JOBS: The Elusive Objective of Full Employment

(2 of 4)

In recent years, the nation's labor force has been swollen by a vast influx of new people looking for work. Between 1968 and 1974, the labor force grew by 11 million people, or 2 million more than the Government's Bureau of Labor Statistics had projected. (The labor force now totals 93.4 million—so that each percentage point of the unemployment rate stands for 934,000 people who want jobs and cannot get them.) Many of the new entrants are blacks; many more are women and teenagers, some of whom are seeking to earn second incomes in families that already have a breadwinner employed. These people tend to change jobs frequently and move in and out of the unemployment category. A poorly educated, unskilled black or a teenager, for example, may alternate between a few weeks of work at a local car wash when it is especially busy, and a few weeks on the unemployment rolls.

A third of the 8 million people counted as jobless in November had been out of work less than five weeks.

A Hair Below. Some economists argue, in fact, that the economy is doing about as well as it ever has in creating jobs for traditional, career-minded workers. Irwin Kellner, vice president and economist of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co. in New York, points out that since 1948 the number of people who do have jobs has averaged 55.4% of the U.S. population over 16 years of age. The ratio in November was only a hair below that: 55.2%.

An 8% unemployment rate no longer means as much joblessness among primary breadwinners as the same rate would have 20, ten or even five years ago. In November, for example, the unemployment rate for married men was 4.6%—not much more than half the average for all would-be workers, though high by prosperity standards. By contrast, the rate for adult women was 7.8% —lower than the average for all groups, but higher than the rate for adult men.

The rate was 13.8% for blacks and other minorities, and for teen-agers a towering 18.6%.

None of this means that joblessness can be callously dismissed as a minor problem. Many inflation-pressed families need the second income that an employed woman or teen-ager could earn.

Moreover, warns Eckstein, if a nation frustrates the ambitions of large numbers of people to work, "you destroy social cohesion." The black who wants to hold a steady job, the woman who wants to use her training and talents outside the home, the teen-ager who longs to start supporting himself, could, with some justice, feel bitter against an economic system that confines them to, at best, in-and-out roles in the labor market.

Even so, many economists contend that the traditional 4% "full-employment" goal has become unrealistic. They view a 5% figure as about the best that can be achieved without radical changes in the way that labor markets operate. Still other experts argue, with much force, that no single statistic can or should be sanctified as the "full-employment" goal. One of them is Robert Aaron Gordon of the University of California, who headed a Government study that led to the last major overhaul of employment statistics in 1962.