Youth unemployment reached a record level this summer. The 18.5% unemployment rate for young people ages 16 to 24 recorded in July 2009 is the highest July rate on record since recording began in 1948! The rate is highest among African-Americans (31.4%). The proportion of employed young people also fell to a record low of 51.4% this July.

With the job market getting worse and older adults taking the entry-level jobs normally occupied by young people, there is no perspective of any real improvement in the short term.

We are often told that getting an education will automatically equal a brighter future, but job perspectives for college grads are poor as well. The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2009 Student Survey shows that just 19.7% of 2009 graduates who applied for a job actually had one by graduation. In comparison, 51% of those graduating in 2007 and 26% of those graduating in 2008 who had applied for a job had one in hand by the time of graduation.

This is not because young people in 2009 are somehow less qualified than people in past years. It is because of the recession: a recession caused by the periodic failure of the so-called “free market economy.” Recessions are endemic to capitalism. Employers are looking to use this capitalist recession to further cheapen products by cutting wages and to lay off workers to increase their profitability.

According to numerous studies, the U.S. has the highest level of income inequality among all rich nations. It’s a myth that if you go to school and work hard you will get ahead. That’s the exception rather than the norm. Instead, young people are burdened with huge student loans and an array of low-wage jobs.

Like everyone else, young people out of school need jobs and an income in order to survive. Without an income – or with only a part-time, low-wage job – young people are often forced to live with and/or borrow money from their parents, causing increased stress for youth and parents.

We must ask ourselves what kind of future we are facing in a system that periodically throws a good chunk of working people into unemployment? That is the logic of the boom-and-bust capitalist economy. We can’t accept this logic. We need jobs to survive.

We need a massive jobs program that can hire the millions of unemployed people at a living wage. Their labor should be utilized to help rebuild the country. A public works program should build schools and hospitals, rebuild our basic industries and infrastructure, and help develop renewable energy. That’s what would really help working people.

Unfortunately, politicians from both the Republican and the Democratic Parties have shown they are more interested in bailing out banks and protecting insurance companies than passing the kind of legislation we need.

If the two parties we have won’t fight for us, it’s time to get organized ourselves! We have enormous power if we organize. Millions of working people are fed up with corporate bailouts and the way capitalism is shredding the fabric of the country in its desire for profit.

We need to build a powerful movement involving community organizations, activists of different movements, and the unions to bring millions into the streets to demand living wage jobs, decent housing, and quality free health care for all.

To achieve this means we will need to build a political party of our own – one in which working people can get actively involved to use it as a vehicle of struggle in our own interests, against the banks, big business, and this boom-and-bust economic system that can’t guarantee us a decent living!