Workers Math and Statscan Fog

Delving into Statscan numbers leads to a quip attributed to Samuel Clemens better known as Mark Twain, that “figures lie and liars can figure”.

Before going further, here is where a worker can read the 2020 2021 $304 billion Federal Government budget estimates by organization.[1]  Noteworthy is 10% for the military, policing and intelligence services organizations and about 4.1% for the agencies responsible for coping with a pandemic.

Let’s consider Statscan January 2021 report on Labour Force and unemployment numbers.

Wage earners know something about numbers

Working class families count every penny to pay the bills and survive.

A pencil and paper and a cell phone and trades math can turn up some basic truths about how well capitalism is working for us.

Phd. Economists can tell us where we have erred!

Let’s start with total wealth produced in Canada, who creates it and who gets it.

GDP and Wages!

Using total wages paid to 17,000,000 wage and salaried earners at an average salary of $52,500/year is $892,500,000,000 divided by a total GDP of $1,900,000,000,000, wages as a percent of GDP is 47%.

Who got the 53% of GDP, $1,007,570,000,000 that is not wages? [2]

That enormous value created after wages are paid, occurred during a period of rising unemployment and a 4% shrinkage in GDP.

Such data must mean something!

We conclude that it means that fewer workers in 2020 worked harder and longer and created a surplus of value over wages of 53%. Using Statscan numbers we calculate that out of a 7 hour day a worker works 3.45 hours a day without pay. Karl Marx called that surplus value the source of profit!

From a wage earners point of view the stat that matters is; - “am I employed or not, is my family well or sick?”

Work and wages give working class families a fighting chance to get through a pandemic and depression and without it are its certain victims.

Unemployment falls on all age groups and both genders with the poorest among our class, the most vulnerable, suffering many tragedies. Without work the youth are robbed of a life with a purpose.

The savings of unemployed Canadian working-class families, their equity in homes, their RRSP retirement funds, foregoing family sports, recreational and personal development pursuits to pay bills is the reality of millions. In effect previously earned workers wages are subsidizing banks and the richest investor classes who prosper in times of expansion, depression or pandemics. 

If workers get some CERB they have earned it. 

Unemployment is used by employers to drive down the price of wages for employed workers, and a pretext to eliminate health and pensions benefits. Health and pension benefits for workers are a form of voluntarily deferred wages, insurance against tragedy and for retirement income. To a capitalist, workers benefits are an unnecessary loss of profits. To right wing governments pension funds exist to be plundered.

What are governments for?

For workers what matters is; - “what are governments doing for wage earners?”

Governments opine, “We, meaning workers and capitalists, are all in this together”. Every wage earner knows that is a lie.

As unemployment afflicts 9.4% of Canadian wage and salary earners the global elites off wealth and privilege are prospering.

Which Side Are You On?

MP’s, MLA’s; - are either for profiteers who view social tragedy as a business opportunity, or with the workers who know depression, mass illness, and war as a curse.

Organized labour and the responsible left demand that governments act for wage earners at the expense of monopoly profiteers. Full stop!

Using worker’s math, the January 2021 Statscan unemployment figure for workers 15 and over is closer to 15% than 9.4%. [3]

For ages 15-24 Statscan figures are, 545,000 or 19.7% of youth out of work. Worker’s math puts the number at 24.9%. Rate of growth of youth unemployment is an alarming 215% since January 2020. By that measure by January 2021, 1,172,462 young men and women will be jobless. [4]

The Takeaway!

Corporate profits are rising as the number of employed workers decreases. Fewer workers are working harder for less.

That reality is the result of a political economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production which compels workers to sell their only commodity, labour power for wages to survive.

The capitalist buys labour power, sets it to work for a given period of time each day. Part of the day the worker works for wages to provide for the necessities of life and for the rest of the day labours for free for the employer, a period of unpaid labour time which adds surplus value to all products and services which the employer appropriates and realizes in the market as profit. Marxism 101!

