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August 25, 2003/ - - DISMALLY, nearly 3 million American jobs have vanished since President Bush took office. Nine million Americans are out of work - and that counts only those drawing unemployment benefits, not the vast number who exhausted their support checks, or never found work in the first place.

Today, the U.S. economy is recovering, and the stock market is rising - but jobs continue to hemorrhage. About 44,000 more disappeared in July, the sixth straight month of payroll decline.

Economists warn that a profound, ominous shift is occurring in American business: The computer revolution is boosting productivity so much that fewer and fewer employees are needed. When extra output is necessary, employers use overtime and temporary workers - neither requiring costly medical insurance and other benefits.

An example of the Brave New World is IBM's $2.5 billion computer chip factory at East Fishkill, N.Y. It produces as many chips as plants with 400 workers per shift - but it's entirely robot- operated, and needs only 100 engineers to consult and observe. Newsweek noted that the staff went home during a blizzard, but the robots continued making chips all night.

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Further, more and more U.S. corporations are moving their high- tech jobs overseas, to places like India or China, where labor costs are a tiny fraction of America's rates. International computer linkages make offshore work easy.

The global economy is a relentless force that simply follows laws of the marketplace, caring little if groups of ex-workers are left in misery. When the Industrial Revolution brought machine-driven production, former handcraft artisans lost their incomes and status. When coal-digging machines came to West Virginia after World War II, more than 100,000 pick-and-shovel miners lost their livelihoods. When conveyor belts, forklifts, ditching machines and other devices curtailed manual labor, multitudes of black American men were consigned to limbo. Now the computer revolution and globalization are ripping their way through the world. Change and "downsizing" are unstoppable.

 

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Under such circumstances, the best America can do is provide government help and retraining for the laid-off, the working poor and other victims of ruthless shifts. Unfortunately, the current administration aids chiefly the affluent and the corporations that are shedding jobs.

President Bush contends that his trillion-dollar tax cuts for the wealthy will give them more money to invest in business expansions, creating jobs. But it isn't working, and most experts see that Bush's real purpose is to hand a colossal giveaway to the privileged class.

Ten Nobel laureates signed a statement saying the tax plan won't stimulate jobs. MIT economist Robert Solow said the cuts are "redistributive in intent and redistributive in effect." They redistribute money from the public to the rich.

The Boston Globe declared: "It is time to call the Bush stimulus plan what it is: phony, divisive, irresponsible."

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Last week, The New York Times said Bush has presided "over a two- year binge of tax cuts, a rocketing federal deficit and job losses that recall the Herbert Hoover era.... The Republicans' chokehold on the nation's revenue flow is doing far more to create debt and deficits than to create jobs." The national newspaper concluded:

 

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"As Mr. Bush's 'growth' program rolls out, the richest 1 percent of Americans can expect an estimated 17 percent cut in their taxes by 2010.... The other 99 percent get a 5 percent cut - along with accumulated deficits of $4 billion or more across the next 10 years and the lost chance that the now-vanished surplus might be used to protect their future Social Security benefits."

It's tragic that the computer revolution and the ruthless global economy are devouring American jobs. And it's doubly tragic that the GOP administration helps only the elite, not the laid-off little people.

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