By KERRY McCUAIG

High unemployment is now government policy. Any commitment to pursuing programs towards full employment has been abandoned as Ottawa absolves Itself of responsibility for the unemployed.

These are the conclusions of a recently released report by the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto Which severely criticizes Finance Minister Allan MacEachen and Employment Minister Lloyd Axwor- thy for their cynical dismissal of the problems of the unemployed.

Since the report’s writing, July’s unemployment rates have been released — 11.8% of the labor force or 1.4 million people are without work by official estimates. A further 431,000, not counted among the officially un- €mployed, are available for work but have given up

because full-time employment is unavailable.

The study finds that government’s ideal of ‘‘full €mployment”’ has always hovered near the official job- less rate. Thus the council reports that when jobless figures stood at 5% during the 1960s, 4% unemployment Was considered full employment in Canada. However in

979 when jobless rates averaged 7.5%, a 6% jobless total became Ottawa’s aim. Today any pretext of achiev- Ing full employment has been abandoned. _

This position, the council charges has been de- Monstrated in the past two federal budgets and two Tecent studies by the Department of Employment and

{immigration on labor market development and un- €mployment insurance.

Both the reports and the budget, the council argues, Sacrifice the unemployed to the battle against inflation. tearing a page out of Reagan’s economic texts, Ottawa IS refusing to touch the unemployment question until Inflation has been reduced to at least 6%.

Economic Development Stagnates

To reach this end, the report points out, wages are to be curbed, interest rates are to be kept high, public Services and transfer payments are to be restrained and €conomic development is to stagnate.

Government rationale for these policies, says the Council, ‘‘is to restore investor confidence and to redis- tribute income to the rich and to corporations so that they can save and invest”’.

The council argues that inflation and unemployment

_ are not tandem phenomena. It notes that both inflation end unemployment rose in the mid 70s while the jobless

looking. While another 360,000 are working part-time |

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Familiar sight for the unemployed as unofficial jobless figures reach the two million mark.

rate has risen dramatically since 1978 without any let up in inflation.

The report recommends that rather than using fiscal restraint to tackle inflation government should look at its institutional causes — an underdeveloped Canadian manufacturing base, forcing the importation of proces- sed goods; monopoly control of sectors of industry and- commerce alllowing large corporations to charge what- ever the market will bear, and excessive reliance on foreign investment necessitating a high interest rate poli- cy.

Erosion of Jobs

Past policies allowing unrestrained foreign investment has led to an erosion of available jobs. Our branch plant economy has left us vulnerable to plant shutdowns and other arbitrary actions decided outside our borders.

Since last August there has been a 150% decline in jobs in the manufacturing sector. Similar, although not as drastic, declines can be seen in construction, resource and transportation.

Although there has been a slight increase in service sector employment, this sector, the report warns, cannot absorb the emerging labor force or re-employ the jobless as it has in the past. This is the sector which is under- going rapid automation, eliminating job opportunities.

Report says Ottawa has abandoned jobless

Jobs in public and social services have been hit by

- government cutbacks. Ottawa has cut $2-billion in trans-

fer payment to the provinces for education and health care. Its commitment to social service spending in gen- eral has trailed behind the rate of inflation for the past five years and continues in this direction.

The outcome is very bleak. Unless Ottawa backs away from its restraint policies unemployment could easily reach 20% by the next decade.

Meanwhile government expresses very little concern for the jobless. Axworthy’s recent Task Force on Unemployment Insurance asserts that the unemployed are in the main secondary earners — young people and women — who have *‘poor work habits and a difficulty motivating themselves to seek employment’’.

Using government's own statistics the council points out that young people are no more likely to quit their jobs without justification than older workers, as the task force maintains. It argues that women’s reasons for leaving the workforce are motivated by familiy responsi- bility, in many cases arising out of a lack of adequate childcare arrangements, which government refuses to finance. © :

Rather than abusing the unemployment insurance fund, the report finds that it is the low wage earner who contriburtes the most heavily to it. It is also critical of government for relying more and more on employee/employer contributions to finance U.I. while its commitment to the program has dropped from 53.3% of its cost in 1975 to 18.5% today.

In the face of such government action the council makes a number of recommendations: :

e A shift in government priorities from resource mega-projects to the creation of a technologically in- novative and internationally competitive manufacturing sector.

e Reverse policies of social spending restraint, and embark on an expansion of needed services as part of a direct job creation program.

e Encouragement of on-the-job training programs through a grant-levy system. This would include a levy on industry for pay for training and grants to employers who establish programs. :

e Provinces should adopt legislation to prevent unne- cessary layoffs, including public hearing. into plant clo- sures. ;

e Affective affirmative action programs for women, ethnic and racial minorities, including equal pay for work of equal value legislation.

