The new millennium confronts prosperous nations with two apparently intractable problems. One is persistently high unemployment, with the number of long term unemployed also at high levels. This threatens to create an underclass locked into welfare dependency, educational underachievement, despair and alienation. The second problem is that many of those who work suffer marginal and insecure employment. Increasing numbers of workers in Western nations are engaged in low-paid casual or part-time or temporary contract work, or are beset by economic insecurity. For many, this has meant that planning for the future is out of the question. Relentless restructurings and ruthless downsizings in both private and public sectors are driving more and more people into unemployment or marginal employment. While Western economies are growing quite strongly as the century draws to a close, those workers who are not yet unemployed are either actually insecure and relatively impoverished, or justifiably anxious.This is part of wider trend to increased economic inequality. The wealthy of advanced capitalist societies are getting seriously richer while the real incomes of the majority of working people are stagnant or falling. In affluent but widely unequal societies, substantial numbers find themselves without sufficient resources for a decent life within the prevailing social conditions. The condition of those on the bottom of the pile — the unemployed underclass — is tantamount to social exclusion. At the other end of the social spectrum, the top ten per cent of our societies has opted out of threadbare public structures into a world of largely private provision - private schools, private health care, private security, and so on. They are retreating from responsibility for the poor and disadvantaged, calling ever more stridently for lower taxes and less social welfare provision. The super-rich, like the corporations they partly manage and ...
