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expository essay on unemployment

Essay on Unemployment

essay on unemployment

Here we have shared the Essay on Unemployment in detail so you can use it in your exam or assignment of 150, 300, 500, or 1000 words.

You can use this Essay on Unemployment in any assignment or project whether you are in school (class 10th or 12th), college, or preparing for answer writing in competitive exams. 

Topics covered in this article.

Essay on Unemployment in 150-250 words

Essay on unemployment in 300-500 words, essay on unemployment in 500-1000 words.

Unemployment is a pressing issue that affects individuals and societies globally. It refers to the state of being without a job or a source of income despite actively seeking employment. Unemployment poses significant challenges, both economic and social, for individuals and communities.

The consequences of unemployment are far-reaching. Financial instability decreased living standards, and a loss of self-esteem and confidence are common outcomes. Individuals may face difficulties in meeting their basic needs, providing for their families, and planning for the future. Moreover, unemployment can lead to social unrest, increased crime rates, and a strain on public resources.

Addressing unemployment requires a multifaceted approach. It involves creating favorable economic conditions, promoting job growth through investment and entrepreneurship, and providing individuals with the necessary skills and training for employment opportunities. Furthermore, social safety nets, such as unemployment benefits and job placement services, play a crucial role in supporting those who are unemployed.

Efforts to reduce unemployment should also focus on addressing structural issues in the labor market, promoting fair employment practices, and encouraging inclusive growth. Additionally, fostering a supportive environment for innovation, research, and development can stimulate job creation and economic prosperity.

In conclusion, unemployment is a complex issue with wide-ranging implications for individuals and societies. It demands comprehensive strategies that encompass economic policies, skill development, and social support systems. By addressing unemployment effectively, we can strive towards a society where individuals have access to fulfilling work opportunities and can contribute to the overall well-being and prosperity of their communities.

Title: Unemployment – The Economic and Social Challenge

Introduction :

Unemployment is a pressing issue that affects individuals, families, and societies worldwide. It refers to the state of being without a job or a viable source of income despite actively seeking employment. High levels of unemployment have significant economic and social consequences, making it a critical challenge to address.

Causes of Unemployment

Unemployment can stem from various factors. Economic downturns and recessions often result in job losses as businesses struggle to sustain their operations. Technological advancements and automation have also led to job displacement, particularly in industries that rely heavily on manual labor. Globalization and outsourcing practices have contributed to the relocation of jobs to countries with lower labor costs, creating unemployment in certain regions.

Impact of Unemployment

Unemployment has far-reaching implications. Financial instability resulting from joblessness can lead to increased poverty rates, limited access to healthcare, and housing insecurity. It also strains social cohesion, as unemployed individuals may experience psychological distress, low self-esteem, and a loss of purpose. Moreover, long-term unemployment can lead to skills deterioration and a loss of work experience, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to re-enter the labor market.

Addressing Unemployment

Addressing unemployment requires a multi-faceted approach:

Economic Policies: Governments should implement policies that promote economic growth, investment, and job creation. This includes fostering a business-friendly environment, reducing bureaucratic barriers, and providing incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. Additionally, targeted industry development strategies can identify sectors with growth potential and encourage job creation in those areas.

Education and Skills Development: Investing in education and skills development is crucial to equip individuals with the necessary competencies for available job opportunities. Collaboration between educational institutions, employers, and government agencies can help bridge the skills gap and ensure that individuals are prepared for the changing demands of the labor market. Upskilling and reskilling programs can help unemployed individuals acquire new skills and improve their employability.

Job Creation Initiatives: Governments should prioritize job creation initiatives, particularly in sectors with high growth potential. This can be achieved through infrastructure projects, green technology investments, and support for small and medium-sized enterprises. Public-private partnerships can also play a significant role in stimulating job creation and economic development.

Social Safety Nets: Establishing robust social safety nets is crucial to support those facing unemployment. Unemployment benefits, healthcare coverage, and access to retraining programs can help individuals meet their basic needs and regain economic stability while actively seeking employment. Such support systems alleviate the financial burden and provide a safety net during challenging times.

Conclusion :

Unemployment is a complex and persistent socioeconomic challenge that demands comprehensive solutions. By implementing effective economic policies, investing in education and skills development, promoting job creation, and providing social safety nets, societies can mitigate the impacts of unemployment and strive toward a more equitable and prosperous future. It is essential to address this issue with urgency, as reducing unemployment rates not only improves individual well-being but also fosters economic growth and social cohesion.

Title: Unemployment – A Dual Crisis of Economic Stability and Human Dignity

Unemployment is a complex and pervasive issue that affects individuals, families, and societies at large. It refers to the state of being without a job or a viable source of income despite actively seeking employment. High levels of unemployment have severe economic and social consequences, making it a pressing challenge that demands effective solutions and interventions. This essay aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the causes, impacts, and potential remedies for unemployment, recognizing its multifaceted nature and the need for a holistic approach.

I. Understanding Unemployment

Unemployment can be classified into various types based on its causes and duration. Structural unemployment arises from shifts in the economy, such as technological advancements or changes in market demand, rendering certain jobs obsolete. Cyclical unemployment, on the other hand, is caused by economic downturns and fluctuations in business cycles. Frictional unemployment occurs when individuals are between jobs or in transition, while seasonal unemployment is linked to seasonal variations in certain industries.

II. Economic Implications

Unemployment poses significant challenges to the economy at both micro and macro levels. At an individual level, it leads to a loss of income and financial instability, making it difficult for individuals to meet their basic needs, contribute to the economy, and plan for the future. Moreover, the lack of economic opportunities leads to a decrease in consumer spending, which negatively impacts businesses and reduces their profitability. This, in turn, can trigger downsizing, closures, and a negative cycle of job losses, further exacerbating the unemployment crisis.

On a macroeconomic scale, high unemployment rates hinder economic growth and development. The decline in consumer spending decreases demand for goods and services, creating a ripple effect throughout the economy. Governments also face challenges in generating tax revenues, leading to reduced public investment in infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Additionally, increased government spending on unemployment benefits and social support places a strain on public finances, potentially leading to higher budget deficits or cuts in other areas.

III. Social Consequences

Unemployment not only impacts individuals’ economic well-being but also has profound social implications. Financial instability resulting from joblessness can lead to increased poverty levels, housing insecurity, and limited access to healthcare, further exacerbating social inequalities. The psychological toll of unemployment cannot be overlooked, as individuals may experience feelings of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and a loss of purpose. This can strain relationships, lead to social isolation, and create a sense of hopelessness among the unemployed.

Furthermore, long-term unemployment can result in skills deterioration and a loss of work experience, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to re-enter the labor market. This perpetuates a cycle of unemployment and hinders upward social mobility, reinforcing existing inequalities and social divisions.

IV. Causes of Unemployment

Unemployment is influenced by a combination of economic, structural, and policy-related factors. Economic downturns, such as recessions or financial crises, can lead to widespread job losses as businesses struggle to stay afloat. Technological advancements and automation also contribute to job displacement, particularly in industries that rely heavily on manual labor. Globalization and outsourcing practices can result in the relocation of jobs to countries with lower labor costs, further aggravating unemployment in certain regions.

Inadequate education and skills training also contribute to unemployment. Rapid changes in the labor market demand individuals with up-to-date skills and knowledge. Failure to adapt and provide relevant training can leave individuals ill-equipped to secure employment in sectors with higher demand.

V. Addressing Unemployment

Effectively addressing unemployment requires a comprehensive approach that combines economic policies, education and skills development, job creation initiatives, and social safety nets. Some potential strategies include:

  • Economic Policies
  • Education and Skills Development
  • Job Creation and Support
  • Social Safety Nets

Economic Policies:

Governments should implement policies that foster a conducive business environment, promote investment, and stimulate job creation. This may involve reducing bureaucratic barriers, providing incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation, and investing in infrastructure projects to generate employment opportunities.

Education and Skills Development:

A focus on education and skills training is crucial to equip individuals with the necessary competencies for available job opportunities. Collaboration between educational institutions, employers, and government agencies can help bridge the skills gap and align education with labor market needs. Upskilling and reskilling programs should be promoted to ensure individuals can adapt to evolving job requirements.

Job Creation and Support:

Governments should prioritize job creation initiatives in sectors with growth potential, such as renewable energy, healthcare, technology, and infrastructure development. This can be achieved through investment incentives, public-private partnerships, and targeted industry development strategies. Additionally, providing job placement services, vocational training, and financial assistance to unemployed individuals can enhance their employability and facilitate their transition back into the workforce.

Social Safety Nets:

Establishing robust social safety nets is essential to provide temporary relief and assistance to those facing job loss. Unemployment benefits, healthcare coverage, and support for retraining can help individuals meet their basic needs and regain economic stability while actively seeking employment. Such measures help alleviate the negative impacts of unemployment and support individuals during periods of transition.

Unemployment is a dual crisis of economic stability and human dignity, impacting individuals and societies on multiple levels. The economic and social consequences of unemployment demand comprehensive and coordinated efforts to address its causes and mitigate its impacts. By implementing effective economic policies, investing in education and skills development, promoting job creation, and providing robust social safety nets, societies can strive towards reducing unemployment rates and creating a more inclusive and prosperous future for all.

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Essay on Unemployment: 100 to 300 Words

expository essay on unemployment

  • Updated on  
  • Mar 30, 2024

Essay on Unemployment

Writing an essay on unemployment provides an opportunity to explore a critical issue affecting societies worldwide. Unemployment, a multifaceted problem, has far-reaching consequences that touch upon various aspects of individuals, families, and nations. In this essay, we will delve into the complexities of unemployment, examine its causes and consequences, discuss government initiatives, and shed light on potential solutions.

Table of Contents

  • 1 What is Unemployment?
  • 2 Essay on Unemployment in 100 words
  • 3 Essay on Unemployment in 200 words
  • 4 Essay on Unemployment in 300 words
  • 5 Tips to Ace in Writing An Essay

Must Read: The Beginner’s Guide to Writing an Essay

What is Unemployment?

Lack of jobs leads to unemployment. It is a very serious economic and social concern that is happening all around the globe leading to many social ills. This issue is a major one and hence many governments are trying to address it. When people of a nation are employed, that leads to the economic and social well-being of that nation. To address it, the education system needs to be modeled differently so as to increase the employability of people. In democracies, political parties use unemployment as a core issue in their election manifestos.

Essay on Unemployment in 100 words

Unemployment refers to the condition when individuals, capable and willing to work, are unable to secure gainful employment. It is a pervasive issue across the globe, with varying degrees of impact on societies. Unemployment results in financial instability, and emotional distress, and hampers individual growth. Governments and organizations must collaborate to create opportunities for employment through skill development and policy implementation.

Essay on Unemployment in 200 words

Unemployment, a pressing concern globally, stems from multiple factors that hinder the workforce’s engagement in productive activities. It affects both developed and developing nations, contributing to economic imbalances and social disparities. The consequences of unemployment include reduced income levels, increased poverty rates, and strained government resources. Moreover, the psychological toll it takes on individuals and families can be severe, leading to stress, depression, and strained relationships.

Essay on Unemployment in 300 words

The intricate web of unemployment is spun from a mix of causes, ranging from economic fluctuations to structural shifts in industries. Cyclical unemployment, driven by economic downturns, and structural unemployment, resulting from a mismatch between skills and job openings, are widespread forms. Additionally, technological advancements lead to technological unemployment as machines replace human labour.

Unemployment has cascading effects on societies. Diminished purchasing power affects market demand, thereby impacting economic growth. As unemployment rates rise, so does the burden on social welfare programs and the healthcare system. The phenomenon also fuels social unrest and political instability, making it a challenge governments cannot ignore.

Governments worldwide have initiated strategies to tackle unemployment. Skill development programs, vocational training, and entrepreneurship initiatives are designed to equip individuals with market-relevant skills. Furthermore, promoting labour-intensive industries and investing in sectors with growth potential can generate employment opportunities.

In conclusion, unemployment is a complex issue that necessitates a multi-pronged approach. Governments, industries, and individuals must collaborate to alleviate its impact. Effective policy implementation, education reforms, and the cultivation of entrepreneurial spirit can pave the way towards reducing unemployment rates and fostering a more stable and prosperous society.

Tips to Ace in Writing An Essay

Before we dive into the specifics of unemployment, let’s briefly discuss some tips to enhance your essay-writing skills:

  • Understand the Prompt: Ensure a clear understanding of the essay prompt to address all its components effectively.
  • Research Thoroughly: Gather relevant information from credible sources to build a comprehensive and informed essay.
  • Organize Your Thoughts: Create an outline to structure your essay logically, allowing your ideas to flow coherently.
  • Introduction and Conclusion: Craft a compelling introduction to engage your readers, and a succinct conclusion to summarize your key points.
  • Use Clear Language: Express your ideas using clear and concise language, avoiding jargon or overly complex vocabulary.
  • Provide Examples: Illustrate your points with real-life examples to enhance understanding and credibility.
  • Edit and Proofread: Revise your essay for grammar, punctuation, and coherence to ensure a polished final draft.

Also Read: Unemployment v/s Underemployment – What’s Worse?

Related Reads:-     

Unemployment refers to the state in which individuals who are willing and able to work are without gainful employment opportunities. It is a condition where individuals seek jobs but are unable to secure them, leading to financial instability and societal challenges.

Unemployment, as discussed in the essay, is a multifaceted issue encompassing the lack of employment opportunities for willing and capable individuals. It explores various forms of unemployment, its causes, far-reaching consequences on economies and societies, and the role of governments in implementing solutions to mitigate its impact.

