Whose Economic Recovery? It's all in the figures.

A lot of noise has been made in recent months about the alleged stabilization in the long-suffering US economy. Sure, GDP has grown at break-neck speed, but only because more work is being done by fewer workers. Job creation is low, wages are low, and hundreds of thousands are no longer counted as unemployed since they have given up all hope of ever finding a job. In his State of the Union Address, Bush unveiled his new tax cut with the following promise: “When America works,America prospers, so my economic security plan can be summed up in one word:jobs.” The result? According to the National Journal: “The economy is so far behind the administration’s forecast that an average of 400,000 jobs would have to materialize every month until the end of 2004 to keep to the White House schedule. How hard is that? During the 1990s boom, such phenomenal job growth occurred in eight months out of 102.”

The facts speak for themselves:

• New jobs being created are paying 13 percent less than those lost during the recession - $14.65 per hour versus $16.92 per hour. By contrast, new jobs created during the later years of the expansion, between 1998 to 2000, paid 12 percent more.        

• According to the EPI study, previous recoveries provided an average of 61 percent of total income growth - and never less than 55 percent - to workers. In this recovery, however, only 29 percent of the total income growth has gone to workers’ wages and benefits. Meanwhile, corporate profits have claimed an average share of 46 percent of total income growth in this recovery, compared to an historic average of 26 percent.

• In 2003, The unemployment rate was the highest since 1994, and the search for a new job was the longest in two decades. According to the Labor Department, the average spell of unemployment lasted 19.2 weeks in 2003, or almost five months. That was the longest average duration since 1983, when the U.S. economy was emerging from the worst recession since the Depression. Then the average spell was 20.0 weeks. As a percentage of all the unemployed, the long-term jobless - those out of work for 27 weeks or more - made up 22.1 percent in 2003, the highest annual number since 23.9 percent in 1983.

The economic “recovery” is a farce and a sham. As always, only the rich benefit from the hard work and long hours of working people.

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