July 19, 1971
Page 25947
A JOB FOR EVERY WORKER
(Remarks by Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE at the Detroit Economic Club, Detroit, Michigan,
May 24, 1971.)
America's economic heartland is the city of Detroit and the State of Michigan. And in 1971, this is also the heartland of America's unemployment.
Across the country, six percent of our working men and women are out of work. But as bad as things are everywhere, things are even worse here. In this city and this State, the unemployment rate is now over eight percent.
Six percent and eight percent are only numbers. They sound very precise and very abstract. But behind the numbers, there are people – and in 1971 it is people who are in trouble.
A machinist in Port Huron sits idle on the front porch of the home his family may lose – because there is no money left for next month's mortgage payment.
A shocked aerospace engineer walks from agency to agency in Seattle with a portfolio that proves he is good enough to get almost any position – but the interviewers keep telling him there are no positions to be had
In New York City, a worried cleaning woman knows the tenants are moving out of the offices in her building – and she wonders what will happen to her kids when all she has is a dismissal slip instead of a pay check.
In Washington, D.C., an eighteen year old who believed the television ad about staying in high school is tired of looking for the job the ad promised. Next week, he will decide to go with the numbers dealer or the pusher man.
That is what the unemployment crisis means in America. It means five million human casualties in a war against inflation that puts productive workers on the front lines. It means the loss of overtime and enforced part-time. It means that, in the first three months of 1971, 400,000 Americans gave up on America's economic system and just stopped looking for a job.
No wonder job security is a constant worry for the majority of workers. No wonder your own University of Michigan survey research center reports a postwar low in consumer confidence. No wonder businessmen are reading daily about losses instead of profits. Henry Ford knew that the prosperity of industry depended on well-paid and secure workers to buy the products of industry.
We are learning that lesson the hard way in 1971, as sales are squeezed by the caution of people who are afraid to spend even what they can earn.
The administration set out to trade inflation for unemployment. What it ended up with was a bad deal for every businessman and every worker.
In recent weeks, we have heard new predictions of success for the old game plan. The proof for the prediction is a rise in industrial production. But apart from the resumption of automobile output after last year's strike, the pace of production certainly did not quicken and probably slowed in the first four months of 1971. An artificial recovery due to the after-effects of a labor dispute is not the kind of recovery any corporation or any worker can rely upon.
And there is another persuasive reason to doubt the administration's claim that the economy is headed for good health. Homebuilding – which accounts for only four percent of the gross national product – has been responsible for more than half of the recent upturn. But a very small part of the economy cannot indefinitely sustain a rise in the entire economy. There is simply not enough evidence that, this time, prosperity really is just around the corner.
To borrow President Nixon's phrase, what we need now is not more promises, but more performance.
To reclaim prosperity, we need a program of self-terminating fiscal stimulation. We need a temporary tax cut and temporary expenditure increases. We must not commit the federal government to an inflationary budget in future years. But this year's budget should put an additional six to eight billion dollars into the economy. That would create jobs for people and business for industry.
To guarantee the value of the resulting wages and profits, we also need a stronger attack on inflation. The administration should immediately establish a program of voluntary price and wage restraints. The record of the guideposts in the early 160S was somewhat uneven, but very encouraging. They permitted prosperity with price stability then – and I believe they can do it again. I also believe that an administration too ready to keep intervening in southeast Asia should be less reluctant to start intervening in our own economy. Too much is at stake – not only material progress – but the hopes of our people.
Of course, it is always easier to be critical than correct about economics. What has been
called the dismal science is also the inexact science. Fiscal and monetary policy created the wartime overheating the Nixon administration inherited. And in the hands of the Nixon administration, they created the recession of 1970. But I believe the same tools which have been so badly mishandled for so long can now bring our economy back. What is required is the will to use them right.
But a worker without work cannot just wait for recovery. Recessions are made in Washington – but they are felt in the homes and neighborhoods of your town and mine. When national economic decline destroys jobs – when breadwinners out of work have shopped out the job market – they should be able to turn to the Federal Government as the employer of last resort. They should be able to keep their self-respect and self-reliance instead of standing hopelessly in an unemployment compensation line.
Every relevant authoritative study estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of vital public service jobs unfilled because they are unfunded. The Federal Government could put the jobless into those jobs. The program would not be mere make-work – and it would make a real difference in our hospitals, our schools, our social services and our environment.
And it would make economic as well as human good sense.
Individuals would enter the program as a recession begins – and their income would help to stimulate the economy. As the recession receded, they could return to the private job market – and government spending would be reduced. Obviously, we would face difficulties in translating this concept into a working and efficient reality. But I am sure they can be solved, with careful planning and constant attention to detail. And I am also sure that public employment is better than relief – better for society, better for the economy, and better for people.
But policies for prosperity and for public employment in the meantime are not alone enough. Too often, we tend to behave as though recovery from a recession freed us from our concern for the unemployed. Too often, we forget the workers who are left out – and the local areas which are falling behind.
The technical name for their problem is economic dislocation. The stark reality is that, even at the peak of prosperity, one million Americans are unemployed because economic change has wiped out their jobs. The demands for the products they once made has disappeared. New products are probably manufactured in a different city or town – and even established production is often shifted to another location. Communities are left with a lot of houses and streets and no job opportunities. Workers are faced with finding a retraining program, finding another job, and finding another place to live.
