Jobs

This article is one in a group of six that will appear in a volume entitled Alternatives: Proposals From the Democratic Left, edited by Irving Howe, © 1984 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., and to be published this spring by Pantheon Books, Inc., with whose kind permission it appears here. Alternatives is an effort to provide realistic short-range and intermediate analyses of and solutions to the socioeconomic problems facing this country. The contributors to the book are Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, Robert Lekachman, Gordon Adams, and Irving Howe —Eds.

America’s current job problem is, unfortunately, not the result of a cyclical...