----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Boettcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Recipients of The_People List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 8:00 PM Subject: 'Recession' Is Near THE PEOPLE JANUARY 2001 VOL. 110 NO. 10 LAYOFFS AND CLOSURES HINT THAT 'RECESSION' IS NEAR Even before the U.S. Supreme Court spread the presidential mantle across his shoulders, George W. Bush was "acting presidential." According to an article printed by THE NEW YORK TIMES on Dec. 19, "Bush has been warning for the last two weeks that there may be a downturn just ahead, and that his proposal for a $1.3 trillion tax cut over the next decade is just the prescription for a faltering economy." The same report recalled that Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan gave a speech two weeks before in which he also "alerted investors that he was growing increasingly nervous about the economy's prospects." Apparently neither man felt the need to offer a similar word of warning to the working class. Perhaps they didn't think it was necessary, and perhaps they were right. Many workers began getting the message long before December. Indeed, on the same day that THE NEW YORK TIMES article appeared the LOS ANGELES TIMES featured one of its own that began on the note that, "Job cuts and layoffs are piling up like this season's Midwest snow." "In the last two weeks," the Los Angeles paper added, "job cuts and layoffs have become as commonplace as profit warnings, coming this month alone from 'old economy' firms such as General Motors Corp., DaimlerChrysler and Whirlpool Corp., and service sector giants Dun & Bradstreet Corp. and PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. Merger partners Chase Manhattan Corp. and J.P. Morgan have also announced job cuts or layoffs." Plenty of other examples could have been added, and several were. On the same day--Dec. 19--in separate articles, THE NEW YORK TIMES reported announcements by Gillette, which said it would close eight factories and 13 distribution centers that will cost 2,700 workers their jobs; by Cummins Inc., which said it would soon lay off between 500 and 800 workers at its plants in Indiana where it assembles engines for the Dodge Ram and other vehicles, and a total of 1,500 in its worldwide operations; and by the country's biggest health insurance company, Aetna Inc., which announced that it would be eliminating 5,000 jobs from its operations, including those of 2,400 workers who "will be dismissed over the next year." In its Dec. 19 report, the LOS ANGELES TIMES said: "The downsizings come on the heels of thousands of other job eliminations and layoffs in recent weeks, and they extend beyond the smokestack industries that are generally the first to take a hit in a downturn. Cutbacks are hitting health care, services, financial firms--and of course the once-vaunted tech sector." The L.A. TIMES went on to cite some numbers gathered by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which was identified as "a Chicago-based outplacement firm that has tracked layoff announcements since 1993." Those numbers showed that, "More than 480,000 layoffs have been announced through November this year, 53 percent of them since July....The automotive sector was leading all others with 59,621 announced job cuts for the year through November, followed by retail with 56,623." In addition, the L.A. paper quoted Ray Hilgert, who it identified as a professor of management and industrial relations at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. "'I think it's kind of ominous, and we're going to have a pretty severe jolt in 2001, with layoffs and increasing unemployment,' he said. "'I'm hoping it won't be too severe or long,' Hilgert added. 'But...people forget that part of a marketplace economy is adjustments, and we're long overdue for one.'" According to the "experts," however, we aren't there--not yet-- even though nearly 500,000 jobs have been wiped out over the last six months and new layoff notices are being announced on a daily basis. Socialists have steadfastly insisted that capitalism cannot provide anything approximating economic stability or security for the nation's working-class majority. Socialists have also been ridiculed for steadfastly insisting on what has been repeatedly proven and is obviously true. Whether or not workers will heed that message as the next capitalist crisis begins to unfold remains to be seen. However, if they continue to ignore those warnings it is a virtual certainty that they will pay a heavy price during the next crisis that capitalism inflicts on the country.
