More than just a job

Marty G
15 years ago
Categories: Social issues, unemployment

Recently, Bill English has been trying to make excuses for not doing anything about the spiralling numbers of unemployed. He says that the practically full employment* of recent years was a mirage and people who are becoming unemployed should know “their jobs were unsustainable“. It’s similar to what he was saying in 1999, when he called unemployment below 6% a “hoax“. All this amounts to a shrugging of the shoulders. High unemployment is natural in National’s book, even desirable because it holds down wages, and they don’t intend to break a sweat trying to get it down again.

But a job is much more than an economic phenomena, nice to have, sometimes lost. Work is about dignity, a sense of worthiness. For most of history, unemployment – not having a task to do if one wanted to – has been a temporary rarity. It was only industralisation that allowed the creation of a surplus pool of labour, the involuntarily unemployed. Wanting to work but not being able to get it is an unpleasant experience, as many of you will know. One can feel hopeless, useless, and frustrated – it’s not something that people cope with well. It tends to lead to more negative social behaviour – more substance abuse, more crime, more mental illness, more violence against others and against oneself.’

I wrote about this a while back in the context of the crime figures, which show a near perfect link between the unemployment rate and crime rate – crime goes up 5% for every 1% increase in unemployment (or, coincidentally, 20,000 for crimes for 20,000 more unemployed).

It was the release of the latest self-harm figures on Friday that got me thinking about this again. I got the suicide data for the last 20 years and compared them to unemployment.

There’s a strong correlation – 0.45 for the general population, 0.6 for young men – that’s a very strong indication that one causes the other). The trend is that for every one percent increase in unemployment the suicide rate goes up 0.24 per 100,000, which is 20 people per year. The increase is four times as strong for young men. Not being able to get work can be the final straw for some people, and young men are especially vulnerable.

This is why I get so pissed off when people talk about unemployment as if it’s some unfortunate mishap, nothing serious, one of those things that happens in capitalism. Unemployment is a root cause of social malaise and individual tragedy.

That’s why it’s so important that government’s commit to full employment programmes and actually do their utmost to realise them. It’s not just so they can afford a nice standard of living, it’s so people can have dignity, feel they’re worthwhile, that they are a part of society, that they’re contributing, that life is worth living.

(*the nature of modern economies with 10% of jobs disappearing and being replaced every year, people moving city, entering and leaving the workforce, there must always be a ‘churn’ level of unemployment – 2-3%)