-On August 6 the CBC radio program

Orningside aired an interview given by Senator Paul Martin to Don Harron, on What turned out to be a monologue by the Senator on the subject of ‘‘liberty”’. In an €ndeavor to give some credence to his Views, the senator chose as his mentor the noted bourgeois political economist John Stuart Mills, who in his day cham-

Alfred Dewhurst |

Marxism-Leninism Today | UR enema NOrEnna eC ORareCnen anancmNmoeC EE

Liberty for whom and for what?

the state and monopoly in close part- nership, with monopoly holding the dom- inant position. Consequently, Senator Martin’s thesis of the state being subser- vient to the people under capitalism is pure poppycock. The senator’s notion of liberty is as false as his attempt to equate capitalism, when it established its hege- mony over feudalism, with modern day

Pioned the democratic slogans of liberty

and freedom, which were the battle cries

Of the new class of capitalists as they set

Out to create a world in their own image. * * *

It mattered little to Martin, a leading Spokesman for the Liberal Party’s elite tner core for a goodly number of years, that he tore Mill’s notions about liberty

8nd freedom out of historical context.

For the ‘senator deliberately set out to

twist the fighting slogans of the bourgeois

Tevolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries

Into a weapon against socialism and so-

Cial progress. . <a The tricky senator skipped over a

hundred and fifty years of history of .

Capitalist rule in order to portray today’s Monopoly capitalism as the champion of liberty and guardian of freedom and lmocracy. Laying his spurious foundation built

- 9n falsification of history, Martin at-

tacked living socialism as being the €nemy of liberty, freedom and democ- Tacy. He did so by baldly. stating that Under socialism an individual is subor- dinate to the state, and in the capitalist Countries the state is subordinate to the Individual. This is truly standing truth on

its head. For it fails to distinguish the difference between these two types of states and which class rules — capitalist state and class or workers’ state and

class. es * * *

Wherein lies the truth? The truth lies in

‘examining the nature of the state under

capitalism and, what does liberty and freedom mean for the capitalist, and what does it mean for the worker in capitalist society? And, wherein lies the difference between the state under socialism and under capitalism?

Under capitalism, liberty means free- dom for the capitalist to exploit wage labor, as well as freedom for the worker (if he can find an employer) to sell his labor power to the capitalist. This is free- dom capitalist style. It means also free- dom for the capitalist to pocket the wealth created by the worker while employed by the capitalist owner of the means of production. Above all, it means the accumulation of great wealth at one pole, and the accumulation of a massive army of unemployed at the other pole, with all of its attendant evils visited upon the working people:

*

oe

The senator’s understanding of liberty means also freedom for the giant mono- polies to subjugate the state to their will, in their rapacious drive for maximum profit. He believes that what is good for the monopolies is good for the country, is good for the people. He also believes that it means freedom for the monopolists to fasten the burden of the economic crisis they have created, onto the backs of the working people.

For the imperialists, liberty means the freedom for the U.S. military, in blatant defiance of world public opinion, to test the world’s biggest-ever H-bomb on the very eve of the 37th anniversary of the dropping, by the very same military, the first-ever A-bomb on Hiroshima near the end of the Second World War, which accounted for 103,777 dead. Surely, not only a blatant example of state terrorism, but also a stern warning to the peoples of the world of the murderous nature of modern day imperialism.

* * *

All the above crimes against the people and, in the first place, the work-

ates

ers, are perpetrated against the people by

capitalism.

Liberty does not stand in splendid iso- lation from the forward march of man- kind to ever-higher social formations. This is a natural law pertaining to human development. Liberty lies in understand- ing this natural law and putting it to work in the service of the people and of the country as a whole. Freedom of will means nothing more than the capacity to make decisions with full knowledge of a given situation or condition. Freedom, therefore, consists in control over our own destiny and of nature. Freedom, therefore, is a product of historical development.

* * *

The historical necessity today is for the working people to take the direction of social development into their own hands. As long as we fail to understand this necessity, so long will we remain as puppets in the hands of those, like Senator Martin, who dread, above all else, that Canadians will opt for social- ism as the next logical step in Canada’s social development — a step that will lead to genuine liberty for the working people, especially for the working class.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—AUGUST 27, 1982—Page 5