Crossposted at The Seminal at FDL.
Well now.
After years (decades?) of marginalizing and outright ignoring labor issues, it appears in the last week or two that Jobs are all of a sudden a hot topic. This is very exciting! Jobs, wages, employment, income, the means of supporting one's standard of living, is one of the most fundamental components of political economy, of social organization.
Yet I wonder. The title presupposes something important, that the state of jobs in 21st century America is something we've thought about, pondered, explored. I want to spend a little time tonight asking some fundamental questions about what, exactly, is a job? What exists now, and what would we like to exist in a more perfect Union? Personally, I harbor the opinion that our wage crisis is one of the great scandals of our time. The ability of a country to address large problems that build up slowly over time is a key gauge of our progress at insuring (or undermining) domestic Tranquility. Ours is not a problem of inadequate aggregate wealth. Ours is a problem of inadequate distribution of the greatest wealth a nation has ever known.
What's a job? What are the characteristics that define a job? We have so much language about work: day jobs, night jobs, second jobs, odd jobs, temporary jobs, contract jobs.
Intergenerational issues in the workforce are one interesting perspective from which to think about jobs, because different generations have really grown up with different experiences of the workforce. Those who grew up in the post-war boom have a much greater tendency to view success in terms of length of service with an employer, to think of things like job security and comprehensive benefits, to view a job as something to which loyalty is owed and from which loyalty is expected. Those of us who grew up in the Reagan-Bush era, meanwhile, have a virtually polar opposite view of jobs. Our experience of a job is something that is fleeting, insecure. It's there one moment, gone the next. A job is something where you're expected to work harder with less support for less pay. It is expected that job seekers far outnumber job openings and that employers will cut you loose at a moment's notice. Jobs increasingly are bipolar entities, with employers proclaiming all sorts of rights and privileges on the one hand (look, we have great work life balance!, our employees are our greatest asset!) while pursuing exactly the opposite paths in practice (I need you to stay late tonight...If you don't like it, quit, we've got lots of other people who want to work here).
The primary method of change for jobs has not been terminating 'good' existing jobs, although layoffs have become common enough practice. Rather, the key development which affects different experiences across generations is that new good jobs just aren't being created. If you're 55 years old and have a good job with a decent boss, good benefits, fair compensation, and so forth, you're more likely to have not noticed the changes in the workforce, and you have the greatest capacity to deal with the immediate economic conditions by extending your planned retirement a year or two. In fact, one of the ways baby boomers have experienced this situation most personally is through their children's efforts to get started. And if you're an out of work boomer who has exhausted your immediate personal and professional networks, you know just how brutal our economy is. You've likely seen people half your age trying to get an interview for the exact same job. This process has been a slow-motion train wreck; it takes awhile to figure out that the wheels are off the track. And it's important to keep in mind that while there are jobs out there, you cannot give up at a personal level, on a societal level, in aggregate, we're in this for the Long Haul. There is no quick recovery to 2007 levels, and in 2007, remember, tens of millions of Americans lacked good jobs. There are no plans being proposed by anyone that would provide the 40 to 50 million 'good' jobs for which there are potential workers spread across our great land.
Another perspective is asking where jobs happen. Even in our own country's history, never mind going farther back in human societies, we used to be an agrarian economy. Then cheap coal, industrialization, and urbanization shifted the bulk of our jobs to larger scale factories. Today, it doesn't take that many people to grow food and assemble cars. Most of the jobs in our country are jobs that help other people; we call these service sector jobs. Even many jobs within agricultural and manufacturing employers today are performing services, from legal to accounting to finance to HR to IT to customer service to retail to food preparation to maintenance to custodial to housekeeping and on and on. In many ways, this has meant a decentralization of the places where jobs happen. If the industrial revolution saw great consolidation from farms and cottages to urban centers, the service economy is flowing back out, providing employment that need not be so heavily concentrated near large masses of labor, important commodity inputs, and traditional transportation hubs.
When jobs happen has also been changing. One of the major drawbacks of industrialization, from the perspective of the average worker, is that jobs could now be designed without regard for natural daylight, the seasons, or weather. Jobs could go 12 or 14 hours a day 6 or 7 days a week. One of the notable components of the post war boom was more leisure time. More recently, an interesting balkanization of time has occurred. In our economy, there are workers who are overworked to the point of mental and physical health problems, while there are other workers who can't get enough hours on a job. One 9-5, Mon-Fri job has been replaced by working multiple jobs at all hours of the day all days of the week, or by working one job from 7 to 7 plus your 24/7/365 Blackberry. Anybody remember the good 'ole days when only doctors and the military were 'on call'?