As it involves a labour force of 18 million Canadians, capitalism is the system of social production and private appropriation of total wealth produced less wages paid to the producers.

Unpaid labour time of tens of millions of Canadian workers, over and above what capitalists pay in wages is what has allowed the 1% to manage more than 50% of GDP that they use in a conspicuous display of wealth and privilege and the rest as new capital to buy labour power and do it all over again and again and again.

What Statscan helps to do is cover up this exploitative reality with facts that are essentially a snap shot in time of how the profit system is working for the profiteers.

Unemployment is something capitalists need. A large reserve army of unemployed serves big capital to drive down wages without a concern that it places at risk the incomes and well being of millions of working-class Canadians and their families.

What Marx also revealed some 154 years ago was the fact that with the growth of capitalism there is the growth of the working class, in the new age of 21st century science and technology, growing in ways and in forms that no one of his time could have foreseen.

Form and essence, a category of dialectical- materialist contradictions need constant study

Nothing that Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerbeg are doing to amass obscene wealth is unique or some ultra-capitalism that alters the essence of capitalism in the imperialist stage of its development.

The invitation by a new crop of liberal radicals who believe exploitation started when they discovered it, invite us to believe that if we rid ourselves of the “bad capitalists” we can live with the “good capitalists”.

No thanks!

A Worker’s Government

Full employment at wages that can provide all workers and their families with the purchasing power to live a full and worthwhile life is possible and it is possible right now.

To achieve that requires a worker’s government empowered to act for all Canadians who create all useful goods and services that make life truly human and civil.

Such a government will devote all of the GDP to the needs of those who produce it.

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[1] The total federal budget estimates, that means what is about to be spent, totals $304,577,541,941.  Department of National Defense is allocated $23.3 billion, RCMP $3.5 billion, CSIS and CSE $1.36 billion, accounting for a cool 9.25% of total estimated spending. Add in Canada Border Agencies budget of over $2.2 billion, almost 10% of total estimates.  Occupational Health and Safety, $11.3 million, Food Inspection, $729.6 million, Health Research $1.2 billion, Public Health Agency $641.8 million or 4.1%.

[2] Gross domestic product (GDP) is defined by capitalist economists as the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period. From a wage-earners standpoint the operative word is value.

[3] Statscan reporting for January 2021 puts the unemployment rate at 9.4% a startling 858,000 increase of jobless since this time in 2020. Statscan’s total labour force number for age 15 and over at January 2021 is 20,171,000. Total number employed is given as 18,272,000. Total number unemployed using worker’s math is 1,899,000/18,272,000 or 10.39 % unemployed. Statscan uses the total labour force number of 20,171,000 as the divisor and gets 9.4% unemployed.

The percentage growth in unemployment 2021 over 2020 using worker’s math and Statscan’s magical 67% participation rate would be .67 X (20,171,000 - 858,000)/858,000 = 14.75% increase in unemployment.

[4] Statscan gives the available work force among youth 15 – 24 as 2,770,100.

Statscan gives the total of employed youth as 1,227,900 fulltime + 996,600 part time = 2,224,500. Statscan then reports that 545,000 of this number are unemployed. Once again Statscan chooses the available work force number of 2,770,100 as the divisor and gets 19.7% unemployment rate among youth.

Worker’s math again using the Statscan number of actual employed youth we get, 545,000/2,224,500 = 24.49% of youth unemployed right now.

The participation rate for youth is given as 62%. Then workers math gets .62 x 2,770,100 = (1,717,462 -545,000)/545,000 = or a 215% increase in the rate of youth unemployment.

The number 215% means that this time next year there could be 2.15 x 545,000 or a possible 1,172,462 youth looking for work. Workers math tells us that at a 2.15 increase for one or two years will see millions of young men and women on the streets or tramping the country looking for work unless something more than CERB is done and now.