Jobs: The Non-Issue of 1976

By traditional measure the 6,860,000 Americans who were unemployed last month should have been a big, painful political lump demanding the ministrations of Henry ("Scoop") Jackson or Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Those two were ready, bags filled with nostrums.

But when Jimmy Carter won in Ohio, Scoop was afield in Queens, N.Y., trying to salvage the vice presidency out of his primary defeats. Some place over Pennsylvania his cry of "Jobs, jobs, jobs--that's the only issue in this campaign" drifted toward oblivion. A beefy union patron sat in morose silence at the time of that Jackson defeat and spoke to the point: "Whatever made him think that work was such a big deal?" It is a big deal, but not like it was in previous campaigns.

Hubert Humphrey was at the Kennedy Center watching the Australian Ballet when the network prognosticators awarded the nomination to Carter. The light went out in Humphrey's dimming star. He had run hard with his new thing, the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, a dubious device that he believes will virtually eliminate unemployment by forcing the Government to guarantee a job to every person who wants one. Experts like Economist Charles Schultze are concerned that the bill, while forcing down unemployment, would force up inflation. There is the danger, too, of creating a Rube Goldberg scheme that would founder in its own complexity, or else produce, as Schultze warns, the kind of low-grade make-work that would add up to "a very unattractive program." No matter. Humphrey waved it before his audiences at every crossroads, easily won the nostalgia vote with his exuberance, but he never could get a grip on all that discontent out in the country that was defined each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now we see that the single greatest miscalculation in politics so far this year was the assumption that the old jobs issue would play again in Peoria. The image out of the Depression years returns like the grasshopper every time the unemployment figures rise, and the old pols begin to remember former glories. This year they hit the road with their worn scripts, conjuring grim visions of Herbert Hoover and the Bonus Army. Other politicians, academicians and analysts, all with the same backgrounds, nodded sagely in agreement. A vast majority of the American people, totally engaged in their everyday lives, knew better.

We saw how those programs of welfare, social security, unemployment compensation, job retraining and food stamps worked well. Real suffering was prevented. Then the recession bottomed out, and we began to climb out of the trough. Though unemployment remained high, the favorable trend reduced the national fear about joblessness.

The experts are beginning to see other images in the welter of statistics. The most important is that during this recession, most of the people who were unemployed soon went back to work. That old picture, first from Europe and then from America in the 1930s, of huddled misery, month after month, year after year, was wrong. It could be, when we finally write the definitive analysis of this period, that as few as half a million people who were employable, who really wanted and sought jobs, and who had really been unemployed long enough to undergo hardship, were still out of work this spring, though the unemployment figures were near 7 million. This does not ease the misery of people genuinely affected by the recession. But political effects come from mass emotion; that response never appeared.

At the White House the experts built a picture of the American economy as a giant churning machine, which constantly reached out and pulled workers in, sometimes discarding them, but always pumping. Political emotion generated by unemployment reached higher levels in Washington, where it is only a statistical phenomenon, than out in the country, where people went back to work before they got bitter.

In the congressional offices, some of the analysts believe that Government benefits may have been too high, discouraging some people from going to work but not encouraging them to vote for the jobs issue. The women's movement--which produced more two-income households--was cited as another reason why unemployment lacked political urgency. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, even mused that a lot of experts overlooked the important role of the automobile. The incredible mobility of the American worker destroyed the conventional theories. Added a White House economic strategist, "Unemployment statistics can no longer be used as an index of hardship." For this season anyway, that may be the epitaph of the old jobs issue as politicians have known and loved it.

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