The most annoying arguments against doing anything about joblessness are usually rooted in fatalism. This perspective argues that whatever social force is destroying jobs is ‘inevitable’ and all we can do is adapt. That’s fine, if it means learning a new software program so we can go our jobs better. It's another thing entirely, if ‘adaption’ means economic ruin and hopeless poverty.
But we make the world and the world makes us. We seem to have no problem changing laws or blocking technology that undermines corporate profits, but if it costs jobs or living wages, well... then the fatalistic arguments about ‘inevitability’ kick in to pour cold water over our efforts to advocate change.
So to agitate the mind and put possibility back into the conversation, here are ten structural changes that will create jobs and raise incomes. I invite you to post your own ideas. I will gather those ideas together and repost them here.
1. Hire gas station attendants.
Yes, we have the technology to allow us to pump our own gas. But in New Jersey, a gas station attendant has to pump your gas for you. Not the best paying job, to be sure, but if you require every gas station to hire staff to pump your gas, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created. What about higher gas prices, you say? Go fill up your tank in New Jersey. Drive around until its empty. Then go fill it up in New York (where gas station attendants are non-existent). Where was the gas cheaper? New Jersey.
Rule change: Require all gas to be pumped by gas station attendants.
2. Hire college professors full time.
At this point, most of the college professors in this country are adjuncts. The poorer the student body, the greater the number of adjuncts and the lower the wages they make per course. Few have any benefits. Many working in public colleges don’t even get social security payments paid into their accounts. So who’s gonna pay for the dog food when your favorite professor is too old to teach? We now have more full-time college administrators than full-time college professors. And nobody ever heard of an ‘adjunct administrator.’
Adjunct teachers do most of the college teaching, average 2000 dollars a course and most make less than 20,000 a year. Now compare that cost to your tuition bill. Collapsing the ranks of the faculty has not had any positive impact on tuition. Indeed, the explosion of academic bureaucracy has paralleled the radical rise of tuition, not simply because of their salaries and/or numbers, but because academic and school decisions are made by people with no real experience with teaching and their decisions serve those who want to exploit education for profit, rather than the students they are supposed to be educating.
Worse than that, the US government (both parties) and the corporate consultancy industry has been actively promoting online and distance learning programs across the country, as well as 'for-profit' policies that exploded administrative overhead and tuition, while gutting the quality of education. Online education is very dubious education. It serves only the most efficient and advanced learners in a given subject. It can be devastating to anyone with a subject phobia or learning challenge. These trends are in direct relationship to the poverty of the student populations. The poorer the students, the less prepared they may be, the greater they are likely to be subjected to online/distance education. Online instructors may be paid as little as 300 dollars a class. Anyone willing to work for those wages is hired, so the quality of the instruction plummets through the floor. This is also true of adjunct faculty hires, where anyone willing to teach for starvation wages is hired, so long as they have the barest mimimum qualifications.
Rule change: downgrade accreditation of colleges according to how many adjuncts the school uses and the percentage of courses they teach.
Corollary rule change: downgrade accreditation ratings for online and distance learning programs and the colleges who depend on them.
Corrollary rule change: conduct a thorough investigation of education consultancy firms, their relationships to auditing firms, information technology companies and software companies and the universities who hire them and implement their recommendations.
Corrollary rule change: conduct a thorough investigation of regional accreditation agencies and their relationship to educational consultancy firms, auditing firms, information technology companies and software companies.
3. Require all government contractors to make all products in the US.
We’ve destroyed our own manufacturing base. Even the last bastion of US manufacturing - military products - are increasingly produced overseas, or at least the parts are. This is a national security issue and it’s an economic crisis as anyone who’s been to Ohio or Michigan can surely attest.
Rule change: require all federal contractors providing manufactured goods to produce those goods in the US, including parts and assembly.
4. Break up companies in market sectors with 10 or fewer companies participating.
Capitalism is supposed to thrive on competition. 5 or fewer companies competing with each other isn’t competition (as is the case in too many industries), it’s a cartel, that’s trying to eat itself. Monopoly capitalism is not productive capitalism, they do not promote ‘innovation’, they promote job destruction and market control. ‘Economies of scale’ are wastelands of former opportunity. Smaller players can’t compete and every merger leads to more layoffs. We need a minimum standard for determining competitiveness in a marketplace.
Rule change: amend anti-trust legislation to give government the power to break up companies in markets where 10 or fewer companies compete. Start with markets where 5 or fewer companies compete.
5. Make corporations talk to you.
We all loath the endless firewalls that corporations construct through their communications systems to prevent you from talking to a real live person. When you do, there’s no guarantee that person is working in the United States or isn’t currently doing time in prison. Its convenient for the company to prevent you from speaking to a person. Not only do they save salaries for customer service personnel, but they can better control the terms of their relationship with you.
Rule change: require all corporations to use a universal ‘opt out’ number in their communications firewall - say ‘0' - so that customers can by-pass their firewalls and talk to a real live person. Those companies providing vital services - utilities, etc. - may not allow a customer to wait more than 15 minutes to speak to a customer service person.
Corollary rule change: require customer service workers for companies selling products or providing services in the United States, to be physically sited in the United States.
6. Hire people to work in the Unemployment Office
One of the most shocking and absurdist facts of life, if you are unemployed, is the utter impossibility of getting anyone in the unemployment office to answer the bloody phone. If corporate America is bad about letting you talk to a real live person, try contacting the unemployment office. What was our response to the flood of people onto the unemployment line? We automated the process and upgraded the software needed to avoid hiring people!
