Marxian
unemployment
Marxian :When
unemployment is needed to encourage workers to work hard and to keep wages
down.
As Karl Marxsaid (and Michal Kalecki stress), some unemployment —
the keep army of the unemployed — is normally needed in order to maintain work
discipline in jobs, keep wages down, and protect business profitability. If profitability suffers a
sustained depression, capitalists can and will punish people by imposing a
recession via their control over investment decisions (a capital strike). Incidentally, in this
section the term "capitalism" is used to refer to a person who owns
economic capital, whether or not s/he holds "capitalist" political
views. To theMarxianschool, these strikes are rare, since in
normal times the government, responding to pressure from their most important
constituencies, will encourage recessions before profits are hurt.
To
Marxists, this kind of unemployment cannot be stopped without remove capitalism
from power as an economic system and replacing it with democratic socialism under which
profitability is protected by the systematic use of direct force.
10-6.2. Seasonal :where special industries or occupations are characterised by
seasonal work which may lead to unemployment. Examples include workers employed
during farm harvest time, or those working Winter jobs in the snowfields.
10-6.3. Hidden unemployment: Hidden, or covered,
unemployment is the unemployment of possible workers that is not shown in
official unemployment statistics, due to the way the statistics are collected.
10-7.
Measuring unemployment: unemployment rate: the unemployment rate is the
number of unemployed workers divided by the total civilian labor force. The unemployment rate is used in
economic studies and economic indexes.
Questions:
1. Give
the Definition of Unemployment?
2. Give
the Definition of Labor Force?
3. True
or false and correct the false if necessary:
a. The average
duration of unemployment for all unemployed workers over the past decade is
12.5 weeks.
b. Underemployed
means the People who are out of a job
that they don’t belong (either over-skilled or under-skilled).
c. Technological
unemployment Caused by the replacement of machines by workers.
d. Marxian unemployment When
unemployment is needed to encourage workers to work hard and to keep wages up.
e. Classical unemployment
means the number of
job-seekers over the number of jobs
4. List
the Types of unemployment?
5. In Iraq we have (five) million persons
who considered total labor force, from those labors are four million persons
employed, Find unemployment rate?
6. Translate the
fallowing paragraph:-
An economic conference on unemployment
An economic conference is being held in Baghdad under
the slogan (rebuilding Iraq by the hands of Iraqis) on Monday.
This was announced by Mr. Raad Am’ar, Executive Director of the
American Trade and Industry Chamber, the executive agency of the conference.
said that the conference will be attended by Iraqi companies, the Office of
Rebuilding Iraq, representatives of donor countries, the American embassy in Iraq,
representatives of a number of ministries and the Iraqi government.
Am’ar explained that over two days the conference will discuss the
phenomenon of unemployment and ways to develop solutions through the creation
of successful employment opportunities within the campaign of rebuilding Iraq,
and the reduction of unemployment in cooperation with concerned bodies.
He said that the conference will also focus on ways to find proper
mechanisms for the recruitment of unemployed to serve reconstruction and to
urge Iraqi companies to benefit from such employment.
A number of economic reconstruction projects will be highlighted
in this forum before the business community, and a questionnaire will be
distributed. The conference is the largest of its kind intended to support and
provide jobs for the unemployed in the private sector working on
reconstruction.