Finally, I want to address the puritan perspective of work: the idea that work, in and of itself, is valuable. This is not solely a religious idea, but one that has captured an important piece of American lore (and really, all of Western thought, but we Americans have been particularly receptive). Empty phrases like 'get a job', 'work harder', and 'it builds character' are effectively tapping into that stream of thought. In practice today, where you hear this sentiment expressed is basically by upper middle class folks who quite simply just aren't familiar with the job market today. It's easy to think work is valuable when your personal experience has been that you get rewarded financially and socially for the work you do, and this attitude gets projected onto others who are not so lucky. The contrast to the puritan view is the notion that a job is simply one person offering labor in exchange for financial consideration. The only value of a job, from this view, is the money; by definition, there is a better use of time, otherwise the job wouldn't have to pay anything.
This contrast is critical because it gets to the heart of what we want jobs to be. Is the point of an economy to create work for everyone, or is the point of an economy to create wealth for everyone? Personally, I fall squarely in the second camp, and that is why I prefer using the term wages instead of jobs. I am not interested in the input. I am interested in the output. To this end, I'm going to make a superficially controversial but very important observation:
In an ideal world, there would be no jobs.
What that means is that in an ideal world, 100% of our time would be dedicated to other pursuits, like leisure time, family time, volunteering, civic engagement, pursuit of the arts, questioning the nature of beauty and the origin of the universe, and so forth. If we lack a clear vision of the perfect outcome, it is more difficult, I would argue, to craft solutions that take into account the real world. The goal is not to 'make work'. The goal is to 'make wealth'. The difference between those two concepts is productivity. The main breakdown in our approach is not in aggregate. Rather, our core challenge today is one of distribution. We have more than enough wages to go around. The problem is that our public policy allows for an extremely dangerous concentration of this wealth into the hands of a very few number of families.
It is good that we can produce all the wheat, corn, rice, peanuts, potatoes, keyboards, sunglasses, TVs, pickup trucks, and so on, that we need with a small percentage of our population. That means children can be in school (extending growing up through higher education), workers can take breaks (from vacations to sabbaticals to retirement), and those unable to work (due to illness or disability) can be taken care of. It means we can have poets and priests and politicians and painters.
If we want 'good' jobs, 'more' jobs, the most important thing for government to do is to provide people with broad support. It means well-funded public education, protection of worker rights, safety net support like universal unemployment insurance and universal health insurance, and direct investment in the public commons. The key to empowering a new generation of jobs is ensuring workers have the skills and security to negotiate for fair compensation with employers. That means doing some things differently, like having meaningful transfer payments to people in periods of transition. And it means abandoning the mindset of trying to capture the laissez-faire rhetoric of the past 30 years through things like creating some partial tax credit for temporary gain.
I'm aware this comes off as slightly libertarian compared to other more liberal views, but I think the CARS (Cash for Clunkers) program is a great example of what I'm talking about. I take that on because it captures these issues, something that superficially seems like a win-win-win, but in reality, just feeds the current failed system. If you focus on the output as what's important, then you see the absurdity.
We don't need more automobiles.
Our environmental scientists have been telling us that. And vehicle buyers have been telling us that. Yet, we poured a couple billion dollars into getting people to take on debt to do precisely that. How many factories could have been retooled to make wind turbines or trains for that money? How many miles of walking trails, bike paths, and light rail could have been built? How many semester hours at the local community college could that have covered? In fact, we could have just paid that money to workers to take a week's paid vacation. Hang out with their kids, do something special for their spouse, travel some, work on the house, read a book, or whatever.
Ultimately, I'd suggest the reason small compromises like that are popular is because we are still in our defensive crouch from decades of bludgeoning by the laissez-faire corporatists of the world. The thing is, we won (and more specifically, from us Millennialls to our elders, you won, in terms of public opinion even if the public policy is lacking. That's worth celebrating!). Abstractly and concretely, wealth concentration has been discredited for another generation at least. We don't have to be afraid anymore; we don't have to tinker around the edges of what's possible anymore.
We can be bold and visionary. We don't have to simply accept what work is; we can think about what we want work to be.
For my two cents at least, the broad answer to that means fewer hours for more pay for the vast majority of the workforce, guided in some ways by direct government investment, but in most ways by private firms meeting the needs of consumers.
I also want to say explicitly something I've emphasized a few times recently. We've had our heads in the sand for so long now, that I think we need to embrace about every half decent idea we've got on jobs at the moment. The general sense that things are bad is inaccurate in one key way: it doesn't grasp the full catastrophe that is work in America in 2009. Toward that end, check out New Deal 2.0's ongoing discussion about Navigating the Jobs Crisis. Having this discussion is one of the most important things we can do (assuming, of course, we don't want to actually become a 'third world' nation - for that, no discussion is necessary).