Decolonization Models for America’s Last Colony: Puerto Rico

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS . . .

228 JOBS, JOBS, JOBS . . . August 21, 2010 The key to overcoming an economic crisis and being able to structure a new country is the creation of jobs. That was the strategy followed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, to reinvent his country, which was submerged in a monumental economic crisis with an unemployment rate of greater than 20 percent, a country controlled by financial magnates, a country lacking in social justice. Some of this American approach spattered Puerto Rico under the leadership of the last American governor, Rexford G. Tugwell, with the active support of the US Armed Forces and the recently founded Popular Democratic Party led by Luis Muñoz Marín. The Puerto Rico of the 1930s was up to its ears in a severe economic depression and a social crisis. The principal strategy for creating a new country, just as in the United States, included the creation of public and private employment as well as programs aimed at attaining social justice. Foreign investors were encouraged to establish operations in Puerto Rico that would create jobs. At the same time, jobs were generated in public works, education, social services, research, cultural affairs, and other sectors. The terms employment and unemployment are usually found in statistical writing employed by economists. But jobs have a direct effect on all citizens’ daily lives. Workers generate income for the government through the taxes they pay. Workers often free the state from having to provide education and JOBS, JOBS, JOBS . . .  229 health services. Workers create other jobs because they have an effect on the businesses they patronize in such areas as transportation, food, and clothing. Unemployment is the worst-case scenario for the state not only because of the costs it generates in the form of unemployment benefits, but also because of the loss of a productive resource. The unemployed are also harmed emotionally: their self-esteem is affected, and they may become depressed, with terrible consequences for the family, often leading to domestic violence. A lack of employment affects a new generation as it faces the harsh reality of a world in which bettering oneself through education does not necessarily lead to secure work. This may induce [those without work] to explore the dark world of drugs as an escape or as a way of making a living. High unemployment, if sustained, may cause the unemployed to lose their skills, which affects their ability to find work again once the economy recovers. Rumor has it that in Puerto Rico there are cases of scientists laid off by pharmaceutical companies and faced with financial need who are using their skills in the illicit world of producing synthetic drugs. The few fortunate graduates who do manage to get a job in times when the labor market is tight begin their professional lives with the enormous disadvantage of earning low salaries, a situation that lasts throughout their working lives. The creation of jobs, whether public or private, is the kind of medicine that has an immediate effect on a scenario such as the one in which Puerto Rico is living. In the past four years, we have lost 157,000 jobs (55,000 in the government, 102,000 in the private sector). The outlook is dreadful, given the imminent closing of pharmaceutical companies as their patents expire and given the multiplier effect of the closing of three Puerto Rican banks. Even worse, Puerto Rico is implementing a strategy that in other places has failed to resolve economic and social crises. Public employees are being laid off, with the multiplier effect on private jobs; taxes are being increased; and the funding of the University of Puerto Rico, where the workers of the future are created, is being cut. 230  Newspaper Columns As long as we cannot manage to reverse Puerto Rico’s massive unemployment , our economy and quality of life will continue in freefall. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman has said that “failure to act on unemployment is not just cruel, it is short-sighted.” ...