Should the Unemployed be required to do voluntary work - Research Paper Example

The rise of capitalism has also brought about tremendous hordes of people who are unemployed. For whatever reasons, these people cannot cope or cannot find the jobs they want with the skills they have. The global economy has undergone big changes due to this globalization trend in that the world has become “flatter” (or more flat), in the words of some economists. The world is now flatter because not only do people compete for jobs with other people within the same country but also vie for jobs with the people of other countries with cheaper cost of labor or some other competitive advantage.

This has been shown by the phenomenon of outsourcing whereby jobs are “exported” to countries in Asia, the Middle East and other parts of the world where it makes more economic and financial sense to do so. The earlier method was contracting, then it became sub-contracting, near-shoring, off-shoring and then finally, outsourcing. Business leaders had welcomed this development but to the detriment of organized labor which had seen its union ranks dwindle with the loss of jobs. People opt to moderate their wage demands in view of this outsourcing threat.

A consequence of this phenomenon is that millions are now jobless. Capitalist economic theory posits that unemployment will always be present despite all the best efforts of business leaders and politicians because it is nearly impossible to eradicate. In other words, full employment is a pipe dream (a near impossibility) but the collapse of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market has greatly contributed to swelling the ranks of the unemployed. It destroyed the American middle class and the American Dream because well-paying jobs that had survived the outsourcing phenomenon were likewise wiped out.

A prolonged and severe economic downturn made matters worse for most people. The economists have called this the Great Recession (in contrast