But this is unlikely, given all the shortages showing up in the economy. Shortages of computer chips have slowed car production. Shortages of lumber are crimping housing construction and driving up prices.

One thing that is not rising rapidly are wages, with a gain of 2% over the last year. This is less than half the overall inflation rate for consumers reported in April of 4.2%. This means that the actual purchasing power of workers’ wages are going down on average.

Nevertheless, businesses across the country are complaining about a shortage of labor, even as they drag their feet on increasing wages, in an effort to further fatten their bottom line. The big corporations and the richest 1% made out like bandits during the recession, and now they are doing the same.

Businesses are showing their control of both political parties, as 25 Republican-led states are ending the $300 a week supplement to unemployment benefits and also the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance or PUA for the self-employed and gig workers. President Joe Biden defended their “right” to end the aid and emphasized that they are temporary programs.

But the PUA in particular is needed as a permanent program, as a growing number of businesses like Uber and Lyft convert their workforce to “independent contractors” to save on taxes and benefits. These workers are not covered by traditional unemployment insurance, and the PUA actually is paying benefits to more jobless workers than the regular state unemployment program.

Last month, when the job creation number was only about one-quarter of what economists predicted, businesses launched a campaign to blame unemployment benefits. This month, with twice as many jobs created, they are still singing the same tune. What they really want is to reduce unemployment benefits as much as possible to force the jobless to work for lower wages. Another sign of the businesses chasing lower wages is that the unemployment rate for teenagers fell to a historic low in records going back to 1953.

The same jobs report also said that the official national unemployment rate fell in May to 5.8%, from 6.1% in April. While most of this improvement came from the unemployed finding jobs, almost one-third came from people leaving the labor force by giving up their search for a job. Over the last three months the unemployment rate has only dropped by 0.2%. At this rate is would take almost three years to get the rate down to the pre-recession level of 3.5% last seen in February 2020.

The official unemployment rate understates the economic hardship workers have faced. Counting all the people who have given up looking for working or working, the unemployment rate would be closer to 7.6%, more than twice the level before the recession. The rising tide of job creation, as usual, is very unequal, with Latinos and African Americans having unemployment rates 50 to 100% more than that of whites.

Another challenge for jobless workers is that the federal eviction moratorium is ending on June 30. More than 10 million tenants are behind on their rent and could face evictions once this protection is dropped. The federal government is spending billions to try to aid tenants and landlords. But not only is the amount too little; only part of the money has been spent. A handful of states have enacted their own moratoriums but many more will need to do this.

#SanJoséCA #US #PeoplesStruggles #IndigenousPeoples #MasaoSuzuki #economy #PandemicUnemploymentBenefitsPUA

San Jose, CA – On Sunday, April 11, at 2 p.m. Pacific / 5 p.m. Eastern, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is hosting an online program about the wave of violence against Asian Americans; violence which led to the recent massacre of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women near Atlanta, Georgia.

Four community organizers: David Monkawa, Progressive Asian Network for Action, in Los Angeles; Monique Sampson, Freedom Road Socialist Organization in Jacksonville, Florida; Daisy Sim, Tallahassee Community Action Committee, Tallahassee, Florida, and Masao Suzuki, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, San Jose, California, will be speaking on how to fight anti-Asian American violence, understanding its historical roots, and building unity among Asian Americans and solidarity with other oppressed nationalities.

Event details here.

#SanJoseCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #MasaoSuzuki

Fight Back! interviews Masao Suzuki, professor of economics and a leading member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Fight Back!: Republican Senator Lindsey Graham once said that extending the extra $600 a week in unemployment insurance would happen “over my dead body.” Why are Republicans so opposed to helping out the millions of workers who lost their jobs during the current crisis?

Masao Suzuki: A common view is that the Republican party leadership is cruel and uncaring – and of course this is true. But underlying this inhumanity is the logic of capitalism, which needs what Marx called a “reserve army of labor” to keep wages down and maintain profits. This reserve army is made up of both the unemployed, and in the United States, immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Asia in particular.

Regular unemployment insurance benefits came out of the massive, communist-led struggles by the working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But typically, these benefits only replace a fraction of the workers’ lost wages, and last for a short period of time. While they are able to stave off crippling poverty, there is still a strong economic incentive to take another job, even at lower wages.

The fact of the matter is that lower-paid workers were the hardest hit by the crisis, as millions of jobs in low-wage service industries were lost. Since the extra $600 is across-the-board, many of the lowest paid workers are getting more in benefits than when they were working. So, many capitalists would like to end these benefits to put pressure on workers to return to work, without the businesses spending enough to make the workplaces safe. In addition, we see Republicans also pushing for legal protections for businesses that reopen and allow the virus to sicken their workers.