Unemployment is the term used to describe the situation where individuals of working age are actively seeking employment but are unable to find suitable job opportunities. It signifies a gap between the available workforce and available jobs, often leading to economic and social challenges within a society.

Unemployment emerges as a prominent thread, influencing economic, social, and psychological realms. As we’ve explored in this essay, comprehending the causes and consequences of unemployment is pivotal in devising solutions. Governments, institutions, and individuals must strive collectively to unravel this issue’s complexities and weave a fabric of employment opportunities, stability, and progress. We hope that this essay blog on Unemployment helps. For more amazing daily reads related to essay writing , stay tuned with Leverage Edu .

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Manasvi's flair in writing abilities is derived from her past experience of working with bootstrap start-ups, Advertisement and PR agencies as well as freelancing. She's currently working as a Content Marketing Associate at Leverage Edu to be a part of its thriving ecosystem.

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Unemployment Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on unemployment.

Unemployment is a very serious issue not only in India but in the whole world. There are hundreds and thousands of people out there who do not have employment . Besides, the problems of unemployment are very severe in India because of the growing population and demand for jobs. Moreover, if we neglect this problem then it will be going to become the reason for the doom of the nation.

Unemployment Essay

What is Unemployment?

Unemployment refers to a situation in which a skilled and talented people wanted to do a job. But cannot find a proper job due to several reasons.

Types of Unemployment

Now we know what is unemployment but unemployment does not only mean that the person does not have a job. Likewise, unemployment also includes people working in areas out of their expertise.

The various types of unemployment include disguised unemployment, seasonal unemployment, open unemployment, technological unemployment, structural unemployment. Besides, some other unemployment is cyclic unemployment, educated unemployment, underemployment, frictional unemployment, chronic unemployment, and casual unemployment.

Above all, seasonal unemployment, under unemployment, and disguised unemployment are the most common unemployment that is found in India.

Reasons for Unemployment

In a country like India, there is much reason for a large section of the population for being unemployed. Some of these factors are population growth, slow economic growth , seasonal occupation, slow growth of the economic sector, and fall in the cottage industry.

Moreover, these are the major reason for unemployment in India. Also, the situation has become so drastic that highly educated people are ready to do the job of a sweeper. Besides, the government is not doing his work seriously.

Apart from all these, a large portion of the population is engaged in the agricultural sector and the sector only provides employment in harvest or plantation time.

In addition, the biggest reason of unemployment in India is its vast population which demands a large number of jobs every year which the government and authorities are unable to provide.

Consequences of Unemployment

If things will go on like the current scenario then unemployment will become a major issue. Apart from this, the following things happen in an economy which is an increase in poverty, an increase in crime rate, exploitation of labor, political instability, mental health, and loss of skills. As a result, all this will eventually lead to the demise of the nation.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Initiative by Government

The government has taken the problem very seriously and have taken measures to slowly reduce unemployment. Some of these schemes includes IRDP (Integrated Rural Development Programme), DPAP (Drought Prone Area Programme), Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, Employment Assurance Scheme, NRY (Nehru Rozgar Yojana), Training for self-Employment, PMIUPEP (Prime Minister’s Integrated Urban Poverty Eradication Program), employment exchange, Employment Guarantee Scheme, development of organized sector, small and cottage industries, employment in forging countries, and Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana and few more.

Besides, these schemes the government also make some rules flexible, so that employment can be created in the private sector also.

To conclude, we can say that the problem of unemployment in India has reached a critical stage. But, now the government and local authorities have taken the problem seriously and working on it to reduce unemployment. Also, to completely solve the issue of unemployment we have to tackle the main issue of unemployment that is the vast population of India.

FAQs about Unemployment

Q.1 Why there is a problem of unemployment in India? A.1 Due to overpopulation and lack of proper skills there is a problem of unemployment in India.

Q.2 Define Disguised unemployment? A.2 Disguised unemployment refers to a form of employment in which more than the required numbers of people work in industry or factory. And removing some employee will not affect productivity.

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Unemployment Essay

500+ words essay on unemployment.

Unemployment is a serious problem among young people. There are thousands of people who do not have any work to do and cannot find work for themselves. Unemployment refers to the situation where a person wants to work but cannot find employment in the labour market. One of the major reasons that contribute to unemployment is the large population of India and the limited availability of resources. In this essay on unemployment, we will discuss all these issues responsible for unemployment in India and how we can overcome this problem. Students must go through this unemployment essay to get ideas on how to write an effective essay on the topic related to unemployment. Also, they can practice more CBSE essays on different topics to boost their writing skills.

Unemployment is measured by the unemployment rate, defined as the number of people actively looking for a job as a percentage of the labour force. The unemployment rate for the year 2013-14 in rural India was 4.7%, whereas it was 5.5% for urban India. In the short term, unemployment significantly reduces a person’s income and, in the long term, it reduces their ability to save for retirement and other goals. Unemployment is a loss of valuable productive resources to the economy. The impact of job loss in rural and regional areas flows through the local community, damaging businesses.

Reason for Unemployment

An unemployed person is one who is an active member of the labour force and is seeking work but is unable to find any work for himself. There are multiple reasons behind the unemployment of a person. One of them is the slow economic growth, due to which jobs in adequate numbers are not created. Excessive dependence on agriculture and slow growth of non-farm activities also limit employment generation. Unemployment in urban areas is mainly the result of substantial rural migration to urban areas. This has also resulted in a labour workforce in cities. The lack of technology and proper machinery has also contributed to unemployment.

The present educational system is based on theoretical knowledge instead of practical work. Thus, it lacks the development of aptitude and technical qualifications required for various types of work among job seekers. This has created a mismatch between the need and availability of relevant skills and training. This results in unemployment, especially among the youth and educated people with high degrees and qualifications. Apart from it, the lack of investment and infrastructure has led to inadequate employment opportunities in different sectors.

Steps to Eliminate Unemployment

Various strategies and proposals have been implemented to generate employment. Many Employment programmes and policies have been introduced and undertaken to boost self-employment and help unemployed people engage in public works. The Government of India has taken several policy measures to fight the problem of unemployment. Some of the measures are the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), National Skill Development Mission, Swarna Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana (SJSRY), Regional Rural Banks (RRBs).

Despite the measures taken by the government, India remains a country experiencing severe unemployment problems. It can be resolved by imparting education in such a way that youth get the necessary skills so as to get employment easily. Setting up various vocational training and vocational courses for undergraduate and postgraduate students will help in finding employment for youth. The government needs to emphasise these courses at the primary level and make them a compulsory part of the curriculum to make students proficient in their early stages of life. Career counselling should be provided within schools and colleges so that students can choose a better career option based on their interests and ability. Government should create more job opportunities for the youth and graduates.

India is a fast-growing economy. There is an enormous scope for improvement in the unemployment sector. The various measures and steps taken by the government to increase the employment rate have succeeded to a great extent. The widespread skill development programmes have gained popularity across the nation. With better enforcement of the strategies, the employment level can be significantly improved. Although, we have to go a long way before we can say that all the people in India will get employment.

We hope this essay on unemployment must have helped students in boosting their essay-writing skills. Keep learning and visiting the BYJU’S website for more study material.

Frequently Asked Questions on Unemployment Essay

Is unemployment still an existing problem in india.

Yes, unemployment is still a serious issue in our country. Steps need to be taken by the government and also by the youngsters in India to improve this situation.

Is it necessary for schoolchildren to be informed about unemployment?

Students at this young age should definitely be informed about this topic as it will motivate them to study and aim for higher scores in exams.

What points are to be added to an essay topic on Unemployment?

Add details about different age groups of people suffering from this state of employment. You can focus on the fact that poverty is an indirect reason for unemployment and vice-versa. Then, suggest steps that can be taken to bring about an improvement in education and increase the percentage of literacy.

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Expository Essay on Unemployment

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The problem of unemployment is a global reality. Even developed countries like the U.S., England, France, Germany, Italy, etc., also suffer from this problem, but it is most prevalent in India.

It has become a threat to India’s economic and social development. It is one of the significant causes of poverty, backlog, crime, and frustration. India is the second-largest country after China in terms of population and labor. But due to severe unemployment, this tool is not being used. There are skilled and determined hands, but there is no job-ready, and they are forced to stay idle.

The ever-increasing number of job seekers in the live registry exchange shows how alarming this has been in recent years. But this gives a negative impression of the problem because all job seekers and unemployed do not find themselves enrolled in employment agencies. In addition, there are no employment negotiations in rural and rural areas of the country.

There are millions of young men and women who are looking for work. This chronic unemployment problem is not limited to any category, segment, or community. There is a massive shortage of jobs for educated, well-trained, and skilled people, among the unskilled and unskilled workers, small and medium farmers, and workers. Then there is the inefficiency. Sadly, creative jobs have failed to keep pace with the growing number of job seekers. It is a problem that poses a significant challenge to our leaders, intellectuals, planners, economists, industrialists, and academics.

In remote areas, cities and towns, the problem is even more significant, with thousands of workers and farm workers without a piece of land on their own. Most of our farmers also have minimal assets. As a result, they remain inactive for many months of the year. This has resulted in a mass exodus of people from cities and towns. Because of this chronic unemployment, the majority of our people live below the poverty line. The unemployment problem has also led to many other serious issues, such as extremism and terrorism. We must not forget that the idle mind is the work of the devil. Many young people are involved in crime, violence, anti-social behavior, terrorism, and extremism because of the frustrations of long-term unemployment and the lack of decent work.

Causes of Unemployment

A frustrated or unemployed man or woman can show that he or she is a hazardous person. He will never allow others to live in peace. Many of our legal and organizational problems are directly related to the problem of youth unemployment. If not managed properly, these will explode into dangerous and anti-social activities. Therefore, it is necessary for the hour when young people are adequately employed, and their strengths, skills, and abilities are used for productive and nation-building activities. If this problem is solved, many more problems will be solved automatically. In a world of democracy and social justice such as ours, unemployment is a significant threat, largely eradicated through effective labor planning and job creation on a large scale. If the increase in our workforce cannot be reduced, your demand must be increased sufficiently by appropriate short-term and long-term planning in both public and private companies.

There are many apparent reasons to be overlooked, in this case. Rapid population growth, a faulty education system, slow industrial development, neglect of small industries, and the backlog of our agriculture, etc., are some of the major causes of the problem. Improper planning of long-term and short-term employees is another factor that contributes to the problem. A few other factors have contributed to the worsening of the situation, but they are not as severe as those listed above.

Our education system needs to be reviewed and adapted to our current needs. As factories, our universities, colleges, and schools are still producing a good harvest of graduates who are only qualified for white office jobs. These graduates are only eligible for clerks, assistants, officers, and officers sitting at tables in offices. These matriculants, graduates, and graduates are adding to the growing unemployed list. These educated but unemployed youths, numbering in the millions, are a source of great anxiety and worry. Our education should be focused on work. It should be so that it enables one to be independent rather than dependent on others. It is paradoxical that our highly educated and highly trained workers, such as engineers, doctors, scientists, etc., run government jobs. They are unwilling to start their forums, laboratories, industries, and businesses.

Instead of facing challenges and creating decent work through self-employment, our educated young men and women are wasting their time by pursuing routine and easy-to-follow government jobs. They rely heavily on the government and do not have the courage and motivation to stand on their own two feet. Emphasis should be placed on vocational education. There should be more technical centers and training centers. Informal and informal admissions to colleges and universities should be considered. Higher education should be reserved only for those who are genuinely qualified.

It is genuinely shocking that our Five Year Programs continue to increase the number of unemployed people. This is because our editors have failed to take a positive, long-term view of the issue. Due to poor planning and mistreatment of workers, some jobs do not have a sufficient number of right hands, and on the other hand, there are thousands and thousands of hands without proper jobs.

This has resulted in our talented people fleeing for greener pastures in other countries. Our staff planning should be objective analysis, facts and statistics, and other relevant factors. Our negative priorities, planning, and policies have created a dangerous gap and holes in our various employment programs. Due to the lack of proper staffing programs, graduates and graduates in various fields are forced to find jobs that have been completely removed from their education, training, and training.

The rapid growth of our people is one of the major causes of this problem. Every minute there is an increase of 40 or more people in our already uncontrollable number. As a result, job creation is not in line with the rapidly growing population. Apart from the lack of jobs for educated young men and women, there are also uneducated workers. Every year more than four million people are in the labor market. Unemployment in rural areas is increasing, putting a lot of pressure on land and cottage industries.

The ever-increasing trend in the domestic and artisan industries has exacerbated the situation. The indiscriminate expansion of educational institutions in colleges and higher education is a waste of the country’s resources. Our education must be reorganized entirely and work-oriented. We need technical education rather than free education. Education should teach one to be independent, not depend on the government for work.

Our industries are also lagging, which makes the situation worse. We have invested heavily in state-owned enterprises with low employment opportunities, ignoring small and rural industries. Non-selective automation and computer performance have also contributed to the worst-case scenario. Any industrial growth should be linked to the immediate needs of the community. Without this in mind, any employee planning can be effective and efficient. The emphasis should be on proper planning and the use of our greatest strengths. We must look for human solutions based on our fundamental truths instead of doubt. There should be maximum use of our industrial power, but it should only be based on these principles.

Recently, there has been much talk about making ”the right to work” one of the fundamental rights, but no material has emerged so far. Moreover, it does not seem to be working in a country like India with a large population and declining natural resources.

To alleviate the problem of unemployment and unemployment in the districts, an ongoing recruitment program called Jawaharlal Rodger Yolanda was introduced in 1989. More than 440 lakhs of families living in poverty benefited from it. Such schemes are needed to create beneficial jobs in organized nations, organized structures, and other backlogs and communities in rural areas of the country. Only then will our development efforts and industries achieve the desired results.

