In general, I'd guess that the impact of unemployment on individuals under capitalism (at least in the advanced countries) has steadily gotten worse, raising the "cost of job loss" associated with any specific unemployment rate. This trend happens as part of the slow or secondary version of "primitive accumulation": it used to be that people could supplement their wages from their own gardens and roof menageries, but such non-market sources of food have slowly gone away. (Michael Perelman's THE INVENTION OF CAPITALISM has a good summary of this.) In general, the means of subsistence (consumption goods) have more and more become commodities (on the market), making employees more and more dependent on employers. In addition, the size of families has fallen, from being extended to being more nuclear, so that family risk-pooling has become weaker. Labor unions also do not provide risk-pooling services such as unemployment insurance any more. If Los Angeles is a sign of what's to come, the risk-pooling aspect of communities is going away, along with those communities themselves.
The obvious exception (counteracting tendency) to this trend is where welfare-state programs such as unemployment insurance are won and/or extended. Alas, we are in a period when the retreat of the welfare state is added on top of secondary primitive accumulation. Carrol Cox wrote: > Unemployment has to vary considerably in meaning over time. In the > 1930s a much larger proportion of the population lived on farms or in > small towns (where many would be relatives of local farmers). And before > WW2 many more farmers still raised a portion of their own food. We lived > with my grandfather in much of the '40s while my father was in a TB san. > A good deal of the food we ate was produced by him: potatoes, beans, > porka (salted), fruit (fresh and canned), (he was a fruit farmer in > southwestern Michigan). There are probably other variations, some of > which would intensify, some ameliorate, the effects of unemployment or > under employment. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