This attitude is very different than workplaces in China, which has a socialist economic system and was the first country with a large outbreak of the pandemic and to bring it under control. In a recent interview by a U.S. business news outlet, the head of operations for a large Chinese computer company in Wuhan said that his first priority is keeping the virus out of the plant, while production comes second. This is the reason why China has gone from also having all of the world’s infections to catching small outbreaks numbering less than 50 per day. In contrast, here in the United States, where we had months to prepare, we have been number one in infections since the end of March. Day after day we have record numbers of new infections, more than 68,000 at last count.

Fight Back!: We seen a big shift to online commerce and a drop in in-store retail. Doesn’t this help keep people safe from the pandemic?

Suzuki: One of the things that capitalist economic crises do is to speed up economic trends already happening. For example, in the last economic crisis, there was a large increase in the use of part-time, temporary and contract workers, who are paid less, often with no benefits, and whose work hours can rise and fall as the business needs. This was already happening before the 2008 crisis but grew even faster with the crisis.

In the same way, the shift to online retail was already happening before 2020 and the pandemic. This is usually explained as a result of new technology, but in fact distance retail has been going on for over 100 years. The rise of Sears, Roebuck and Company and its mail-order catalog in the 19th century was beginning of distance mass merchandising. The explosion of online sales today is safer for consumers, many of whom do not feel as safe browsing through a retail store even when they are open.

But they do not protect the growing number of warehouse workers, like those working at UPS, who are the backbone of online sales. The growth of online sales is also speeding up another tendency under capitalism, which Marx called the rising organic composition of capital. Marx recognized the tendency for capitalist enterprises to substitute machinery and technology for human labor. From the first large textile factories in England, which threw thousands of independent weavers out of work, to the automated warehouses of today, there has been a constant stream of working people who have lost their livelihood to new technology.

This is also happening today in meatpacking, which has perhaps the most labor-intensive large factories in the United States today. Large meatpacking companies such as Tyson foods are doubling down on their efforts to use more robots in their factories in a way that has already been done in industries such as auto.

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #MasaoSuzuki

San José, CA – On Sunday, February 17, more than 400 people filled the San Jose Buddhist Church gym for the 39th annual Day of Remembrance event. Across the country, Japanese American communities commemorate the anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. The San Jose event was organized by NOC, the Nihonmachi [Japantown] Organizing Committee.

This year’s event came just two days after President Trump declared a National Emergency in order to build his wall on the Mexico-U.S. border. Criticism of this act and comparisons with Japanese American experience and the World War II concentration camps ran throughout the program, which had the theme, #NeverAgainIsNow.

Sumi Tanabe, who was incarcerated during World War II, welcomed the audience on behalf of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin. Sumi was the first woman to be president of the church.

She was followed by Masao Suzuki, a professor at Skyline College. He pointed out that many Japanese unauthorized immigrants came to the United States through Mexico, just as Honduran and other Central American refugees are coming to the United States today. Like these refugees today, Japanese immigrants came to improve the life of their children. They had the saying “kodomo no tame ni” – for the sake of the children – to explain how they endured the hardships in America.

Suzuki described how the World War II concentration camps were caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” These same forces are at work today with President Trump’s declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ to build his wall on the border. “The yellow peril of a hundred or more years ago has been replaced by a ‘brown peril’ today,” continued Suzuki. Suzuki called on the audience to support protests against the state of emergency and Trump’s wall.

Fahad Alam, President of the South Bay Islamic Association, thanked NOC and the Japanese American community to be the first to stand up for the rights of American Muslims after September 11, 2001. The importance of today’s immigrants was stressed by Teresa Castellanos, who is the coordinator of Santa Clara County’s Immigrant Relations and Integration services. She was followed by Chizu Omori, another Japanese American who was incarcerated in the Poston camp on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. Omori was also co-producer of the film, Rabbit in the Moon, a documentary on her family’s experiences.

The last speaker of the evening was Don Tamaki, one of the lawyers for Fred Korematsu. During World War II, Fred Korematsu, along with Min Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi, had challenged Executive Order 9066 and took the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. While the courts upheld the concentration camps under the guise of ‘national security,’ Don Tamaki and others fought to reopen Korematsu’s case many years later and were able to get his conviction vacated on the grounds that the U.S. government had hidden evidence. Tamaki criticized Trump’s national of emergency as unconstitutional.

The San Jose Day of Remembrance had a number of cultural performances, including singer Safiyah Hernandez, the young musician Jake Shimada, and the traditional San Jose Taiko [Japanese drum] performance. San Jose Taiko did a piece with poet Asha Sudra, a