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  • Unemployment

Essays on Unemployment

Unemployment is one of the main social-economic problems in the world, making unemployment essay writing an important task to help understand unemployment and its consequences. The unemployment rate in the country influences the level of crime, people’s living conditions, the availability of skilled labor force, emigration, etc. The task of the government is to keep the unemployment rate low. This is achieved by taking various measures: creating new jobs, updating the education system to meet modern labor market conditions, creating favorable conditions for the development of small and medium-sized businesses, etc. – people explore various possible measures in their unemployment essays. We compiled some great unemployment essay samples for you to check out if you're having trouble with your essay. Reading samples of other people’s essays on unemployment is an efficient way to study the subject through other people’s opinions.

The Sociological Perspective The sociological perspective looks at the issues which affect the society and looks at the assumptions and beliefs underlying a social problem. The public issues affect the entire society or a large group of people depending on the patterns and behavior of the society. The social construction and...

Words: 1158

What I found most interesting in the article by Ronald Alsop are the reasons why most university graduates are unable to secure meaningful employment. Some of these interesting yet compelling reasons include the fact that most employers expect all job applicants to bring a mid-level professional work experience as well...

Types of Unemployment There are many types of unemployment, one of them is clinical employment is where individuals lose their jobs as a result of the decrease in demand. There is also demand deficient unemployment, which is caused by insufficient demand, which could generate the required level of employment in a...

Unemployment Unemployment is a situation whereby aspects of manufacture are willing and are capable of being hired at the governing market wage rates but are compulsorily unutilized or underutilized.\u00a0 \u00a0The number of unemployed individuals will depend on the price of expansion of work opportunities which in turn depends on the level...

Unemployment in the Philippines Unemployment is a major issue that influences a nation's politics. The statement about unemployment in the Philippines attracts many political views. The unemployment rate in the Philippines is high because of the unavailability of jobs to be offered to people. The growth of unemployment rate in the...

Employment and unemployment are very critical economic indicators. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand how the figures for unemployment are obtained and assessed. Thus, there is need to figure out which people are termed as unemployed. In the UK the ONS quotes the unemployment figures after every three months which is...

Words: 1683

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Unemployment entails a situation whereby a section of people in an economy’s work force who have the capacity and the will to work but they lack jobs. It is expressed as a percentage of an entire work force. It is calculated as a ratio of the number of unemployed people...

Words: 2245

A sociological perspective of social problems A social problem is a condition that is deemed to have negative effects on individuals and the social world. Sociologists have used various theories to come up with a sociological perspective of social problems including unemployment (Loseke, 2017). This paper will explore the theory of...

Unemployment and its Effects on Society Unemployment represents a situation where an individual is willing to work but has none. Unemployment has many effects on the society. These impacts can be mental, physical, and economic. Unemployed people usually tend to have less money to spend and are unable to buy some...

Words: 1767

Being in a condition of scarcity, or not having enough possessions, is what is meant by the complex concept of poverty. Most often, poverty in a particular area is defined as a condition in which people make less than $2 per day. For instance, the Census Bureau's 2017 estimates for...

Words: 1165

US Weekly Jobless Claims According to a CNBC story, the US weekly jobless claims were 232,000, compared to 240,000 predictions (CNBC, 2017). This study implies that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits has decreased in six months, and the data further demonstrate the tightening in the labor market, prompting...

Every month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the unemployment rate in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics used data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census's Current Population Survey (CPS), which covers 60,000 members of the civilian population over the age of 16. (Marthinsen 73). The unemployment...

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Unemployment Essay Writing Guide

Academic writing

Essay paper writing

expository essay on unemployment

Employment is one of the major forces that bring on the economic growth of each country. In addition, unemployment rates can show how economic state of a country changes with time. That is why, it is crucially important to study the causes and effects of unemployment on the economy, social issues, and the life of every individual. Every student can do that by working on a research paper or essay about unemployment.

Luckily, you have come across this article, in which we collected the tips and ideas on how to write the best essay or research paper on unemployment. Stay tuned and read on to know all the intricacies of writing the best academic paper on this topic from scratch, even if you know little or nothing in this field. 

Purpose of writing an unemployment research paper

Let’s start with a discussion on how to write a research paper. Conducting unemployment research, you are encouraged to explore and identify issues that arise when willing workers can’t find a well-paid job or lose jobs as a result of their employers’ inability to maintain the growing rate of production.

Of course, this process affects the economy in general as well as the lives of each and every one of us. Having said that, when you look at this problem analytically and study it from different points of view, using recent data, it allows you to either find solutions to it or encourage other students, activists, or even scholars to further this research and propose their solutions.

unemployment-essay-writing-guide

Unemployment research paper topics

Here are some interesting research topics on unemployment for your consideration: 

  • Karl Marx’s theory of unemployment
  • To what extent can automation be helpful or harmful in the workforce?
  • What are the long-term consequences of unemployment?
  • What is a link between inflation and unemployment?
  • Why is unemployment particularly bad for women?
  • How does the unemployment rate affect the phycological state of people?
  • Unemployment during the Big Depression
  • Unemployment rate during COVID-19 pandemics
  • Automation of labor and unemployment
  • The effects of unemployment on students
  • The unemployment rate in the country of choice
  • Which population is the most vulnerable to unemployment?
  • The link between unemployment and crime rate
  • Ways of reducing unemployment

Unemployment research questions

When you have chosen the topic, it is important to formulate a few unemployment research questions and choose one or a few that you are going to focus on in your work. If your topic is broad, narrow it down to something more specific that you would be able to cover within the given word count. Make sure it is not too narrow to be researchable but specific enough for you to understand what kind of information to look for specifically.

The questions you formulate can be focused on the:

  • Comparison between certain aspects of unemployment.
  • Relationships between variables of your choice.
  • Advantages/disadvantages of certain aspects.
  • Causal relationships between specific variables.
  • Factors contributing to the problem or its solution.

There are a lot of ways to formulate a research question for an unemployment paper, and we suggest that you run the question of your choice by your professor before starting to write.

unemployment-essay-writing-guide2

Unemployment research paper outline

While your outline should include as many details as possible, the main sections it will cover are:

  • Introduction
  • Introductory phrase
  • Background information
  • Statement of hypothesis/thesis statement
  • Body sections:
  • Literature review
  • Methodology
  • Restated hypothesis/thesis
  • Main points of research.
  • Further application/Significance of research.

Tips for writing an essay on unemployment

Writing an academic essay on unemployment might appear like quite a difficult task. In order to make your life easier, we have decided to provide with the best writing tips:

  • Choose the topic which you are genuinely interested in. This way, the writing process will be exciting and productive.
  • Make an outline. This is an essential part of employment essay writing, which helps you to keep your ideas in order and write a well-structured text.
  • Write the first draft. It will help you understand how to present your arguments and evidence as well as frame your essay.
  • Look for well-written examples. There are a lot of sample essays on unemployment on the Web. Therefore, if you are not sure what to focus yours on or how to put your ideas on paper, reading a few examples might help.
  • Proofread your essay. It’s a good idea to revise your paper the next day after you finish writing it. This way, you will notice more grammatical errors and common structural and stylistic mistakes.

Topics for writing an essay on unemployment

  • Essay on educated unemployment
  • Essay on unemployment among graduates
  • Essay on unemployment and poverty
  • Essay on rural unemployment
  • Essay on the evils of unemployment
  • Essay on poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment
  • Essay on poverty and unemployment in specific countries/states
  • Essay on unemployment and underemployment after wars
  • Essay on effects of unemployment (psychological, sociological, financial, etc.)
  • Causes of unemployment essay
  • Essay on reasons for unemployment
  • Essay on the impact of unemployment
  • Causes and effects of unemployment essay
  • Cause and effect of unemployment essay: is there a link between low quality education and unemployment?
  • Argumentative essay on unemployment: should government help the vulnerable population with job search?
  • Cause and effect essay on unemployment and inflation
  • Unemployment problem solution essay
  • Essay on employment and unemployment
  • Essay on unemployment in America
  • Essay on unemployment and its long-term effects

unemployment-essay-writing-guide3

Unemployment essay outline

Whether you are writing a one-page essay on unemployment or a longer well-researched one at the end of the semester, making an outline is an important step you should never skip. Just like with a research paper, an unemployment essay outline also has a specific structure:

  • Unemployment essay introduction. For starters, you need to provide readers with background on the topic and some justifications as to why you have chosen it. At the end of the intro, present your thesis statement with the main points that you will be discussing in more detail further.
  • Body paragraphs. The main part is the most extended and informative section of the whole essay. It usually consists of 3-5 paragraphs (however, there can be more or less, depending on the specific requirements). Each paragraph has to include the argument connected with your thesis statement, which is reinforced with evidence and examples. Make sure that your body paragraphs are logically interconnected. In this case, transition words will be of great help.
  • Conclusion for an essay on unemployment. At the final stage, here comes the time to briefly remind the readers about all the arguments discussed throughout the essay and the thesis statement that you have put forward in the intro. Don’t make new points in a conclusion for an unemployment essay. This is the part where you reflect on what was written without adding factual or statistical info to continue the discussion. In the final sentences of the unemployment essay conclusion, try coming up with a catchy phrase to wrap up everything that you have showcased before effectively and to encourage your readers for further reflections. 

Statistics for your essay on unemployment

We have collected some interesting and somehow shocking statistics, which you can use in your unemployment essay or research paper:

  • Developed countries often cannot offer permanent positions for an excessive number of college graduates, both local residents and international students. This problem creates enormous competition for permanent positions in their chosen fields of study. One great example of such a situation is the US economic recession of 2007-2008 when the employment rate of candidates with bachelor's degrees suddenly dropped to as low as 9%.
  • One of the recent American surveys showed that some of the highest unemployment rates were among Philosophy (6.2%) as well as the English Language (6.4%) and Mass Media (7.4%) graduates. On the other hand, the lowest unemployment rates were fixed in the fields of Industrial Engineering (1.7%) and Medical Technicians (0.9%).
  • Youth are approximately three times more likely to be unemployed than adults (2.7).
  • Among all developing regions, East Asia has the largest unemployment rate.
  • The number of unemployed workers in the world’s developing economies is roughly the same as the population of Bangladesh (156.6 million), the world’s eighth-most populous country.
  • Despite COVID-19 pandemics, the US unemployment rate has fallen to 7.9% (from 8.4%). The most prosperous are the restaurant, retail, and healthcare sectors.

expository essay on unemployment

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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Political Economy — Unemployment

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Essays on Unemployment

How to write an unemployment essay.

So, you've got this essay assignment on unemployment? Don't sweat it; we've got your back! To kick things off, let's take a look at a few sample prompts to help you get a grip on what you're dealing with:

Prompt 1: "Discuss the causes and consequences of youth unemployment in the 21st century."

Prompt 2: "Analyze the impact of technological advancements on job opportunities and unemployment rates."

Prompt 3: "Examine the role of government policies in reducing unemployment rates."

2. Picking the Perfect Unemployment Essay Topic

Now that you've got the prompts down, let's dive into choosing the right topic for your essay. Here are some points to consider:

  • Passion: Pick a topic that genuinely interests you. It will make the research and writing process much more enjoyable.
  • Relevance: Ensure your topic aligns with the prompt and the goals of your assignment.
  • Uniqueness: Avoid common and overdone topics. You want to stand out, not blend in.
  • Availability of Resources: Make sure there's enough information available for research.

3. 20 Unique Unemployment Essay Topics

Alright, you've nailed the prompts, and you know what to consider while choosing a topic. But just in case you need some inspiration, here's a list of 20 unique unemployment essay topics to get your creative juices flowing:

  • Impact of the gig economy on unemployment rates
  • The correlation between education and employment
  • Unemployment and mental health: A hidden crisis
  • Automation: A friend or foe in the job market?
  • Gender disparities in unemployment
  • Global economic downturns and their effects on joblessness
  • The role of entrepreneurship in reducing unemployment
  • Unemployment among veterans: Challenges and solutions
  • Effects of COVID-19 on unemployment and job security
  • The future of remote work and its impact on employment
  • Youth unemployment in developing countries
  • Unemployment and its relation to inflation
  • Job outsourcing: A blessing or a curse?
  • The psychology of job loss and coping mechanisms
  • Structural vs. cyclical unemployment: Understanding the difference
  • The gig economy and its impact on job stability
  • The role of vocational training in reducing unemployment
  • Immigration and its influence on unemployment rates
  • Unemployment in the arts and creative industries
  • The future of work: Challenges and opportunities

4. Crafting Inspiring Paragraphs and Phrases

Now that you've chosen your topic, it's time to get down to writing. Here are some sample paragraphs and phrases that can serve as inspiration for your unemployment essay:

Introduction: "In a world constantly shaped by economic forces, the specter of unemployment looms large, affecting individuals, families, and entire communities. Understanding the intricate web of factors contributing to joblessness is essential in devising effective solutions."

Body Paragraph: "The advent of artificial intelligence and automation has revolutionized industries, leading to both job creation and obsolescence. While some argue that these technological advancements offer opportunities for growth, others fear the displacement of traditional jobs."

Conclusion: "In conclusion, addressing unemployment requires a multifaceted approach that includes education reform, government policies, and fostering a culture of entrepreneurship. Only through collective efforts can we hope to mitigate the challenges posed by joblessness."