This kind of change is an inevitable and continuing process in a free market economy. In 1971, you can see the signs of the process everywhere in America.
As foreign shoes become less expensive, American shoes become harder to sell. That's why the shoe industry is in trouble in New England.
As we withdraw some of our troops from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of veterans who served their country are finding it tough to get a job which suits their skills. That's why a national magazine recently ran a long story about a soldier who came home to Indiana – and to unemployment.
As we slowly shift our priorities from the task of killing abroad to the tasks of life at home, defense workers must start to search for non-defense jobs. That's why there is a sign outside Seattle that says: "Would the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?"
As air travel undermines rail travel, people who have always worked the rails watch their trains and their jobs disappear. That's why the Penn Central crisis threatened the livelihood of 94,000 employees with a total weekly income of $20 million.
And as new regulations save our environment so man can survive, polluting plants may decide to shut down instead of controlling their pollution. That's why Saltville, Virginia, now faces the loss of 600 jobs.
Many of these economic shifts are evidence of the vitality of an economic system with a genius for adaptation and progress. They are not only inevitable – they are also indispensable. But telling communities or workers in jeopardy that the G.N.P. will go up or the railroads will run on time is not an acceptable answer.
Economic change benefits two hundred million Americans. A million Americans should not have to bear the burdens alone. The country should not make progress on the backs of some towns and workers. We must cushion the impact of economic and human dislocation. We must save communities and stem the tide of migration to overcrowded urban centers, where too many people are already chasing too few jobs. Three-quarters of the welfare mothers in New York were born outside New York. Most of them came north when the pattern of agriculture in the south moved from small to large farms.
A just society must do better than exiling them to dependence on relief and dumping the resulting tax burden on already overtaxed cities in crisis.
One solution – the wrong solution – is to supplant the free market mechanism instead of strengthening it. We are asked to purchase more arms than we should – so there will be more jobs in the defense industry. We are asked to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on an environmental disaster called the SST – so thousands of aerospace workers can waste their talents and their time instead of applying them to our most urgent national tasks. And we hear those requests from the same forces that last year killed a bill to provide 40,000 jobs in essential public services. By government fiat, they want to buy useless new products the free market could not otherwise sell.
Their mistake is matched only by men who deal with market changes by denying them – by trying to hold on to the past and hold off the future. Apply their arguments throughout American history. Should we have subsidized the kerosene industry when electric power came along? Should the Government have bought buckboards and stagecoaches to make up for the competition from cars? Should the Congress have appropriated money to keep the number of blacksmithies equal to the number of gas stations?
Surely, none of us would have supported any of that – and none of us should support anything similar now. What we should support – and what we must work for – are policies that put our resources into our opportunities for progress. But when we spend less on defense – when we reshape our economy with new technology and new products – when we shift from war to peace and from pollution to a clean environment – we must make certain that every American breadwinner and every American community have a decent chance for a decent share of a prosperous country.
I believe that is possible.
I believe that Marx was wrong.
I believe that we don't need war for prosperity – or subsidized waste for employment. I believe we can strengthen the free market system by underpinning it, instead of supplanting it.
I believe we can give every American who heads a family or supports himself the right to a job.
We must begin now the tough, tedious nuts and bolts work necessary to make that right a reality.
Specifically, we must design a system for an equitable prosperity which will meet five priority goals.
First, the system must guarantee every eligible unemployed worker access to an effective retraining program.
Second, the system must guarantee truly adequate financial support to every eligible unemployed worker who is entering retraining or must move to take a new job.
Third, the system must guarantee a better match of jobs with workers by combining present scattered programs into a comprehensive effort – and it must also use technology to guarantee the relevance of retraining to future skill needs.
Fourth, the system must guarantee incentives sufficient to bring new industry to depressed areas.
Fifth, the system must guarantee short term emergency grants to local communities like Seattle, where even basic services are threatened by economic crisis.
Finally, the system must guarantee that the Federal Government will act as an employer of last resort, not only in a recession, but in a time of national prosperity.
There will always be competent, able-bodied breadwinners with no immediate place to go in the free market system. We must protect them by giving them absolute access to a job. If a worker is too old to retrain or relocate, he should receive a decent early retirement income – if that is what he wants. But he should also have a chance to choose public employment. The gifts of experience and age could contribute in countless ways to communities across the country.
Building a system for an equitable prosperity will require hard choices – about wages and standards – about financing and administration. But it is the only choice we have.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the Employment Act of 1946. For a quarter of a century, the act has failed its own title. We have made some progress. We have endured no second great depression. But we have not produced the full employment we pledged twenty-five years and two wars ago.
It is time for something better.
It is time to commit our Nation to the right to a job.
It is time to abolish the concept of unemployment in America.
Unemployment occurs when there are more people to work than things to do. But there are plenty of tasks in our society for every pair of willing hands in our economy. And I am convinced that a new partnership between the genius of a free market and the genius of a free government can bring workers and work together.
Then, we can mean it when we say to the American breadwinner: "You'll get a decent job – and you'll get a decent paycheck."
And we can mean it when we say to American business: "You'll make a fair profit in a prosperous country."
All that requires is to stamp three simple, vital words on to the employment Act of 1946: "This means you."