Toward Global Action

Despite the world's rising unemployment and underemployment, the United Nations has deserted its earlier commitments to full employment. This reflects the attitudes of most member states. In turn, economists have failed to measure the full labor surplus, analyze it globally, or update earlier full-employment concepts. Fortunately, new quality-of-life employment proposals in the U.S. Congress provide a political impetus for improved data analysis and policymaking in the United States. Its sponsors also urge regional and global fact-finding conferences under U.N. auspices. This would require new-style expert appraisals. Such appraisals might well indicate that joblessness, underemployment, and job insecurity (1) affect the majority of people in every region of the world; (2) have enormous economic and social consequences; (3) undermine the purchasing power and productivity needed to reverse economic stagnation and prevent collapse; and (4) are used to justify arms escalation as a way of providing jobs.