Unemployment Problem, Its Cascading Effect and Solutions to Tackle The Issue from Different Angles

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Using Universal Basic Income and Unemployment Insurance to Help Citizens Cope with Unemployment

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A Neoclassical Perspective of The Level of Unemployment in China

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  • How to write an expository essay

How to Write an Expository Essay | Structure, Tips & Examples

Published on July 14, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

“Expository” means “intended to explain or describe something.” An expository essay provides a clear, focused explanation of a particular topic, process, or set of ideas. It doesn’t set out to prove a point, just to give a balanced view of its subject matter.

Expository essays are usually short assignments intended to test your composition skills or your understanding of a subject. They tend to involve less research and original arguments than argumentative essays .

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Table of contents

When should you write an expository essay, how to approach an expository essay, introducing your essay, writing the body paragraphs, concluding your essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about expository essays.

In school and university, you might have to write expository essays as in-class exercises, exam questions, or coursework assignments.

Sometimes it won’t be directly stated that the assignment is an expository essay, but there are certain keywords that imply expository writing is required. Consider the prompts below.

The word “explain” here is the clue: An essay responding to this prompt should provide an explanation of this historical process—not necessarily an original argument about it.

Sometimes you’ll be asked to define a particular term or concept. This means more than just copying down the dictionary definition; you’ll be expected to explore different ideas surrounding the term, as this prompt emphasizes.

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An expository essay should take an objective approach: It isn’t about your personal opinions or experiences. Instead, your goal is to provide an informative and balanced explanation of your topic. Avoid using the first or second person (“I” or “you”).

The structure of your expository essay will vary according to the scope of your assignment and the demands of your topic. It’s worthwhile to plan out your structure before you start, using an essay outline .

A common structure for a short expository essay consists of five paragraphs: An introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Like all essays, an expository essay begins with an introduction . This serves to hook the reader’s interest, briefly introduce your topic, and provide a thesis statement summarizing what you’re going to say about it.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

In many ways, the invention of the printing press marked the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval period in Europe is often remembered as a time of intellectual and political stagnation. Prior to the Renaissance, the average person had very limited access to books and was unlikely to be literate. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century allowed for much less restricted circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation.

The body of your essay is where you cover your topic in depth. It often consists of three paragraphs, but may be more for a longer essay. This is where you present the details of the process, idea or topic you’re explaining.

It’s important to make sure each paragraph covers its own clearly defined topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Different topics (all related to the overall subject matter of the essay) should be presented in a logical order, with clear transitions between paragraphs.

Hover over different parts of the example paragraph below to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

The invention of the printing press in 1440 changed this situation dramatically. Johannes Gutenberg, who had worked as a goldsmith, used his knowledge of metals in the design of the press. He made his type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, whose durability allowed for the reliable production of high-quality books. This new technology allowed texts to be reproduced and disseminated on a much larger scale than was previously possible. The Gutenberg Bible appeared in the 1450s, and a large number of printing presses sprang up across the continent in the following decades. Gutenberg’s invention rapidly transformed cultural production in Europe; among other things, it would lead to the Protestant Reformation.

The conclusion of an expository essay serves to summarize the topic under discussion. It should not present any new information or evidence, but should instead focus on reinforcing the points made so far. Essentially, your conclusion is there to round off the essay in an engaging way.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a conclusion works.

The invention of the printing press was important not only in terms of its immediate cultural and economic effects, but also in terms of its major impact on politics and religion across Europe. In the century following the invention of the printing press, the relatively stationary intellectual atmosphere of the Middle Ages gave way to the social upheavals of the Reformation and the Renaissance. A single technological innovation had contributed to the total reshaping of the continent.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An expository essay is a broad form that varies in length according to the scope of the assignment.

Expository essays are often assigned as a writing exercise or as part of an exam, in which case a five-paragraph essay of around 800 words may be appropriate.

You’ll usually be given guidelines regarding length; if you’re not sure, ask.

An expository essay is a common assignment in high-school and university composition classes. It might be assigned as coursework, in class, or as part of an exam.

Sometimes you might not be told explicitly to write an expository essay. Look out for prompts containing keywords like “explain” and “define.” An expository essay is usually the right response to these prompts.

An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

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Youth Unemployment and Policy Solutions Essay

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Policy Solutions

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Nowadays, the problem of unemployment affects people in different age groups. Youth unemployment (YU) is especially problematic since for people aged 15-24, the lack of available jobs is associated with the inability to pay for education and start their own families. Despite significant economic differences between countries, the problem affects young people all over the world. As of 2018, the average YU rates ranged from 3.7% of the force aged 15-24 in Japan to 53% in South Africa and did not exceed 9% in the United States (“Youth Unemployment Rate (Indicator”).

Importantly, YU is closely interconnected with minority discrimination. For instance, in the United States, the group with the largest unemployment rates is African-American young men and women between 16 and 19 years old (“Labor Force Statistics”). Minority groups can be affected by this problem due to a variety of factors, including potential employers’ biases, educational inequality, and the lack of necessary skills.

The growth of YU rates has a variety of negative consequences, impacting both economic development and people’s quality of life. The inability to address the problem of unemployment in the given age group may result in the growth of criminal activity, child poverty, and people’s negative perceptions of life (Kalleberg). The causes of YU are being thoroughly researched. The following factors may be the potential causes of the problem:

  • Age-based discrimination in the job market;
  • The lack of necessary qualifications;
  • Short supply of jobs;
  • Ethnic discrimination;
  • Globalization and technological advancement (Kalleberg 36).

Apprenticeship Systems

A larger number of strategies expected to reduce YU rates has been proposed in different countries. Given that unemployment exists due to individuals’ limited opportunity to get necessary skills, the first potential solution is based on young people’s access to courses helping them to get any professional skills that are in demand. Such policies are widely used in both developed and developing countries to strengthen partnerships between educational institutions and key employers in some regions.

As a potential solution, the creation of apprenticeship systems aimed at the development of skills is generally believed to be an effective practice (Riphahn and Zibrowius 33). Unlike older people, young citizens do not have networks that would make them aware of job opportunities matching their skill levels (Kalleberg 37). Taking this fact into consideration, apprenticeship programs are particularly important since they introduce future specialists to certain professional fields, at least helping them to understand their future employers’ expectations.

Being used in many countries with high GDPs, apprenticeship systems have a variety of advantages when it comes to the problem of unemployment. Some of the most significant benefits of such policies are listed below:

  • Future employees get helpful experience and learn to solve real-life problems;
  • Apprenticeship trainings help reduce dissatisfaction with the chosen jobs;
  • Young people make their first professional contacts, which can be helpful in the future;
  • Apprenticeship programs are focused on the development of practical skills that are in demand (Riphahn and Zibrowius 35).

Even though such policies can lead to positive changes in the situation with unemployment among young people, they should not be the only option to rely on due to their potential disadvantages. The weak points of apprenticeship programs include the following:

  • Not all programs for young people are fee-free;
  • There is no evidence that apprenticeship programs reduce race-based inequality in access to jobs.

Support of Youth Entrepreneurship

There are many policies that aim to reduce the problem of unemployment by implementing initiatives that support youth entrepreneurship. According to experts from the UN, to reduce YU, it is necessary to provide young people with more opportunities to start their own businesses and contribute to their countries’ economic development (UNCTAD 86). The proposed policies involve the simplification of procedures needed to start a business and the introduction of start-up incentives for new businesses led by young people (UNCTAD 86). Such programs should always be implemented with attention to the economic situation in particular countries and the presence of necessary resources.

Policies that promote financial and regulatory support of young entrepreneurs can positively impact the situation with unemployment and encourage more people to implement their ideas into practice. In general, the following advantages of such initiatives can be singled out:

  • The growth of the small business sector (UNCTAD 86);
  • Youth-led businesses can create new jobs for young people;
  • Allowances can help young entrepreneurs to stay competitive;
  • Youth entrepreneurship can positively change the labor market in disadvantaged areas.

However, this strategy has some disadvantages and involves certain unobvious risks. There is no doubt that more individuals will try to profit from their ideas if some regulatory barriers to starting a business are removed. At the same time, given that people aged 16-24 usually have no experience of being a business leader, the outcomes of increased entrepreneurial activity among youth present an open question. As for particular disadvantages, the following factors make the policy’s relevance to the discussed problem questionable:

  • Young entrepreneurs may fail to manage business operations successfully;
  • The policy does not guarantee equal opportunities for the representatives of different ethnicities;
  • To achieve success, young entrepreneurs can prefer to collaborate with experienced specialists, which limits the initiative’s impact on YU.

The approaches to addressing the problem of YU vary greatly. Both the adoption of apprenticeship systems and measures helping to encourage entrepreneurship activity among young people. This initiative may help create more job options for young citizens with different educational levels because they focus on the development of practical skills and aim to remove barriers to business. Increased entrepreneurship activity, in its turn, leads to the creation of new jobs, which can be important to young people who cannot find jobs in large companies due to high competition.

Despite the advantages of policies that support youth-led businesses, the first option seems to be a more suitable solution. Apprenticeship systems and programs can prepare young people to fulfill different roles and work in a team, which is critical to success in career development. In contrast, overreliance on policies to increase the number of youth-led businesses will not help to prepare a diverse workforce.

Moreover, although such policies are targeted at young people, it is not valid to say that entrepreneurs in this age group hire only inexperienced employees, and it reduces such programs’ relevance to the chosen problem. Taking these disadvantages into consideration, it can be recommended to solve the problem of YU by propelling the idea of apprenticeship programs to the next level.

In particular, it is critical to design new measures to prevent organizations from discriminating against racial and ethnic minority applicants. Therefore, to increase young people’s chances to find good jobs and developing skills that are in demand, it can be necessary to introduce changes to some policies that are already in use.

Kalleberg, Arne L. “Precarious Work and Young Workers in the United States.” Youth, Jobs, and the Future: Problems and Prospects , edited by Lynn S. Chancer et al., Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 35-52.

“ Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey .” United States Department of Labor . 2019. Web.

Riphahn, Regina T., and Michael Zibrowius. “Apprenticeship, Vocational Training, and Early Labor Market Outcomes – Evidence from East and West Germany.” Education Economics , vol. 24, no. 1, 2016, pp. 33-57.

UNCTAD. Policy Guide on Youth Entrepreneurship . United Nations, 2015.

“ Youth Unemployment Rate (Indicator) .” OECD , 2019. Web.

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1. IvyPanda . "Youth Unemployment and Policy Solutions." July 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/youth-unemployment-and-policy-solutions/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Youth Unemployment and Policy Solutions." July 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/youth-unemployment-and-policy-solutions/.

‘Nothing Has Really Changed’: In Moscow, the Fighting Is a World Away

Sept. 6, 2022 @ The New York Times [ Original article ] By Valerie HopkinsPhotographs by Nanna Heitmann

Last Updated on Dec 2, 2022

expository essay on unemployment

MOSCOW — On a recent evening in Red Square, a corps of "a corps of" - a branch of an army elite paratroopers dressed in camouflage performed a battle-like dance with pyrotechnics. An Egyptian performer dressed as a pharaoh rode back and forth in a chariot wielding an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, as a band played “Katyusha,” a Soviet-era patriotic war song. ► Nataliya Nikonova, 44, was one of thousands of spectators cheering from the bleachers at a festival celebrating the militaries of Russia and friendly nations including Belarus, India and Venezuela. “I was so thrilled that I just about lost my voice!” she said. ► Russia’s army is now waging a slow-moving war that has left tens of thousands dead and contributed to global inflation and a surge in energy prices. But Ms. Nikonova said she hadn’t experienced many disruptions to her life in the past six months.“Nothing has really changed,” she said. “Sure, the prices went up, but we can endure that.” She rushed off to listen to an encore of “Katyusha” from the Egyptian Military Symphonic Band.

Very little about day-to-day life seems to have changed in Moscow, where people have the financial resources to weather significant price increases, unlike much of the rest of the country. GUM, the luxury mall next to Red Square, is full of shoppers — though many Western stores like Prada, Gucci and Christian Dior are closed — and restaurants and theaters do thriving business "thriving business" - businesses that are very successful and developing well. . Moscow’s roads still teem with luxury cars like Lamborghinis and Porsches. ► “A few stores closed because of sanctions, which is frustrating but not that bad,” said Yuliya, 18, a recent high-school graduate who was hanging out on a bench in Gorky Park, where Muscovites sunbathe, dance and rollerblade. She and her friends said they don’t really think about the fighting in Ukraine that often. ► That detachment is exactly what President Vladimir V. Putin is counting on as he executes a domestic strategy of shielding "shielding" - protect something from danger, risk, or unpleasant experience. Russians from the hardships of war — no draft, no mass funerals, no feelings of loss or conflict. Much of Russia’s effort on the battlefield has not gone as Mr. Putin had planned, but at home, he has mostly succeeded in making Russian life feel as normal as possible.

Most museums and theaters are open, as long as their leadership didn’t criticize the Kremlin, and on summer evenings, party boats with effusive "effusive" - enthusiastic. revelers ply the nearby Moskva River and people picnic in the grass. The fall seasons in opera and ballet have just begun — though a few anticipated premieres and ongoing productions have been canceled after their directors and stars spoke against the war or fled the country.

“What Russians normally do is protect their everyday lives,” said Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, describing a coping mechanism that dates from the Soviet period but became widespread during Mr. Putin’s tenure.“This is the thing that they always prioritize and that they excel at,” he said of Russia’s leadership, “and they are doing that now with a considerable degree of success, I would say.” ► But while many Muscovites embrace revelry and willful ignorance, many of the capital’s intelligentsia "intelligentsia" -highly educated people. , whose work and life tied them to the West or to Ukraine, are struggling to reconcile the feeling of normalcy with the enormity of being engaged in Europe’s biggest land war since World War II.

