Productive unemployment: the crisis as creation of unemployment for the revival of corporate profitability

Abstract

We start from the evidence that the production and management of unemployment in Spain since 2007 has been used as a device to recover capital profits: current data show that the recovery of the economy has not led to the creation of employment, but job destruction has been the way to increase business profitability rates. In our hypothesis, we argue that unemployment policies have not improved the access of the unemployed to employment, but work intensification of the workers. In this article we analyze the mechanisms by which this process has taken place. First, we analyze the legal and political bases that permit that the structural unemployment be a productive factor and a device for modulating the crisis. For that, we analyze the key role of the Keynesian concept of involuntary unemployment. Secondly, we analyze two types of evidence: 1) the "regulated deregulation" of unemployment in the main policies in the last ten years and 2) the interpretation of unemployment as voluntary in the employers discourse