing more evidence that China cannot be the engine of the world economy when the traditional industrial powers suffer.

China fears a reverse migration
China's roaring industrial economy has been abruptly quieted by the effects of the global financial crisis. Rural provinces that supplied much of China's factory manpower are watching the beginnings of a wave of reverse migration that has the potential to shake the stability of the world's most populous nation.
Fast-rising unemployment has led to an unusual series of strikes and protests. Normally cautious government officials have offered quick concessions and talk openly of their worries about social unrest. Laid-off factory workers in Dongguan overturned patrol cars and clashed with police last Tuesday, and hundreds of taxis parked in front of a government office in nearby Chaozhou over the weekend, one of a series of driver protests.

Amid the global financial crisis, China's small and medium-sized enterprises, largely labor-intensive and vulnerable to fluctuations in domestic and external demand, are affected most. In the first half of 2008, 67,000 such companies, each with a business volume exceeding 5 million yuan, closed and laid off more than 20 million employees, said the National Development and Reform Commission. That figure doesn't include service industry firms or small companies with sales of less than 5 million yuan, as there are no authoritative figures available on those categories.

A HUNDRED per cent of the global economic growth next year will come from developing countries. This, according to Stuart E. Eizenstat, former US deputy treasury secretary, is the first time in history that developing countries will shoulder the full responsibility of pulling the global economy.
The European and US economic engines are not firing and therefore will not be able to pull the world economy along as has been done previously. Some economists, including David Carbon, chief economist at DBS Bank, believe that Asia is now more capable of standing on its own.Why then should the worker in a factory in China or Malaysia be concerned when the region, by most accounts, is in a much better economic situation than in the US and other more advanced nations? Why should economies in Asia and indeed other developing countries be concerned with rising unemployment in the US and Europe?The fact is that even though Asia is not as badly off as the US, Asia's growth is also slowing. In today's highly interconnected and globalised world, what happens in one part of the world is rapidly transmitted to the other side. Contagions spread faster. Thus, with the economic meltdown in the US and massive job losses, the demand for goods and services also falls. Offshore centres in India and in other parts of the world are also feeling the heat from the US financial and economic meltdown. The production and assembly line that snakes around the world, and in some cases making its way into remote villages, has also been affected.The unemployment numbers in Europe and other developed countries are also on the uptrend, with more joining the jobless ranks every day. This, according to some, could be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s

Ok folks lets do the math. Recession + Unemployment = Depression

US "Great Depression" has begun: Best of the Boards/Blogs

There's no mystery about what the government is trying to do. After the Black October crash, the government and the Bank of England got out their history books and started looking at what happened in the Great Depression. In September 1931, as unemployment reached three million, the national government slashed interest rates and abandoned the gold standard. The value of the pound fell by 25%, just as it has today. Interest rates fell from 6% to 2% - deja vu - and this led to a modest, export-led recovery. Unemployment fell marginally in 1935 as a recovery in the housing market, mainly in the south of England, boosted economic activity. The government is clearly trying to do the same today.
However, this isn't the 1930s. For one thing, there was a lot of spare capacity then in the economy, which is not the case today. We also had the Empire. Britain erected tariff walls against imports and used the colonies - yes, we still had them - to provide cheap food imports. The 1930s depression wasn't caused by consumer spending and debt, it was a classic crisis of ineffective demand.
Also: it didn't really work. Unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the 1930s outside the south-east of England, and it was only rearmament, as the Second World War approached, that ended mass joblessness. We are in a very different situation today. We cannot seek salvation in another unsustainable boom and we certainly cannot afford to go to war.

And depressions lead to workers revolt.

Workers at Republic Windows continue sit-in after company closes

Sit Ins and plant occupations were popular in the 1930;s as well, and are far more effective than strikes, they can lead to the only obvious solution to the capitalist crisis; workers control of the means of production and the socializtion of capital.

SEE
Neo-Con Industrial Strategy.
Common Sense
Neo-Cons Have No New Ideas
Back To The Fifties
Here Come the Seventies
Wall Street Mantra


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