The Jobs Crisis: What Did Roosevelt Do that Obama Should?

The crisis is much worse than most of us think. According to the US Department of Labor, the underemployment rate is 16.5 percent, if you count part-time workers who want full-time jobs and discouraged workers who have simply stopped looking. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that the number of long-term unemployed, meaning those unemployed for more than six months, hovers at a postwar record level of 45 percent. All these figures are much higher for black and Latino workers.

No one is insulated. Workers at every educational level have seen their unemployment rates double since 2007 - high school graduates, college graduates and even those with graduate degrees. The severity of the crisis has overturned conventional wisdom that higher education is a cure for joblessness. The unemployed do not need more education - they need work.

Republicans oppose taxing the rich, just as they did in the 1930s. It will take popular mobilization by labor, faith, civil rights, women's and youth organizations to overcome such resistance - just as it did then. Occupy Wall Street may be the beginning of a movement for a new New Deal. Collective action worked in the 1930s and it could work again now.