Amid the stories in this morning's New York Times about the auto industry was one of the inevitable paragraphs discussing how the United Auto Workers had been obliged to settle for lower starting wages for new hires, beginning at $15 an hour.
Now, I'm about to turn 50, and am becoming keenly aware that, like my parents, my sense of what things cost and what they're worth is stuck in memory. (This screen memory, I suspect, makes it easier for business owners to imagine they pay their employees well.)
So I went to my favorite widget which allows me quickly to see what $15 an hour would have been when I started work, back in 1977, when minimum wage was $2.30 an hour. The starting auto worker hourly comes to $4.16 in 1977 dollars. Please jump with me to some conclusions and meditations.
I started out as a typesetter in the fall of 1977, as I entered college, and $2.30 an hour was enough to pay for my gas and tuition and rent, and, sometimes, Top Ramen. As I got better at it, and as minimum wage went up again, I worked up to making $3.25 an hour, and was offered a job downtown by a competitor at $3.75 an hour, only I'd have had to drive further and pay for downtown parking, so it worked out even and I stayed put.
So, by my count, at 18 years old with the beginnings of what was, then, a skilled trade, I was able to make close to what an entry level auto worker can make today.
Now...I'm certain our hypothetical auto worker has better benefits than I did, because I didn't have any. And I assume he or she still has a pension plan, though it's hard just now to imagine that any pension plan is more than an opportunity to toss money blindly at a roulette wheel. But in terms of take-home pay, in terms of disposable income, in terms of quality of life and raising a family...$15 an hour ain't all that.
(Where I now live, incidentally, $15 an hour would still be a pretty good wage. Sad as that is to mention.)
The difference is that an auto worker is doing a very physical job...and please understand that I'm using the auto worker as a metaphor for the American workforce as a whole, and that I've never worked on a line and am largely informed by the fine book Rivethead. The difference is that, had typesetting not disappeared from the marketplace, I could still be sitting in a chair inputting text today with comparatively little threat of physical impairment from my work. Whereas for people who do manual labor, there is a kind of trade-off: They give the workplace their youth and strength, their knees and backs and wrists, and at some point are either given supervisory positions which do not oblige them to continue misusing their body for our collective benefit, or they're retired.
The union movement, as I understand it, made explicit that trade of youth and labor for wages. Those union contracts said, in theory (if not always in practice) that the workers would be taken care of, that they would be compensated (as athletes are) for the comparatively limited window of their working life with higher wages and a decent pension plan.
In exchange for that -- and this is a point I keep trying to make, but am unable to back up with research because I simply don't seem smart enough to ask Google the right question -- generations of blue collar workers were able to live middle class lives, to fuel our consumer economy, to send their kids to college or to get them comparable jobs on the line.
There was dignity in that.
There was pride.
My headline here is a mantra I've been returning to these last few days, as I come up against my 50th birthday and the one-year anniversary of my own little American dream shutting down. There is a difference between work, and having a job.
For my entire adult life I have made a calculated trade-off: I have chosen to work in creative industries that, in general, pay poorly. I didn't go to law school. I don't own a suit, and have not even the faintest idea how to tie a tie. But I did my work, I did the thing I was meant to do, and it brought me a decent living and unending pleasure. The word vocation is commonly used today to describe trade schools, to which we are now invited to repair so as to find new work. We should not forget that a vocation is also what a priest has, that his work is a calling.
Many people do not so clearly have a specific work calling to them. They take jobs so as to pay for their lives and their children, their hobbies and their pleasures. And the trade-off they are making is that they are trading their time and their skills and, too often, their health...for a paycheck. Their dignity is measured by their bank account, by their quality of life.
We are now in a time of cataclysmic change. The publishing industry, to which I swore fealty thirty-odd years ago, is disintegrating, and I have no expectation of further work (save the piece work I still do) in that world. Most of the middle-class blue-collar jobs we once had in this country are lost and gone forever. Perhaps they will be replaced by other blue collar jobs that pay as well, but that seems unlikely just now.
So where will we find our work? And what work will we do which brings us both pride and a prideful paycheck? I'm not looking for a job, but I'm always looking for work.