Job fair participants in Westfield, Indiana take a data processing test for GTE. How long before these service jobs go overseas.

As ugly as it is, the map only conveys the official view of the unemployed. It does not count those who:

• have been unemployed for so long that they have dropped out of the labor market,

• sought to claim disability because they could not find work,

• work two or three part-time jobs to make up for the one job they lost.

The Bush Administration’s official number is 3.4 million unemployed. The real number is four times that or over 13 million unemployed.

Each one of those 13 million unemployed Americans can see themselves on that map. And their family members and friends can see them, too.
 
The numbers of Americans impacted by unemployment grow geometrically – 26 million in the inner family circle, 39 million in the next ring of extended family members, and 52 million in the third ring of neighbors and friends.


The Fight for Jobs
Those Americans are the vanguard of the fight for JOBS! But they are not alone.
The ripple effect of being unemployed does not stop at the kitchen table or the front door of one’s home. It impacts the entire community, the entire county.
County tax receipts and county services are reduced by prolonged unemployment. School districts see their budgets cut and cut again. Community groups struggle to operate food banks, shelters and counseling services.

Small businesses shrink. They carry smaller inventories; hire fewer employees; offer lower wages and benefits (if any); pay less in taxes – all because their customers cannot afford to shop there anymore.
 
As the country western song says it’s “the little man who built the town” that disappears when the “big money” like Wal-Mart comes along.

Working Americans know that they, too, remain insecure when jobs are scarce. Their jobs, and their union contracts, are at risk. They know from hard experience that employers take advantage of high unemployment to depress wages, reduce benefits and alter work rules.

That’s why the JOBS! Worth Fighting For strategy is so potent. Joblessness injures us all.


Deep Pockets of Joblessness
High unemployment is not limited to the rural counties of the Appalachian Mountains or the Pacific Northwest. A check of the 331 major metropolitan areas, the medium-sized cities and their suburbs, indicate that twenty-four percent of them have unemployment rates over six percent.

While the corporate media outlets proclaim how the economy is roaring out of recession, fifty-five percent of the nation’s major metropolitan areas have seen either no improvement or a worsening of their joblessness rate in the last year.
There’s no cheering in Florence, Alabama or Rocky Mount, North Carolina or Yuma, Arizona, metropolitan areas that saw over two percentage point drops in their unemployment rates last year.
 
And the reason no one cheered? Florence dropped down to 7.7 percent. Rocky Mount dropped to 7.9 percent. And Yuma dropped from 25.7 to 23.6 percent.
Even the largest counties in the land have little to cheer about. In the ten largest counties – counties like Los Angeles, Cook, New York, Harris, Miami-Dade and King – 156,250 jobs in manufacturing and information technology disappeared between March 2002 and March 2003.
 
In seven states – Alaska, California, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, South Carolina and Washington – the statewide unemployment rate exceeds 6.5 percent.
Stripped of its “happy days are here again” drivel, the Bush Administration faces a massive political problem: Fifty-two million Americans have felt the harsh sting of unemployment, directly or indirectly. They have one very good reason for throwing the rascals out: Our JOBS! Are Worth Fighting For.

Cover Story: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5