With so many people unemployed, so many people whose former careers are gone, we need a lot more people in the unemployment office to help them adapt and find new jobs. Yet you can start calling on Monday morning, repeat the process every 20 minutes and not get a person until Friday afternoon, on a good week.
Rule change: require all unemployment offices to pick up the phone within 15 minutes and address the concern of the caller.
Corollary rule change: flood the unemployment office with staff dedicated to answering phone, providing job assistance and conducting extensive research on the state of the job market.
7. Close tax loopholes for outsourcing jobs.
President Obama has mentioned this before, but has done little but grandstand on the issue. This needs to be tied together with a much larger project to address the destruction of living wage work in this country, not a reworking of the tax code. The crisis of joblessness means there is a visceral demand from the public for immediate change. But redesigning the tax code is a Washington insider’s game that invariably favors K Street, not main street. Don’t get into a horse trading session over taxes, just kill these provisions.
Rule Change: repeal tax provisions that allow multinational corporations to defer paying US taxes on their overseas profits until they return them to the United States.
Corollary rule change: treat all corporations that base their operations or credit their sales overseas to avoid US taxation as ‘foreign companies’ and exclude them from government contracting.
8. Get control over sensitive data.
Whole industries have sprung up around the outsourcing of sensitive personal data out of the organizations that are supposed to be keeping that data and out of this country. This is a huge problem in the medical, credit and financial industry. It creates personal and national security issues, never mind the loss of jobs.
Rule change: require all data collected on US citizens to be stored and processed in the United States.
9. Raise taxes on non-productive market economic activity.
Why should an investment firm invest in a widget company in southern Indiana, when they can make more money trading drachmas for rupees? Why should it invest in new technologies for energy, when there’s a lot more money to be made inventing new derivative ‘products’ that make money out of money? Its more than time for this nonsense to stop.
Rule change: create punitive tax rates for currency trading and derivative sales. Outlaw ‘put’ options.
10. Get a bloody public employment program going.
The biggest drag on the job market has been the divestment of public sector workers. 79% of all jobs posted by the USAJOBS database - repository for all federal job postings - are for war, intelligence and homeland security, as of August 2010. This is up from 71% for these government sectors as of August 2009. Meanwhile we have lost close to 400,000 full-time postal worker jobs and government agencies from the local to the federal have been hemorrhaging full time jobs. While President Obama has been endlessly touting a million jobs created in the private sector - with no awareness of whether they are full-time, part-time, temporary, living-wage paying or even really there - we have shed over a million government jobs.
With so many employment sectors destroyed - really only a few are viable these days - and so many people competing for work, job postings and hiring processes have become the ‘land of the purple squirrel’. A purple squirrel is a job whose requirements are so specific that only someone who did that exact job and has the exact ‘requirements’ desired by the person, company or group doing the hiring has a hope of getting that job. For those of us whose resumes don’t match these often ridiculously specific requirements, we are simply wasting time, paper and postage.
Unemployed and underemployed workers, workers in industries that have disappeared or been consolidated to the point where the jobs are gone, need new work opportunities to laterally shift in the marketplace. Failure to address joblessness in a clear and direct way - without wasting billions on corporate welfare strategies that get gamed by the corporations and send our tax dollars overseas - is the single greatest reason this party got ‘shellacked’ at the polls last November. Indeed, the Democratic Party leadership has responded to the crisis of joblessness by destroying the remaining ‘recession proof’ job markets and have been active collaborators in the downward pressure on wages. So getting a WPA-style jobs program going - across all negatively affected job markets - is good news for those who have jobs, as well as those who are unemployed and/or underemployed.
And after two years of hearing ephemeral ‘job creation’ reports that nobody who looks at the want ads believes for a second, the credibility of President Obama and this party has radically plunged. So more tricky games, tax credits, corporate welfare schemes and public-private partnerships will not restore that confidence, it will feed the cynical belief by those of us in the economic danger zone, that President Obama is simply using our plight to pad his campaign coffers and making our lives worse. Gut the pentagon if you need to, abandon our fatal and bankrupting wars (that would be a win-win for the world), but jobs are not coming back if the federal government doesn’t step in and hire people to do necessary work on behalf of the American people.
If jobs are ‘gone for years’, then triaging is necessary to protect Americans until then. Following up by addressing each affected job market with new rules, laws and other structural changes is also necessary if we ever expect living wage work to return.
Rule change: get a Direct Public Employment Program going across all industrial sectors. Ensure that at least 75-90% of all funds go directly to living wage salaries. Do not let the private sector get their mitts on this program. The private sector is the least efficient way to get money down to the economic base. They will suck up all the money and we will be creating jobs in China and India, again.
New jobs are being created by government efforts, but they aren’t being created here. Without addressing the structural conditions - laws, treaties, tax code loopholes and other business practices - that destroyed living wage work for the past 30+ years, corporate welfare and tax cuts simply mean pouring money into Wall Street, the banks and the major corporations and watching them reinvest our tax dollars into cheaper and less regulated markets abroad.
That’s why the money spent on the stimulus plan never reached Main Street. And without invigorating the economy at the social base - the poor, the working class and the formerly working middle class - small businesses and the rest of main street will never recover either.
I invite you to add your own suggestions to my list.