It's now become a standard. Each quarter we get told that jobless figures have gone up, yet again. But we also get told - as welfare minister, "Lord" Freud, did last week - that these figures "show some encouraging signs of stability despite the challenging economic climate".
"Encouraging signs of stability"? But for whom? Maybe for the politicians and bosses who fear that a galloping increase of unemployment may finally herald a social explosion? And so they should!
But how can there be anything "encouraging" in these figures for the jobless who are queueing up and down the country in search of a job that never materialises? Or for the part-timers who can't scrape a living out of the few hours they have, just because their employers would have to pay NI contributions if they worked more hours? Or for all those on the government's bogus apprentice and workfare schemes, which allow the bosses to pay them even less than the minimum wage and sometimes nothing at all? Or for so many so-called "self-employed", whose status is just another form of forced casualisation allowing the bosses to get round just about every employment regulations?
The "reserve army" of the jobless
All these workers are really part of that "reserve army" of the jobless that the capitalist class keeps at all time in order to weigh down on wages, impose labour "flexibility" and curb militancy.
Except that, in this period of capitalist crisis, the ranks of this "reserve army" have been swelled out of all proportion, using every possible trick, in order to allow companies to maintain their profits and shareholders to keep their dividends.
Although at a 17-year high, the official jobless figures deliberately understate the reality. The 2.67m without any work announced last week, are just the visible part of the jobless army.
Even this visible part conceals a far more dramatic reality than is made out: for instance, that one third of these unemployed have been out of work for over a year, or that, at the present rate, one under-24 out of four will soon be out of a job.
But hidden behind these 2.6m are millions who are classified as "employed", but are really jobless in disguise used as cheap labour and/or under conditions which should not be tolerated.
Like, for instance, the 1.3 million part-timers who would like a full-time job but can't find one. Or the 440,000 under-paid "apprentices" who joined a government scheme last year, among whom no less than 40% are over 25! Or the 34,000 jobless sent to work on 30hr/wk eight-week wage-less placements, doing menial jobs for retail giants like Tesco and others, under threat of losing their benefits - and Cameron intends to expand the scheme to 100,000 placements next year! And to these numbers should be added hundreds of thousands, maybe millions among the 4.4m "self-employed", who are forced to sell themselves on the cheap, according to the bosses' whims, without sick pay, pension or health and safety protection.
Who can afford such a system?
Just as the frenzy of greed which caused the present crisis, the permanent "reserve army" of jobless is a stigma of a profit system which has long been unfit to provide for the needs of society.
But while millions of working class families are going through hard times, the tiny minority of capitalists who run this system are still managing to make a killing out of their crisis.
Yes, the wealthy are doing well. Luxury items like Rolls-Royce cars, yachts and exorbitantly priced fashion clothes are selling like hot cakes. Art sales in London have now regained their pre-crisis level. British companies are sitting on a pile of cash worth over £800bn, which could and should be used for job-creating investment, but is wasted instead on speculation and paying higher dividends.
In their profit spree, the wealthy can rely on their politicians. Take the ConDem plan to tax housing benefit claimants who "under-occupy" their homes. It will be a tax on the poorest. Yet ministers reckon it will bring in only £100m - less than 1/3 of what the government-controlled RBS splashed out on its 323 highest paid managers! And Labour can't be trusted to do any better, given their refusal to reverse the ConDem public sector cuts and judging from their endorsement, last week, of the ConDem planned job and wage cuts in Network Rail.
Against the chaos of the profit system and the frantic greed of the capitalist class, the working class can only rely on its own resources. By joining ranks with the army of the jobless, the battalions of the employed working class would have the strength not only to get the capitalists to pay their bill, but also to get rid altogether of a system which has become just unaffordable.