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Technology & Innovation

The Right to Work

Benjamin Kunkel thinks that, absent a political movement for full employment, the U.S. will continue to have fewer jobs—and those with jobs will be increasingly exploited.
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“Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state, and so on—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least,” writes Benjamin Kunkel. But “the American approximation to ‘full employment’ has now collapsed,” and will remain high through at least 2012. “There is no reason to think that, absent a political movement for true full employment, the US will avoid the fate of the rest of the capitalist world: a place—now a planet—where a proportionally shrinking body of laborers is ever more heavily exploited to ensure a rate of profit that nevertheless continually declines.”

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