That was evident on Saturday in the outpouring of sympathy and appreciation for the former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, expressed by thousands of Russians attending his funeral, who represented a silent protest against Mr. Putin and his policies. ► As soon as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, said Anya, she started reading books about the rise of totalitarianism "totalitarianism" -a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens. in Nazi Germany and grappling with the concept of collective guilt.“It was the end of the world for so many people,” said Anya, 34. Like several others interviewed for this article, she did not want to provide her last name for fear of retribution "retribution" -punishing someone for their actions. .“In your name, someone is killing civilians,’’ she said. “And your country is turning into something like North Korea.”She said she went to a protest and signed an antiwar petition "petition" -a formal written request. , and several days later, she was invited to resign from her job at a public institution.

For many years, Mr. Putin has been cracking down on "cracking down on" -to start dealing with bad or illegal behavior in a more severe way. dissent and protesters, but today it is almost impossible to express disenchantment with the system, and people expressing their views do so with the knowledge that a new law punishes criticism of the war. Almost 16,500 people have been arrested on charges of protesting the aggression in Ukraine since Feb. 24, according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights organization. ► Russians who oppose the fighting feel despised and threatened by their government, spurned by the West — which they believe blames them for not protesting the invasion — and powerless to bring about any change.“We all have this feeling of impotence,” said Anya. “The fact that you exist and have your opinion doesn’t mean anything. There are five, 10, 20 million of us. And it doesn’t make any difference.”

Muscovites like Anya spent the first months after the conflict started anxious and uncertain. Tens of thousands of them fled. But over the summer, the capital largely returned to normal, buoyed by a soaring ruble, a silenced opposition and a news media almost completely under the Kremlin’s control. ► Still, society is changing slowly: While Mr. Putin has sought to infuse a sense of normalcy, he is also working to further militarize Russian society.

Along Moscow’s artery roads there are billboards of soldiers listing their rank and title, with a QR code to scan for more information. And there is no shortage of events celebrating Russia’s military might. ► Thousands of spectators gathered at the Alabino army training ground southwest of Moscow over two weeks to watch the Army International Games, a festival that includes a Tank Biathlon, in which international teams compete to drive a tank through natural obstacles and fire accurately at targets. (Since 2013, when the competition started, Russia has always come in first place.)“I’ve been seeing tanks on TV for all this time; I wanted to see them in real life,” said Ilya, 34, who drove out to the event from Moscow with his children, 11 and 4.“I think every war is bad; I am not saying I support the ‘Special Military Operation,’ or don’t,” he said, using Mr. Putin’s term for the hostilities in Ukraine. “But I trust the leadership in my country, and if they say it is necessary, then it is.”

Others said that seeing the weapons on display at the army festival — including Kinzhal missiles being used in Ukraine — made them feel as if they had come from a strong country. Andrei Yevgenyevich, 55, who was a tank driver in Soviet-controlled Germany in the last days of the Cold War, said the weapons display brought him back to the days when the Soviet Union was a strong and feared global power. “When you see this, you trust that all is well in your country, that everything is as it should be,” he said. “We were raised in the Soviet tradition, and we love our motherland. This brings pride to our country.” ► As for the sanctions "sanctions" -a threatened penalty for disobeying a law or rule. , he said: “I don’t feel any difference. I think America and the West are suffering far more.” This is a common refrain on Russian television. State-run media produce daily segments about the uncertainty countries like Germany are facing over gas prices and soaring inflation in Europe and the United States.

At the army training grounds, children scrambled over tanks, including one that said, “Smash the Fascists,” and people of all ages shot automatic rifles. But booths inviting visitors to sign a contract to join the army stood empty, save for the recruiters, indicating that even if nationalism is rising, people are not ready to fight Mr. Putin’s war.“Not a lot of people are coming right now,” one military recruiter said, declining to give his name, as the sounds of shots from the nearby firing range could be heard.

For people who are uninterested in army games and accustomed to spending their summers traveling around Europe, there are plenty of homegrown distractions. A recent festival in the art park Nikola-Lenivets, a haven for hipsters a few hours from the capital, drew about 16,000 partygoers in the woods over four days. ► One night, people decked out "decked out" -dressed in a very fancy way. in facial glitter, faux-fur coats and even a jellyfish costume danced to the music of an upbeat reggae performer who promised he wouldn’t leave Russia as many other artists had. The crowd went wild. ► “At first I was thinking to myself, wow, there is a war 400 kilometers away, and we are at a music festival,” said Ivan, a 25-year-old who had just returned to his native Russia after several years abroad. He loosened up eventually. “Life goes on, especially when there is nothing we can do to control the situation,” he said. Back at the Red Square festival, a woman named Ekaterina, 26, a brow technician at a beauty salon, said she and her boyfriend, who serves in the military, felt their “spirits raised” by the bands. But she said she was “nervous for the men who are on both sides of the front line.’’ “Here, people act as if nothing is happening. Here is one world, and there,” she said, referring to the field of battle, “is a completely different one.”

International Socialist Review

The unemployed movements of the 1930s

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THIS YEAR marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Social Security Act (SSA). The SSA, which created unemployment insurance and assistance programs for the elderly, disabled, and poor, is the most lasting achievement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. 1  These programs formed the foundation of a social welfare system that today keeps an estimated 31 million people out of poverty. 2 Equally important, the passage of the SSA marked a fundamental shift in American political culture that has endured, even through the past thirty years of conservative attacks on “entitlements” that have steadily eroded the social welfare provisions of the act. Today, unemployment is seen as a societal question that demands some type of government response.

The history taught in most high schools is that Roosevelt created the Social Security Act with the aim of “relieving human suffering…helping business and industry to recover…[and] adjusting the economic system to prevent recurrence.” 3  The textbooks typically do not explain why Roosevelt, elected in 1932, did not present the SSA to Congress until 1935, a three-year period that saw no shortage of human suffering.

In fact, Roosevelt had no intention of creating the programs for which he has become a liberal hero. He came into office with a modest package of regulation and piecemeal programs, many of which were watered down by the reactionary Southern segregationist wing of his own Democratic Party. FDR was pressured to create more extensive social welfare programs by the largest protest movement the country had seen since the populist movement of the late 1890s.

Though they are barely mentioned in the history textbooks, it was socialists and communists who built this movement. 4  The Communist Party, Socialist Party, and followers of radical pacifist A.J. Muste created unemployed organizations that mobilized hundreds of thousands of jobless workers in local and national protests. While these actions on their own were not enough to win national legislation, they helped to shift popular opinion about government assistance and trained thousands of future leaders of the union movement that did attain the power to produce lasting change.

The mythology of FDR has long been a staple of the Democratic Party. This past year, as debate swirled around President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, a new twist on the old story emerged. Liberal supporters of Obama’s decidedly un-liberal measure tried to reassure themselves with a flawed analogy to the Social Security Act.  New York Times  columnist Paul Krugman wrote:

social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete, but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by. Thus Social Security originally had huge gaps in coverage—and a majority of African-Americans, in particular, fell through those gaps. But it was improved over time, and it’s now the bedrock of retirement stability for the vast majority of Americans. 5

Krugman is correct that the SSA was passed with many flaws, some of which were later improved. Socialists at the time understood and criticized these weaknesses and looked forward to winning bigger reforms—and maybe a revolution—in the future. But unlike today’s health care reform, the Social Security Act did not build on the existing private charity systems that were actually part of the problem, but instead created enormous federal programs with guaranteed benefits. This was a dramatic shift from the longstanding American tradition of private sector charity. It occurred only because tens of thousands of activists dared to fight for something that at the time seemed utterly unrealistic.

The Great Depression and the “American way”  The starting point of any history of this period must be the horrifying conditions of the Great Depression. The most memorable statistic of this period is the unemployment rate, which reached 25 percent in 1933. As stark as this figure is, it does not begin to capture the crisis encountered by tens of millions. Workers who managed to hold onto their jobs faced increased exploitation and reduction in wages and hours, which made it harder for them to help out jobless family and friends. 6  The social fabric of America was ripped by the crisis: One-quarter of children suffered malnutrition, birth rates dropped, suicide rates rose. 7  Many families were torn apart. In New York City alone, 20,000 children were placed in institutions because their parents couldn’t support them. 8  Homeless armies wandered the country on freight trains; one railroad official testified that the number of train-hoppers caught by his company ballooned from 14,000 in 1929 to 186,000 in 1931. 9

At the onset of the Depression, Republican Herbert Hoover was president. Today, Hoover is notorious for his conservative response to the crisis, his heartlessness in the face of mass suffering (in contrast to the heroic compassion of FDR). But Hoover’s policies didn’t stem from his personal traits. In fact, he had made a name for himself coordinating relief efforts in Europe after the First World War and had convened a series of conferences on unemployment in the 1920s in an effort to coordinate private relief. 10

Hoover’s passive response to the Depression stemmed from the political orthodoxy of the day that government should keep out of unemployment relief. In early 1931, he declared, “the basis of successful relief in national distress is to mobilize...agencies of relief help in the community. This has been the American way.” Hoover’s aim was to maintain the longstanding American tradition that unemployment not be made the responsibility of government but of individuals and “the community.” The private relief system relied on charitable and religious organizations, whose aid was usually both insufficient and degrading. Single unemployed workers were forced to live in squalid “flophouses” while those with families had to submit themselves to patronizing investigations and rules. Most charities operated under the assumption that people were unemployed because they were “unemployable”—or just lazy.

The regulations and investigations were not really meant to address any “culture of poverty.” Rather, as Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argue in their seminal book,  Poor People’s Movements , these practices were aimed at creating “a clearly demarcated and degraded class, a class of pariahs whose numbers were small but whose fate loomed large in the lives of those who lived close to indigence, warning them always of a life even worse than hard work and severe poverty.” 11

This system of degradation created divisions between unemployed and employed workers. At the beginning of the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the largest workers’ organization in the country, did not even support unemployment insurance. The AFL, which was comprised mainly of skilled workers’ unions (many of them segregated), did not see itself as the representative for all American workers. Rather, AFL president Samuel Gompers tried convincing American business and government that skilled workers—unlike the unskilled masses—deserved a seat at their table. Many AFL leaders were only too willing to accept the stereotype of the unemployable worker—unskilled, often African American, or a recent immigrant—to contrast with their own members’ respectability.

The problem for Hoover was that even by their own low standards, private organizations were in no way prepared to meet the massive needs unleashed by the Depression. Churches, charities, and ethnic associations were overwhelmed by the flood of requests for rent and grocery money at the same time as they were losing critical funding in the wave of bank failures. 12  In New York City, which actually received more state funding then most cities, the welfare department resorted to skipping every tenth family on the rolls, a practice known as “skip the feed.” 13

The crisis exploded on March 6, 1930. That morning, the  New York Times  ran a headline declaring “Hoover forecasts employment gain. No cause for alarm.” 14  That afternoon, 500,000 people in twenty-five cities demonstrated for government relief. The response by New York City police was described by a reporter for the New York World.

Women struck in the face with blackjacks, boys beaten by gangs of seven and eight policemen, and an old man backed into a doorway and knocked down time after time…. One of [the women] fought savagely howling curses…. A detective ran up and while the policemen held her crashed his blackjack into her face three times before a man dragged her away. 15

Despite this repression, the protesters were back at New York’s City Hall that October. Although they endured more beatings and arrests, they emerged with the movement’s first victory: the city granted $1 million in additional relief (almost $13 million in today’s terms). 16

Beyond this material gain, the March 6 protests threw a wrench in Hoover’s strategy to ride out the Depression on the backs of American workers. Hoover’s infamous declaration that “prosperity is just around the corner” reflected his intention to minimize the extent of the crisis to avoid large-scale government action. Had it not been for the initial protests, he might have been more successful. It is worth noting that unemployment had not yet reached 9 percent by 1930. 17  If today we remember the Depression as having begun in 1929 and not a few years later when the unemployment rate really shot up (under FDR), it’s because of the hundreds of thousands of jobless workers who forced politicians and newspapers to acknowledge the crisis.

The protests were organized by the Unemployed Councils, formed the previous year by the Communist Party, which was almost as surprised by the size of the March 6 protest as was the Hoover administration. It was the first sign that the radical left had entered a new period.

The Communist Party and unemployed councils  The stock market crash of October 1929 brought an abrupt end to a great decade for business. For most working people, it only increased the hard times they were already enduring. Ten years earlier, business leaders had used the momentum gained from winning the First World War to launch “the American plan,” a public relations campaign to associate unions with subversive and foreign influences, particularly Bolshevism. The AFL lost a quarter of its membership during the 1920s. 18

Alongside the corporate attack on unions was a government campaign against radicals—especially immigrant radicals—known today as the “Red Scare.” From the raids and deportation of thousands in 1919 and 1920 to the framing and execution of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, the “Roaring Twenties” were a difficult time for the American left. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was practically repressed out of existence. The Socialist Party (SP) split over the question of the Russian Revolution and never regained its former influence.

The Communist Party (CP), composed of some of the leading former members of the IWW and SP, was the strongest organization on the American left by the end of the 1920s. But that wasn’t saying much. Founded at the beginning of a period of political reaction and an assault on the labor movement (the AFL lost more than a million members, and it drove thousands of communists from its ranks in this period), the CP was also paralyzed in its first decade by intense factional disputes that required intervention from the Comintern—the Moscow-led organization of communist parties internationally. As a result of the repression, the decline of the labor movement, and factionalism, the party declined throughout its first ten years by more than two-thirds, to just over 6,000 members. 19

With the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the CPs all over the word became subordinate satellites of Moscow, required to change policy according to dictates that largely reflected the interest of the Russian bureaucracy. In 1928, Joseph Stalin, consolidating the power of the state bureaucracy in Moscow, expelled opposition leader Leon Trotsky and abolished the remaining elements of workers’ control from the 1917 revolution—all in the name of strengthening the socialist “motherland” against its imperialist enemies and preparing for worldwide revolution. In every communist party, Stalin engineered the elimination of leaders who sided with either Trotsky or Nicolai Bukharin and replaced them with Stalin loyalists who would toe every line delivered from Moscow.

