The Insecure Economy and our State of Health

During the current Coronavirus crisis, those who are hardest hit are the low-wage temporary and gig workers who don’t have paid sick leaves. The job insecurity of these workers translates directly into a huge health risk to the rest of the population. It is time for us to take stock and understand how our economy has undergone fundamental changes in the last four decades. We do not arrive at this stage due to some accident. Rather, the structural change in our economy is carefully engineered by capitalists and their consultants to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of the workers and transfer a substantial part of business risk to them.

We can understand this by listening to this speech by Alan Greenspan, the ex-chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, dated October 12, 2005. Here Greenspan gloated about the resilience of the American economy and its ability to absorb shocks. Then, he justified the capitalists’ subtle transfer of business risk to the workers in the name of competitiveness and economic flexibility:

Flexibility is most readily achieved by fostering an environment of maximum competition. A key element in creating this environment is flexible labor markets. Many working people, regrettably, equate labor market flexibility with job insecurity.

Despite that perception, flexible labor policies appear to…