The Unemployement problem, 10.2, October 2009: how high is enough ?

The Unemployment rate (October 2009) is 10.2%. This number does not include the people not in the labor market and does not represent what is going on in some segments of the unemployed for example, among teens, or when broken down by ethnicity or sex of the populations. How high is bad enough? How high will it be before a critical and irreversible point is reached? The term "recession" does not mean that the problem is not bad enough as in depression, the term was used because it was felt that the term depression would be too harsh and negative and that a softer adjective should be used.

Why is this problem inserted and being treated here in this blogsphere point? Mainly because it is a social problem, and in this era of the social web it cannot be ingnored. The relation is that people have to have to income, revenue derived maily from employment in order to be able to have discretionary income to be able to purchase goods and services beyond their basic needs and in their pursuit of better happiness.

So, a real aggresive and earnestly determined effort, must be put in operation, the sooner the better, to deal with this particular problem. Today, there was a report of an employement program designed to assist the Veterans. A similar or comparable programs must be put in practice to assist all Americans who have been laid off due to the economic crisis.

Who is the person or people that must deliver the solution? Basically, the people/individuals/organizations that have the power to produce the required effect. The companies and employers with the most money must provide leadership in this. There are several companies/industries that are thriving despite the so called "recession." In addition, the government can/must form specific and special partnerships with private enterprise, just as it does to provide for other government services and programs (and the world, since this is a globally interconnected situation/crisis) to combat this problem. These are unprecedented and unusually irregular circumstances that may require extraordinary provision/programs. Banks, specially, must do their jobs and provide the loans and financial incentives/programs/conditions/infrastructures necessary for small businesses to develop and expand.

One last observation: on the Web and the blogsphere, on Twitter, this is barely touched upon. It makes it appear that it is business as usual, and that all what people have to do is to join one of the MLM/Marketing and AdSense or similar programs and everything will be fine. Well, it sound very easy, but who is going to have purchasing power without a job? The social web is about the technical process and procedures put in place to operate online and with the networked market place, but it hardly reaches into the social problems as experienced by the unemployed in the real-time brick and mortar communities. [Perhaps, there may be a need to get into something that I will call the socioemotional-web (for lack of a better term, at this point, to include its intricate and unique human/sociological connection--this will be treated on a separate post)].

Posted via web from norwind's (beyond) posterous