Announcing that capitalism had entered its “Third Period” since the Russian Revolution, one of intractable economic crisis, the Comintern concluded in 1928 that a world revolutionary upsurge was on the immediate agenda. To prepare for this upsurge, the earlier Comintern strategy of proposing united fronts for the purposes of struggle between revolutionary and reformist organizations was abandoned. Communists were to leave the trade unions and form their own “red unions” and refuse joint work with reformist and social-democratic parties, which were now denounced as “social fascist.” 20

The rise of Stalinism and its apocalyptic Third Period perspective had a catastrophic impact on communist parties around the world. Across Europe, communists refused to form united fronts with reformists to resist fascism, with particularly tragic results in Germany. 21  In the U.S, the CP responded to the new perspective by abandoning its strategy of “boring from within” the AFL, which had suddenly become a social-fascist organization, and creating a competing “revolutionary” union federation: the deceptively named Trade Union Unity League (TUUL). The Comintern defined the TUUL’s primary task not as organizing the many workers ignored and excluded by the AFL, but to “destroy the American Federation of Labor, the most reliable support of American imperialism.” 22

The only thing that the TUUL destroyed was the influence and reputation that thousands of communists had worked hard to achieve over the previous decade. In 1928, for example, the CP had a solid base of 300 miners and was a force of opposition to autocratic United Mine Workers (UMW) president John L. Lewis. 23  That year, the party took itself out of the UMW and formed a red or dual union, the National Miners Union (NMU), whose membership never reached more than several hundred. Within a year, communists found themselves outside a wave of spontaneous strikes in Pennsylvania and West Virginia while their own NMU general strike call was ignored. 24  By the CP’s own reckoning, the TUUL had a membership in 1932 of only 40,000. 25

Similar results followed in other industries. Workers in the early years of the Depression, facing a devastating wave of layoffs and cuts in hours and wages, looked for a united labor movement. Instead they found a Communist Party that defined all its political rivals, from the NAACP to the Socialist Party, as fascists just as surely as Hitler and Mussolini. 26

The party’s attacks on the rest of the left were not only verbal, as historian Sidney Lens relates:

Since socialists and fascists were all of the same breed, it was permissible to break up socialist (and Trotskyist and Lovestoneite) meetings. Indeed it was sometimes a revolutionary duty. When [Socialist Party leader] Norman Thomas held a rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1934 to protest the murder of socialists by the semi-Fascist Dollfuss regime in Vienna, Stalinist strong-arm men made a shambles of it with catcalls, shrieks, knives, and physical force until it was adjourned. It was not unusual for Communists to break into a meeting of another leftist group, armed with lead pipes, brass knuckles, sticks, and knives to force it to suspend. Every now and then a brick was thrown at an outdoor meeting of the Trotskyites. It became so bad that rivals had to form “defense squads” to protect their gatherings. 27

Despite these considerable handicaps, the CP entered the Depression with some momentum. Stalin’s elimination of all opposition had the ironic impact of freeing the American party from the paralyzing factionalism of the 1920s. Moreover, the Comintern’s Third Period perspective predicted a massive economic collapse and called on parties to create unemployed organizations. Thus, in August 1929, two months before the stock market crash, the CP began building the Unemployed Councils (UCs) whose protests in the ensuing months would establish the communists as a significant force in the 1930s. 28

Building UCs forced communist organizers to confront the limitations of the Comintern perspective that revolutionary speeches would lead the masses into revolutionary action. Steven Nelson, a movement leader in Chicago, describes how he learned this approach from other workers in his first UC meeting.

[My] speech…was pretty vague. I pounded the rostrum a little and complained that the bourgeoisie always make the workers pay for depressions…. The whole approach was sectarian in tone and demonstrated just how isolated we were from most workers…. In this case, however, our approach hadn’t done much damage. These Greek workers really impressed me.... Actually, they knew what to do better than I. “Now, Mr. Chairman,” someone called from the floor, “the first thing we have to do is set up a committee that can deal with grievances. Let’s have some volunteers.” Many of the early councils were built on existing ethnic and fraternal organizations like this Greek club. We spent the first few weeks agitating against capitalism…. But even if people listened to our arguments, we couldn’t offer them much hope for the immediate future. How were they going to pay the rent, buy food, and survive in the meantime? Answers began to emerge from the actual experience of organizing. 29

One key strategy that emerged was direct action to help individuals win relief or prevent eviction. Within months, the approach of the Chicago UC had changed remarkably, as evidenced in recollections of Christine Ellis about the first UC meeting in a Black neighborhood on the west side of Chicago.

We spoke simply, explained the platform, the demands and activities of the unemployed council. And then we said, “Are there any questions?”…. Finally an elderly Black man stood up and said, “What you folks figure on doing about that colored family that was thrown out of their house today?... They’re still out there with their furniture on the sidewalk.” So the man with me said, “Very simple. We’ll adjourn the meeting, go over there, and put the furniture back in the house. After that, anyone wishing to join the unemployed council and build an organization to fight evictions, return to this hall and we’ll talk about it some more.” That’s what we did…everybody else pitched in, began to haul in every last bit of furniture, fix up the beds...and when that was all done, went back to the hall. The hall was jammed! 30

Through the national network of unemployed councils, people learned about these successful actions and the practice spread rapidly. It is estimated that in 1932, 77,000 New York City families were moved back into their homes by UCs. 31

The emphasis on neighborhood organizing allowed the UCs to connect with the anarchic atmosphere of desperate rebellion unleashed by the economic crisis. The early 1930s were years of food riots and raids on delivery trucks and packinghouses. 32  Hosea Hudson, a leading Black communist in Alabama, describes how landlords in Birmingham would sometimes allow tenants to stay even without paying rent “because if they put a family out, the unemployed workers would wreck the house and take it away for fuel by night…. This was kind of a free-for-all, a share-the-wealth situation.” 33

Local actions were combined with a series of national protests that garnered media attention for the unemployment crisis. The 1931 National Hunger March called for federal unemployment insurance at full wages for all unemployed and underemployed workers without regard to age, sex, race, political affiliation, or citizenship status. In addition, the marchers demanded that cities and states provide funding to clothe, house, and feed the unemployed, who would be responsible for administering their own funds. 34

These demands, impressive in their focus on eliminating divisions among workers yet lacking any measures that could be won in the near term, did not arise from any democratic discussions within the councils, but came directly from the CP. The party openly controlled the councils. UC demonstrations often featured speeches and signs calling for defense of the Soviet Union. 35  The first National Unemployment Conference of 1930 adopted a program identical to that of the CP and TUUL, and warned that workers should have “no illusions that the government will grant these measures of partial relief”—an odd rallying cry for an unemployed movement. 36

While mainstream observers dismissed the CP for its ultra-radical perspective and clumsy tactics, the party was able to connect with the rage bubbling under the surface of society. As the labor radical Len De Caux described the process:

The communists brought misery out of hiding in the workers’ neighborhoods. They paraded it with angry demands through the main streets….and on to City Hall…. Sometimes, I’d hear a communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme, I’d feel embarrassed. Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience—shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour. Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, hands to clap. 37

As Steve Nelson explained, at a time when the idea of government assistance was far outside the mainstream, the jobless needed to “see that unemployment was not the result of their own or someone else’s mistake, that it was a worldwide phenomenon and a natural product of the system.” For this reason, Nelson felt “the unemployed agitation was as much education as direct action.” 38

The communists contributed to the movement not only radical demands but also two key strategies for how those demands could be won: solidarity between the labor movement and the unemployed and anti-racist unity.

In contrast to the AFL, communists and other radicals argued that employed and unemployed workers needed to make common cause because their fates were linked. If unemployment relief was not unbearable, employed workers would have more leverage with their bosses because they would be less afraid of going on strike or being fired.

Nowhere did the CP demonstrate these connections more sharply than in Detroit, where the majority of unemployment was directly related to auto factory layoffs. Detroit Unemployed Councils and the Young Communist League led marches to the car factories to protest the meager benefits given to laid-off workers. The next day, protesters shut down the Briggs Highland Park factory, and read a statement to workers inside pledging that the unemployed would not scab in the event of a Briggs strike. 39

A few months later, on March 7, 1932, the UC and the TUUL-affiliated Auto Workers Union led the Ford Hunger March—a demonstration of 3,000 current and former Ford workers to demand relief, limited hours, an end to racial discrimination, and the right to unionize. 40  Before the protesters could reach company headquarters, they were attacked at the Dearborn border by city police and company security. In the course of the fighting, the police began firing their guns, killing five men and wounding at least seventy-five more. More than 30,000 marched in the funeral procession. Years later, many participants reflected that the events surrounding the Ford Hunger March marked the first chapter in the unionization of American auto companies that took place later in the decade. 41

Racial and ethnic divisions were other barriers facing the unemployed movement. It is hard to overstate the degree to which racism permeated American society in the seventy years between the end of Reconstruction and the birth of the civil rights movement. The South was ruled by a one-party oligarchy, which maintained the allegiance of most poor whites through the frenzy of white supremacy. In the 1930s, Southern Democrats—“Dixiecrats”—formed a solid bloc of reaction that dominated Congress to the point that Roosevelt did not even attempt to pass anti-lynching legislation, which must seem incredible to modern readers. Roosevelt offered this excuse for his inaction to Walter White of the NAACP:

I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southerners [of Roosevelt’s own party] by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairman or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk. 42

The extreme racism of the Jim Crow South permeated every corner of America, including the labor movement. Since Blacks and immigrants made up a high proportion of the unskilled and unemployed, the biases of skilled workers blended in with racism. Many AFL locals were segregated either formally or informally. The disastrous nature of this policy was made clear during the steelworkers’ strike in 1919, which was defeated in part because tens of thousands of African Americans crossed the picket line rather than fight for a union that didn’t fight for them. 43

Into this atmosphere, the CP played a historic role in bringing Black and white jobless workers together into one organization by making anti-racism a part of the movement. The CP made sure that all of its agitation in the unemployed councils included protests against racial discrimination by relief agencies, landlords, and local and federal government. 44  On a more individual level, the Communists’ emphasis on multiracial organizing created situations in which whites and Blacks worked together for a common purpose and created personal bonds. In his autobiography, Hosea Hudson explains how this process took place over years in Birmingham, from the first multiracial jobless marches to the latter part of the decade when white workers objected to having a segregated union hall and supported their Black coworkers’ efforts to register to vote. 45  At a time when Depression conditions enabled fascists to gain supporters among the unemployed across Europe and in some parts of the United States, the Communists were able to build a commitment to fighting discrimination in the American unemployed movement.

At the same time, the CP undermined its admirable efforts at building a labor movement united across racial and employment divisions with its steady cries of “fascist” at all competing organizations. In the early 1930s, the CP’s authoritarianism and sectarianism fueled the rise of other radical organizations that began to appear in the unemployed movement.

The SP entered the Depression as a pale remnant of its glory days two decades earlier. Dominated by its old guard, which had expelled the left for supporting the Russian Revolution, the SP sought to lobby AFL locals and Democratic officials for unemployment insurance and other reforms. 46  Within a few years, however, the SP had attracted a new layer of young militants who favored the CP’s grass-roots orientation to the unemployed, if not the CP itself. These militants created SP-affiliated workers’ committees that competed with unemployed councils in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. 47

Another source of unemployed agitation was the Conference of Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), whose dominant figure was a Dutch minister turned radical labor organizer named A.J. Muste. The CPLA established unemployed leagues on the model of the Seattle Unemployed Citizens League, which organized thousands of jobless families into an impressive network of barter and labor exchange. 48 Soon, however, most leagues “renounced self-help in favor of militant protest since self-help never provided more than a fraction of their economic needs.” 49  The CPLA (and its later more radical incarnation, the American Workers Party) were never able to attain national prominence but it was a key player in the Midwest, especially in Ohio.

