White-collar unemployment

Sunday on Long Island in midsummer is, I suppose, very much like Sunday anywhere along the thousands of miles of American coastline that runs from rock-bound Maine down through New England and New Jersey and Maryland and along the ocean fringe of the south, all the way to the Florida Keys and then up the west coast of Florida and around the states that look out on the Gulf of Mexico.

Beaches and swimmers and picnickers and bikinis in the sun and old people with floppy hats under umbrellas, the nearby tennis courts bouncing with earnest amateurs and the golf courses crowded with hackers, fishermen up to the knees casting for striped bass, or bobbing sinkers from boats for porgy and other bottom fish and little sail boats and big ones and the miniature sail-fish boats that you stand on and manipulate a single sail.

Last Sunday was different. It was 98 degrees and the next day it was 100 – 100, that is in any discoverable shade. There were three million people on the beaches around New York and the pictures of them on any single stretch of sand looked like a canvas of writhing creatures by Hieronymus Bosch and there were more boats out on the bays than I've ever seen. But in our part of the island, the tennis courts were pretty deserted and the golf pro called up to say things were so slow you could, more or less, have 120 acres to yourself. It was bad enough walking from one room to a kitchen and fixing yourself some iced tea, let alone trying to bang a ball across a net or into a distant hole.

The only thing to do was to retire to a bedroom with a humming air-conditioner and sit down and read the New York Times and pick up the enlightening information that a new and authoritative report, just put out by a bunch of international meteorologists, says positively that we've spewed out so much industrial smoke already that we've framed the earth with a halo of carbon dioxide, which prevents the heat from escaping back into the upper atmosphere and since we've also been busy stripping large sections of the earth of its forests and ground cover, the greenery isn't there to absorb the heat. The upshot, you'll be interested to hear, is that by 1990 or a little later, the average temperature of the earth will have risen by about eight degrees.

Some of us have been saying, since the grim statistics about unemployment came out in the early spring – especially with the staggering figure that 52 per cent of all black youths between the ages of 15 and 23 have no job and practically no hope of one – we've been fearing or predicting with no relish at all that, as the old song says, 'There'll be hot time in the old town tonight', or rather, this summer, which is the usual time, usual in depressed and angry years like 1965, like 1968, when frustration boils over in the streets. Well, it hasn't happened and we have to look around and try and say why.

... If there's any such thing as a hasty pause that's what you're hearing now. I'd better say it hadn't happened when I recorded this talk. I just remembered what happened to a journalist friend of mine, an experienced, editorial writer on the old New York Herald Tribune who, one summer, took in all the capitals of Europe and came out with a reassuring book entitled, 'No War in Europe'. It was published in the first week of September 1939.

Still, while not for a minute pretending to know any better than the politicians or even the sociologists who always know why after the event, to know why riots and general turbulence happen when they do, I'd say that there are at least some findings about American society today that could be fed into the data bank which will eventually disgorge the truth.

First, some figures which would not, on the face of them, explain the general calm since they apply to people – to old people and white-collar workers – who're usually the last to revolt, but I bring these figures up because the old daddy or grand-daddy of statistical method used to warn his pupils that the seemingly irrelevant statistics always belong in the main calculation. At the moment, I can't think how, but I should cite them nonetheless.

The first word, then, is that older Americans are, as one report puts it, winning the war on poverty more than any other group of Americans which has got to mean more than the middle-aged and young. In 1960, the exhilarating first year of the Kennedy presidency, one in every three people over 65 was poor by the federal definition of the poverty line. The official figure today is one in six and if you count in the several millions who get help from such fairly new national resources as Medicare which is federal, Medicaid which is handed out by the states, food stamps, housing or crop subsidies, the figure of the defined poor is one in 20.

Yet, there's more of a hullabaloo going on today – naturally from the Democrats as the out party – about soaking the poor than there ever was from a Republican when they were the out party and accused Franklin Roosevelt of a deliberate policy to soak the rich.

Well, so much for the old. Now, I have at my elbow a new report from the Labor Department of the government which lists the lucky people, the types of job, that have lately managed to whip inflation in the sense of getting percentage pay increases that are greater than the present rate of inflation. The inflation figure on consumer prices for the past year is 6.8 but there's a whole raft of workers – and the striking point is that they're all white-collar workers – who have, in the last year, salary increases well above 6.8.

By the way, I ought to say here that the boast of the Reagan administration that it would bring down the growth rate of inflation is one boast that has been handsomely fulfilled.

All right, 6.8. The people who have seen their pay go up substantially more than that are lawyers and accountants, 11.4; chemists, engineers, typists, all above ten per cent and such people as buyers, job analysts, photographers. Stenographers have made the biggest gain, nearly 14 per cent or double the inflation rate.

Still, as I say, old people and accountants and lawyers and typists are not usually in the vanguard of street mobs. However, what we're apt to overlook in these encouraging figures is the simple fact that a lot of office workers – buyers, chemists, typists and other white-collar workers – are not beating inflation if they're unemployed. That seems a rather obvious point but it's not mentioned in this Labor Department's report I've been quoting from. It is, however, the most depressing fact about white-collar workers throughout the country. Another government department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, calls them the 'new unemployed'.

In bad times we always assume that factories will close or go on half time but the burden of unemployment will be carried by manual and industrial workers, what Americans came to call 'blue-collar workers'. Well, such is the sluggishness of the American economy today – the recession which Mr Reagan inherited has got worse not better – that white-collar workers from executives down to lowly office staff are more expendable today than they've been since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

General Electric, for example, has fired 7,000 of its white-collar workers. Hundreds of companies are doing the same and the new unemployed include such unfamiliar types of the needy as bankers, lawyers, vice-presidents, highly paid advertising executives and great numbers of people of what they call 'the management level' – that is, managers of companies who, in the dumps, find they have less and less earnings to manage. As for small businesses, they are dropping off like autumn leaves. More bankruptcies than we've seen in ten years.

So this still leaves a mass of unemployed who are, or would be, blue-collar workers and they make up most of the 9.5 per cent of the available workforce that is unemployed. Even that figure is deceiving because it's an average. There are whole cities – Detroit is the most glaring example – with one person in five unemployed. Why are such people not desperate, not rebelling on the hot streets?

I think the answer must lie in three sets of comparative figures that nobody, certainly not the complaining Democrats, ever bring up. The fact that in the good old days of Kennedy, 25 per cent of his budget went for social services. In the bad new Reagan days, 53 per cent of the budget is set aside for social services, twice the largesse of the Democrats' heyday. Kennedy gave corporations a 29 per cent tax cut. Reagan gives them only 22 per cent. Kennedy, the peace maker, devoted 48 per cent of the national budget to national defence. Reagan, the alleged war maker, proposes to spend only 26 per cent of the budget on national defence.

What this means, I think, is that we've come to accept a vast and necessary outlay of any nation's wealth for the food, the care of most people, whether in or out of work and whether, incidentally, we've earned that wealth or not. It's the defence line, the rearguard reserve against actual stark poverty and starvation and, hence, against open rebellion.

Call it if you like 'the safety belt' of the welfare state. And this safeguard, it occurs to me, must be even truer in some other countries, for instance, Britain which, only a year or two ago, was shuddering at the prospect of one million unemployed. Today the figure is over three million, the highest figure in 70 years.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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