Industrial Workers of the World

From the Peterson Institute of International Economics, the first hints that unemployment will be persistent, brutal, and even at unprecedented post-war levels:

“a greater share of the US economy today is undergoing structural change than has been the case in previous decades. Combined with the record current level of long-term unemployment in the US (29 percent of the total in June 2009 were unemployed for 27weeks or longer, the highest ever recorded by the BLS since records began in 1948⁶), this suggests that the structural level of unemployment in the US has rising rapidly in recent months. Not only could we be back in the 1970s, we may also be going through changes in employment that we have never seen before.”

(http://www.iie.com/realtime/?p=852)

And, this, from Larry Summers:

“normally in economic downturns, productivity decreases as firms keep workers employed even as the amount of work declines. This pattern of deteriorating productivity has not been a feature of the current recession. In fact, productivity has increased in this recession, as it did in the last.”

(http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?ResearchID=1264)

The administration economic policy is being inundated with changes in the economy begun in the previous recession. It is no longer possible to sustain the amount of superfluous labor which has been built up over the last seven decades.

Hours of work will have to be aggressively cut to prevent a calamity for 'working families'.