The CP’s attitude to these other unemployment groups was highly sectarian. According to historian Harvey Klehr, “The Communist response was to step up attacks on ‘social-fascists’ for misleading the unemployed. A party plenum in September [1932] attacked the unemployed councils for allowing ‘spontaneous unemployed movements’ in Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Youngstown to fall ‘into the hands of social-fascist leaders.’” The CP did agreed to join a “united front” conference set up by the Chicago UC, which was headed up by a local SP leader, Karl Borders, only to denounce Borders as a “social-fascist” at the conference. 50

By 1932, there were hundreds of unemployed councils, unemployed leagues, and workers committees on the unemployed across the country. In one city after another, the power dynamics of the relief system were dramatically changed. Upon hearing that a family had been denied relief, the local unemployed organization would call a meeting, lead a march to the agency, and send in an elected committee to demand an immediate appointment to resolve the situation, often with a large and hostile crowd waiting outside the building. 51  Hosea Hudson describes the methods of the Birmingham UC:

If someone get out of food and been down to the welfare two or three times and still ain’t got no grocery order…. We’d go to the house of the person that’s involved, the victim, let her tell her story. Then we’d ask all the people, “What do you all think could be done about it?” We wouldn’t just jump up and say what to do. We let the neighbors talk about it for a while, and then it would be some of us in the crowd, we going to say, “If the lady wants to go back down to the welfare, if she wants, I suggest we have a little committee to go with her and find out what the condition is.” 52

The fighting spirit spread to some of the flophouses. The Chicago UC newspaper reported about a flophouse in which the men elected a committee to demand fresh bread and vegetables and backed up their demands with a protest in which they threw the inferior food on the floor. 53

As these “pariahs” began to organize themselves, charity agencies found that their own lack of professionalism and arbitrary rules now worked against them:

Relief officials, who were accustomed to discretionary giving to a meek clientele and were not much governed by any fixed set of regulations, usually acquiesced in the face of aggressive protests. With each abrasive encounter, officials in local and private charities gradually forfeited the discretion to give or withhold aid. 54

Or, as an unemployed worker put it: “For three weeks, we would wait for recognition from a relief office. Our committee got it for us in fifteen minutes.” 55

As relief agencies caved in to the angry protesters outside their doors, they turned for more aid to municipal governments whose budgets were not growing but shrinking. By 1932 cities found themselves in a vise between a seemingly bottomless economic crisis and the swelling anger of the jobless. From Chicago, where the unemployment rate had reached 40 percent, Mayor Anton Cermak told Congress to send $150 million today or federal troops in the future. 56  In Detroit, relief was reduced to milk and bread; in Philadelphia, it was cut off entirely. 57  In response, mayors and city businessmen pressured Washington for relief, both individually and through the newly formed Conference of Mayors, an organization that exists to this day. As Piven and Cloward put it, “Driven by the protests of the masses of unemployed and the threat of financial ruin, mayors of the biggest cities of the Unites States, joined by business and banking leaders, had become lobbyists for the poor.” 58

In July, President Hoover finally broke with laissez-faire orthodoxy and passed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act (ERCA), the first federal legislation for unemployment relief. But ERCA was the epitome of too little ($300 million) and too late (three years into the Depression). Hoover was crushed by Roosevelt in the November elections.

The first New Deal Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933 with the promise of a “new deal.” The specifics of this promise were unclear. As governor of New York, Roosevelt had established a liberal reputation by speaking in favor of unemployment insurance and creating a modest state relief program. 59  Yet Roosevelt was an establishment politician, a scion of a wealthy family who showed little inclination to threaten the wealth of his class. Furthermore, as a Democratic politician, Roosevelt had only been able to secure his party’s nomination by assuring the Dixiecrats that he would not challenge their reactionary agenda.

Roosevelt differed from Hoover primarily in his willingness to “consider greater government intervention into the private market in order to save capitalism.” 60  In his famous first one hundred days, the new president issued a series of regulations of banking and industry in an attempt to tackle the bankruptcies and overproduction that had ground the economy to a halt. 61

In contrast to these Herculean efforts to save business from itself, FDR’s initial legislation on unemployment relief was meager. The Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA), passed in May 1933, allocated $3 billion over three years. 62  FERA was a big improvement over Hoover’s ERCA, but it was still woefully insufficient to address the ever-growing crisis. Moreover, many state legislatures were reluctant or dilatory in participating in the program. Roosevelt himself, who called relief “repugnant to American ideals of self-reliance,” was only too willing to cut off funding to these states. 63

Inadequate as it was in material terms, FERA was a victory for the movement, beginning a dynamic played out for the next few years. FDR would enact a reform in the hopes of quelling unemployment unrest only to see unrest increase instead. This apparent paradox was rooted in the experience of rising unemployment alongside organizing by a self-conscious minority. While unemployed activists represented a minority of the nation’s unemployed, millions more remained in the shadows, ashamed of their status and unwilling to ask for relief. Each new federal relief measure, however, was an acknowledgement that the unemployed were not to blame for their predicament and that they deserved a certain standard of living. Millions of previously invisible jobless workers would emerge to ask for, and then demand, relief and the escalating cycle of protests and reforms continued.

Nowhere was this interplay more apparent than in the rise and fall of the Civilian Works Administration (CWA), the first attempt at federal work relief. The CWA, launched by Roosevelt’s talented liberal aide Harry Hopkins at the end of 1933, provided unemployed workers with jobs that paid real money instead of coupons for food or rent. The program was wildly popular. And that was the problem. “When we started Civil Works we said we were going to put four million men to work,” Hopkins recalled later. “How many do you suppose applied for those four million jobs? About ten million. Now I don’t say there were ten million people out of work, but ten million…stood in line, many of them all night.” 64

In fact, there were fifteen million people unemployed in 1933, but the Roosevelt administration was not prepared to fund jobs for them all. Many of these were people who had managed to stay off of relief and were thus invisible to Hopkins and the New Deal planners. News of the jobs program, however, led these new millions to apply for relief in order to become eligible for a CWA job. When they found out that CWA did not have enough jobs for them, many people accepted relief for the first time. A FERA manager described the thought process this way: “The government having failed to provide me with a job, it is now up to the government to take care of my family.” 65  One newspaper described the dilemma faced by Roosevelt and Hopkins: “C.W.A. is a bear which the administration holds by the tail. It’s afraid to hold on and it’s afraid to let go!” 66  The president decided to let it go, terminating the CWA within a few months of its inception.

While Roosevelt vacillated, a profound ideological shift regarding the unemployed was taking place. As Hopkins, put it, “For a long time those who did not require relief entertained the illusion that those being aided were in need through some fault of their own. It is now pretty clear in the national mind that the unemployed are a cross-section of the workers, the finest people in the land.” 67

Yet the Roosevelt administration was unwilling to provide these fine people an insurance program for the unemployment that it admitted was not their fault. Some of FDR’s economic advisers tried in vain to convince him to include a substantial unemployment program and old age insurance in the sweeping program of the first one hundred days. 68 There were other forces, however, pressuring Roosevelt against such an action.

To begin with, there were the Dixiecrats: the devils to whom liberal Democrats sold their souls on their way up the political ladder. These few dozen men were not on the fringe of the party but at its core—their KKK-enforced one-party domination of the South was the foundation of the Democrats’ congressional majority. Their reactionary politics were not limited to racial segregation, but included hostility to any hint of progressive change.

Even if Roosevelt had not been concerned with maintaining Dixiecrat support, he still would have been reluctant to create unemployment insurance. Ruling-class opinion in the United States had long been set against any form of government relief. Unemployment had been a recurring phenomenon since the late nineteenth century. In 1900, for example, unemployment spiked as high as 20 percent. 69  Protests against unemployment and demands for federal relief had grown as well, from groups ranging from the IWW to Coxey’s Army, a loosely organized network that tried to organize jobless workers to hop freight trains from around the country and converge on Washington, D.C., in 1894.

By the early twentieth century, similar protests had led many European countries to create state unemployment programs. The U.S. ruling class, true to its nature, preferred a little violent protest and repression to conceding government responsibility for unemployment. The American resistance to unemployment insurance was connected to the American resistance to unions for those employed in sweatshops, factories, and mines. As Piven and Cloward explain:

These practices were not only a reflection of harshly individualistic American attitudes. They were also a reflection of American economic realities. Work and self-reliance meant grueling toil at low wages for many people. So long as that was so, the dole could not be dispensed permissively for fear some would choose it over work. 70

The unemployed movement found itself at an impasse: it had shifted public opinion by dramatizing the crisis of the Depression and created enough pressure to win some minor victories. But it was not powerful enough to win a permanent national insurance program. For one thing, the instability of unemployed life led to the instability of unemployed organizations. Most unemployed organizations were made up of a small core of radicals and a larger layer of short-term activists. This problem was particularly acute in the Communist dominated councils, leading CP leader Herbert Benjamin to complain that non-CP activists “find themselves excluded from all participation in the actual work of planning and leading actions.” 71  But SP and CPLA activists also found their organizations foundering by 1933. 72  Unemployed organizations simply did not have the social weight to do more than create disruption. They did, however, play an important role in building a more powerful force: the labor movement.

Turning point  The early years of the Depression were horrible for unions. Long lines of jobless workers outside factory gates allowed companies to drastically reduce wages and hours for those still working. In these years it was the unemployed movement that provided the training ground for a new generation of activists. Many leading union militants of the late 1930s learned how to organize—and often how to understand the whole capitalist system—when they were active in the unemployed movement earlier in the decade.

Unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1933; it then declined to 21.7 percent in 1934. 73  That may seem like a minor shift but it meant that factories finally began hiring workers again—some of whom had become activists and revolutionaries in the movement. Workers felt more confident to organize to make up lost ground in wages and hours. Thus, 1934 became a turning point for labor, a year that not only saw a strike wave of textile workers from New England to Georgia but also three strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco in which union workers—led by socialists—won the majority of the workers in each city to actively support their fight against both the company and the police. These strikes have been recently analyzed in the pages of this magazine and they will not be described in detail here. 74  It is important to note that unemployed organizations played key roles in these strikes, particularly in Toledo, where the Musteite-led Unemployed League played a decisive role in battling police and strike-breakers. 75

The militancy and radicalism of the strikes of 1934 sent shudders through executive boardrooms and government chambers. “You’ve seen strikes in Toledo,” warned one Congressman in 1935, “You have seen Minneapolis, you have seen San Francisco, and you have seen some of the southern textile strikes…but you have not yet seen the gates of hell opened, and that is what is going to happen from now on.” 76

Roosevelt needed to take decisive new action to take back the initiative from these radical movements. The result was a spate of dramatic pro-labor legislation that became known as the “second New Deal.” In 1935, Roosevelt pushed through the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the SSA, each of which contain a number of measures that have changed the relationship between labor and capital to this day. It is beyond the scope of this article to deal with the NLRA, which guaranteed the right for workers to organize unions, but we will consider the SSA as well as the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The WPA was a mammoth project. Between 1936 and 1943, the government employed an average of 2 million workers, who built 600,000 miles of roads, 75,000 bridges, and 5,584 schools, among other projects. Young workers in the related Civilian Conservation Corps built 45,000 telephone lines and 42,000 dams. 77  Like the CWA before it, workers flocked to WPA jobs because they gave the unemployed some of the dignity they had been demanding. WPA jobs were based on workers’ skills as opposed to income, which meant there were no home visits or other demeaning investigations. 78  Moreover, Roosevelt pledged that the program would provide “self-respecting jobs at useful work.” 79

The reality of the WPA, however, was somewhat different. To begin with, the program was set up so as not to compete with private industry. This meant, as UC leader Herbert Benjamin pointed out, that miners and steel workers were put to work cutting grass instead of doing the “useful work” at which they were skilled. 80  At the same time, WPA wages had to be kept sufficiently low that the unemployed would have an incentive to take private work if it became available. The problem with this, Benjamin argued, it that private sector wages had greatly dropped during the Depression, precisely because of the availability of unemployed workers. Rather than forcing those salaries up by paying a decent wage, the WPA reinforced the era’s poverty wages. 81 Furthermore, while Roosevelt and Hopkins promised that the WPA would employ all 5 million of the unemployed on the FERA rolls, in fact it never employed more than half that. Yet the president went ahead with his plans to dismantle FERA after passing the WPA.

The Social Security Act was signed into law on August 14, 1935. The act provided for old age insurance funded by workers and employers, three months insurance for terminated workers funded by employers, and assistance for the blind and dependent children. This act, strengthened in the 1960s and weakened in the 1990s, has remained the crowning achievement for the unemployed movement in the United States—though several decades of an employers’ offensive buttressed by the ideology of free-market individualism has placed Social Security under threat. In addition to the material benefits it has given to millions of people, the SSA marked a historic shift in American culture and consciousness toward the idea that unemployment relief is a societal responsibility.

While the SSA marked a turning point in U.S. policy, it did not satisfy the demands of the unemployed movement. Communists and socialists both campaigned against the legislation. The radicals understood that the SSA, important as it was, did not satisfy the underlying demand of their movement: full equality for the unemployed. In a number of ways, Roosevelt’s legislation drew a distinction between the “unemployable” and those who happened to not have a job. To begin with, the exclusion of agricultural, domestic, and retail workers created a lower status of workers undeserving of insurance. These workers were disproportionately Black and female. 82  In addition, the time limits created a distinction between workers facing seasonal layoffs and those facing more long-term unemployment.

