Election 2012: Unemployment Drop a Sham According to Socialist Party Ticket

Stewart Alexander for President
Alex Mendoza for Vice President

Los Angeles, CA – December 3, 2011 – The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the unemployment rate fell by .4% to 8.6% in November. The Socialist Party USA ticket of Stewart Alexander and Alex Mendoza feels that this is something that will pass by January and that long term jobs are not being created. They call for serious job creation programs to ensure that workers can readily find employment that pays well.

“This is the spending season,” states Alexander; “businesses are hiring desperate workers at low wages to sell merchandise. These workers will make a thousand dollars or two and be pushed out once Christmas is over. This is often part time work while it lasts.”

Over one third of the new work was in retail, directly related to Christmas sales. The key signs of economic health, manufacturing and construction jobs remained stable.

In addition to the seasonal jobs, hundreds of thousands of workers gave up on seeking work and are no longer considered as unemployed despite being capable and willing to work. There are 2.6 million Americans whom have searched for work in the past year but are not considered unemployed because they hadn’t searched in the past four weeks, not because they have found work. To put this in perspective, 13.3 million people are officially considered unemployed. This amount does not include those who have given up more than a year ago, nor the 8.5 million underemployed, those whom want to work full time and are forced to accept part time work.

In addition to these temporary jobs, the average pay of the private sector employee has fallen slightly while inflation marches on.

“We’ve seen a lot of this in my home state of Texas,” says Mendoza. “Governor Rick Perry has enacted economic policies which bring in a lot of new jobs, but they’re not jobs to write home about. We have good jobs being replaced by minimum wage jobs so businesses get more work for less cost and people aren’t technically unemployed anymore.”

The Alexander/Mendoza campaign calls for a real jobs program in order to make this happen, as well as protecting public sector jobs which have been faltering since the crisis began. They say that spending billions of dollars on incentives for businesses doesn’t get the job done – rather they call for the government to create jobs directly.

“Government employees work every bit as hard as private sector employees,” explains Alexander, “and given the staffing cuts while workloads increase, probably much harder. If we have money to give to private industry as an incentive, we have the capital to do for ourselves. We don’t need to be wasting any of that money on bonuses for executives at companies like Solara – it belongs in the pockets of workers put back into the workforce.”

The Tennessee Valley Authority, created during the New Deal, did just this – providing power in an area of the country that the private sector wouldn’t touch and the power was both cheaper and wages higher while still pulling in a profit for the US government.

Find more information at: Stewart Alexander for President; Stewart Alexander 2012; Stewart Alexander for President 2012 http://www.stewartalexanderforpresident2012.org/index.htm