Most important, SSA divided benefits into the two categories: universal insurance (for retired and unemployed workers) and public assistance (for dependent children and the disabled.) The SSA thus divided its recipients into those who have “earned” assistance and those who simply “need” it. Not surprisingly, the pension and unemployment programs for the former have remained politically popular. The “welfare” programs, on the other hand, particularly Aid to Dependent Children (ADC, later changed to Aid to Families With Dependent Children, AFDC), which mostly assisted single mothers, soon became seen as a handout to an underclass unconnected to the majority of working Americans. 83

Instead, unemployed activists supported the Workers and Unemployment and Social Insurance Bill, introduced by Ernest Lundeen, a Farmer-Labor Congressman from Minnesota. The Lundeen Bill reflected many of the demands of the UCs: insurance payments equal to average local wages for all workers over eighteen, part time as well as full time, regardless of race, gender, or citizenship, funded by a new tax on all those making over $5,000 per year, and administered by elected representatives of workers’ organizations. 84  It is a sign of those times that this radical legislation was recommended for passage by the House Committee on Labor before it lost momentum in the face of Roosevelt’s competing bill. 85

Despite the limitations of the WPA and the SSA, the unemployed movement in 1935 seemed powerful enough to do what it had done with previous reforms: use the increased legitimacy that these gave to the demands of the jobless to press for further and more radical changes. These hopes were bolstered in 1936 when the CP, SP, and Musteites ended their squabbles and merged their unemployed organizations into the Workers’ Alliance of America (WAA). The WAA engaged in militant actions to win collective bargaining for workers at a number of WPA projects. 86

Yet the years after 1936 saw the unemployed movement in decline. In some ways, the movement was a victim of its own success. Its ranks thinned as more jobs appeared through the private sector and WPA. Many movement activists went on to play important roles in the major social movement of the latter half of the decade, the growth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In addition, the expansion of the welfare system in the New Deal created a more professional system of relief. This professionalism, however, meant that agencies grew more skilled not only in meeting their clients’ needs but also in channeling local protests into orderly meetings, and even sometimes decapitating councils by hiring their leaders. 87

These explanations, however, are incomplete. In 1938 a second recession spiked unemployment from 14.3 percent back to 19 percent. 88 FDR did not increase relief funds and actually cut the WPA budget in 1939. 89  Yet instead of the explosion of anger that one would have expected from actions in the early 1930s, Roosevelt faced little more than polite conferences and scattered protests. 90

What had changed was the Communist Party, now engaged in its Popular Front strategy. This shift, dictated by Moscow in response to the growing threat of Nazi Germany to Russia, called on CPs internationally to unite with progressive capitalist forces, which in the United States meant everyone from the SP to President Roosevelt. Because the Popular Front led the CP to abandon the rabid sectarianism of the Third Period and dramatically (but temporarily) increase its membership, some historians see this as the CP’s most successful period. In reality, it marked the party’s complete surrender of a revolutionary vision to transform society.

In their unemployed work, the Communists oriented the Workers Alliance more on lobbying than on local agitation. This shift reflected the Communists’ new support for Roosevelt, which in turn led to a shift in their approach to his programs. Only two years after Benjamin penned his incisive critique of the WPA, his new unemployed organization called a rally in New York to uncritically “demonstrate to the public just how much WPA means to the 175,000 workers and their families on work programs in that city.” 91

In the middle of the decade, radicals had scared the White House into creating a social welfare state. Now, as the unemployed movement lost its radical core, Republicans and Dixiecrats regained momentum and FDR “sought corporate support for a massive military buildup, further strengthening his ties to big business.” 92  There would be no third New Deal.

The legacy  The Social Security Act of 1935 has changed the balance of class forces for the past seventy-five years. SSA’s insurance and assistance programs—as well as the Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps programs added in the 1960s—have not only kept millions from facing utter destitution; they have given workers a little breathing room in case of termination and thus leverage in the eternal tug of war with employers over wages and benefits.

Predictably, free-market fundamentalists at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute churn out reports against these programs. 93  Yet these normally influential think tanks are largely ignored when it comes to unemployment. Aside from a few cranks, most congressional Republicans voted to extend unemployment insurance by twenty weeks last November, even as they were denouncing government spending at various “tea parties.” 94  For the time being, both parties are unwilling to challenge a program that most Americans have come to see as a fundamental responsibility of government in troubled economic times.

Yet our safety net remains a flawed and inadequate system in all the ways the radicals of the 1930s anticipated—and in many ways they did not. For starters there is the two-tiered nature of the system. Those programs that are universal—provided to all regardless of income—like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and—more recently—Medicare, have become revered institutions. Meanwhile, means-tested programs—provided only to those who qualify—such as AFDC (“welfare”), Supplemental Security Income (“disability”), and Medicaid, face a steady stream of budget cuts, stigmatization, and accusations of cheating the system. The attacks on means-tested programs came to a head in 1996, when Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we know it” by replacing AFDC with the more restrictive Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Despite the near-universal praise it receives in the media, TANF has proven to be far less effective than AFDC in preventing poverty. 95

Moreover, even the popular universal programs are inadequate and under threat. Emergency extensions by Congress have allowed workers in some states to collect unemployment insurance for ninety-nine weeks—the longest period in the program’s history. 96  In a prolonged recession, however, millions of workers are finding that jobs do not suddenly appear in the hundredth week. Moreover, strict eligibility requirements and hostile bureaucracies mean that only 36 percent of unemployed workers receive benefits. 97  For this minority, unemployment checks vary widely depending on where they live, from $411 in Massachusetts to $197 in Mississippi. 98  Meanwhile, states’ unemployment funds are running out while regressive taxation policies, bank bailouts, and the costly demands of American militarism put the future funding for unemployment insurance, Medicare, and even Social Security in doubt. Though the Bush administration failed in its attempts to privatize Social Security, the claim that Social Security is in “crisis” and must be “fixed”—read, whittled down and modified to the detriment of the retired workers who depend on it—is a periodically renewed theme by politicians and the press. 99

As our worst economic crisis since the Depression enters its third full year, the history of the unemployed movement offers a lesson of how local and temporary struggles during a period of overall working-class retreat can interact with radical organizations to strengthen the left for larger struggles to come. Perhaps in this recession unemployed workers will be compelled to fight to maintain or to be eligible for the benefits they deserve. (We should be particularly wary of pseudo-populist attempts to introduce means-testing into universal programs like Social Security, a long-term scheme to turn an untouchable institution into a degraded welfare program.)

Perhaps our generation’s defining struggle will be for health care. As millions discover the inadequacies of the new health care bill over the coming years, the climate may be ripe for “under-insured councils” to initiate local direct actions at insurance offices, hospitals, and drug stores to win the health benefits that the politicians have failed to deliver.

Any movements that arise today will have to confront the same politics of division that existed in the early 1930s. The centrality of anti-racism of the CP at that time is a model for activists today—when the rate of unemployment among African Americans is 50 percent higher than the national average. 100  Today we have to apply these principles to immigrants (regardless of legal status), prisoners, and ex-inmates—sections of the population vastly larger than they were eighty years ago. Finally, the movement will have to take on the sexism that lies at the heart of the popular definition of “real” jobs (i.e., not domestic work) that are worthy of insurance.

As in the 1930s, the heart of a new movement for the unemployed will need to be socialist politics. As they always have, employers and politicians use shame—better known today as “personal responsibility”—to discourage those victimized by capitalism from demanding compensation. They blame poverty and joblessness on a “culture of poverty” in the tabloids while they debate capitalism’s “natural rate of unemployment” in the business press. 101  To counter this, we need an anticapitalist understanding to help people see, as UC organizer Steve Nelson put it, that “unemployment was not the result of their own or someone else’s mistake…[but] a natural product of the system.”

Herbert Benjamin, the CP’s lead organizer of the unemployed councils, eloquently expressed the defiant and intelligent posture we need today.

Ever since the present crisis began, those who are unwilling to provide relief for the millions who have become destitute…have tried to meet every demand for such relief by smugly declaring that: “The unemployed don’t want relief—what they want is jobs!”…. It is of course true that we workers want jobs. It is true that we resent being compelled to live on miserable relief doles which we are made to feel is “charity”. But much as we gag on these humiliating hand-outs, we have come to realize that as long as the masters of industry, finance and government are unwilling and unable to afford us the opportunity to earn a decent livelihood through work, we must compel them to provide us with other means of existence. 102
  • Today only the old age and disability pensions are known as “social security” because they are administered by the Social Security Administration. Unemployment insurance and poverty assistance—which have become known as “welfare”—are now administered by separate agencies.
  • Arloc Sherman, “Safety net effective at fighting poverty but has weakened for the very poorest,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, July 6, 2009, http://www.cbpp.org .
  • See, for example, “Core curriculum: Social studies,” New York State Department of Education, 62.
  • Ibid. Socialism is mentioned in the New York curriculum under the subtopic of “other voices,” alongside the demagogue Huey Long and the Nazi sympathizer Father Coughlin.
  • Paul Krugman, “Pass the bill,”  New York Times , December 17, 2009.
  • Lizabeth Cohen,  Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 218.
  • Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward,  Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail  (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 48.
  • Franklin Folsom,  Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808–1942  (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1991), 239.
  • Ibid., 223–26.
  • Piven and Cloward, 42.
  • Cohen, 221–23.
  • Suzanne Wasserman, “’Our alien neighbors’: Coping with the Depression on the Lower East Side,”  American Jewish History  88, June 2000, 228.
  • Fraser M. Ottanelli,  The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II  (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1991), 31.
  • Folsom, 252–55.
  • Ibid., 270–71.
  • Robert VanGiezen and Albert E. Schwenk, “Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jan. 20, 2003, http://www.bls.gov .
  • Sharon Smith,  Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States  (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 97.
  • Roger Keeran,  The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Union  (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 67.
  • Ibid., 100–01.
  • Duncan Hallas,  The Comintern: A History of the Third International  (Chicago: Haymarket Books: 2008), 127–44.
  • Harvey Klehr,  The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade  (New York, Basic Books, Inc, 1984), 39.
  • Ottanelli, 22.
  • Klehr, 40–41.
  • Ottanelli, 27.
  • Sidney Lens,  Radicalism in America  (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966), 304.
  • Robert Fisher,  Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America  (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), 39–40.
  • Nelson, 75–76.
  • Christine Ellis, “People who cannot be bought,” in  Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers , ed. Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 18–19.
  • Folsom, 269.
  • Ibid., 240–41.
  • Hosea Hudson,  Black Worker in the Deep South  (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 51–52.
  • Unemployed Council of Chicago,  Chicago Hunger Fighter , December 1931.
  • Folsom, 232.
  • James J. Lorence,  Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland  (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 36–37.
  • Folsom, 305–06.
  • Lorence 42–44.
  • Harvard Sitkoff,  A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights As a National Issue: The Depression Decade  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 47.
  • See, for example, “Protest relief discrimination against Negroes!” Chicago Hunger Fighter , January 1932.
  • Hudson, 58–71.
  • Steve Valocchi, “The unemployed workers movement of the 1930s: A reexamination of the Piven and Cloward thesis,” Social Problems 37, May 1990, 194–95.
  • Roy Rosenzweig, “Radicals and the jobless: The Musteites and the Unemployed Leagues, 1932–1936,”  Labor History  16, 1975, 56.
  • Klehr, 64–65.
  • Folsom, 262.
  • “Flophouse protest,” Chicago Hunger Fighter , December 1931.
  • Piven and Cloward, 57.
  • Folsom, 268.
  • Piven and Cloward, 61.
  • Jeff Singleton,  The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression  (Westport: Greenwood, 2000), 82.
  • Piven and Cloward, 64.
  • Folsom, 256–57
  • Lance Selfa,  The Democrats: A Critical History  (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 47.
  • Ibid., 47–50.
  • Piven and Cloward, 66.
  • Singleton, 139.
  • Ibid., 133.
  • Ibid., 137.
  • Herbert Benjamin, A Handbook for Project Workers (New York: National Unemployment Council of the U.S.,1936), 4.
  • Piven and Cloward, 68.
  • Lorence, 2.
  • Valocchi, 197.
  • VanGiezen and Schwenk.
  • Sharon Smith, “1934: The strikes that paved the way,”  International Socialist Review  69, Jan–Feb 2010.
  • Folsom, 352.
  • Gwendolyn Mink,  The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the welfare state, 1917-1942  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 127.
  • Folsom, 399–400.
  • Chad Alan Goldberg, “Contesting the status of relief workers during the New Deal,” Social Science History  29, Fall 2005, 345.
  • Benjamin, 5.
  • Ibid., 5–6.
  • Alice Kessler-Harris, “In the nation’s image: The gendered limits of social citizenship in the Depression Era,”  The Journal of American History  86, December 1999, 1,262.
  • Mimi Abramovitz,  Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the United States  (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 16.
  • Folsom, 472.
  • Ibid., 398. Valocchi, 200. Valocchi implies that Roosevelt wanted the Lundeen Bill to make it out of committee to scare conservative Democrats into backing the Social Security Act.
  • Valocchi, 201.
  • Piven and Cloward, 77–79.
  • VanGeizen and Schwenk.
  • Piven and Cloward, 89, Selfa, 52–53.
  • Piven and Cloward, 87–90.
  • Tad DeHaven, “Food stamp use soars and stigma fades,” Cato Institute, December 2, 2009, http://www.cato-at-liberty.org . See also: James Sherk, “Extended unemployment insurance benefits: The Heritage Foundation 2009 labor boot camp,” Heritage Foundation, January 15, 2009, http://www.heritage.org .
  • Corey Boles, “Congress extends jobless benefits, home-buyer credit,”  Wall Street Journal , November 5, 2009.
  • Sherman, “Safety net effective at fighting poverty but has weakened for the very poorest.”
  • Boles, “Congress extends jobless benefits.”
  • Elizabeth Schulte, “Adding insult to injury,”  Socialist Worker , February 23, 2009.
  • Olga Pierce, “Unemployment insurance buckles after years of underfunding,” ProPublica , June 3, 2009.
  • “Before his inauguration, Mr. Obama said of Social Security, ‘We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s.’” Jackie Calmes, “Next big issue? Social Security pops up again,”  New York Times , March 22, 2010.
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Black America’s economic freefall,”  Socialist Worker , January 8, 2010.
  • David Brauer, “The natural rate of unemployment,” Congressional Budget Office, April 2007.
  • Benjamin, 6.

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expository essay on unemployment

"A sense of hope and the possibility for solidarity"

Sapronov and the russian revolution, standing up to the zionist backlash against bds, legacies of colonialism in africa, austerity, neoliberalism,
and the indian working class, disability and the soviet union: advances and retreats, the critical communism of antonio labriola, austerity, neoliberalism, and the indian working class, the legacy of louis althusser, "a sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity", islamic fundamentalism, the arab spring, and the left, knocking down straw figures, have the democrats evolved, giving voice to the syrian revolution, from “waste people”
to “white trash”, defending our right to criticize israel.

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