On work: the peculiar state of the U.S. labor market, and more

The global economy seems to have climbed down off the ledge where it was perched for the last part of 2008 and beginning of 2009, teetering precariously on the verge of falling. Newspapers trumpet increases in productivity and GDP growth, and the banks are giving record bonuses.

Yet unemployment numbers in the United States reached 10.2 percent officially and unofficially are closer to 17 or 18 percent, it’s no longer time to talk about jobless recovery. It’s time to realize that without jobs there is no recovery.

And yet, what is a job? What does it mean, to work? The labor movement, since its inception, has many times redefined work, moving from mostly industrial workers toward service employees and other low-wage workers, organizing janitors and security guards and nurses and teachers.

But the industry that’s gotten the most play over the course of this year has been the banks—specifically, investment banks that have created the most impossibly complex house of cards—or perhaps spiderweb is a better metaphor. After all, it’s sheer and stretched taut, turning up in unexpected corners, sticky and likely to snare all manner of things—like taxpayer dollars. When “work” that deserves multimilliondollar bonuses essentially consists of creating elaborate schemes to turn money over and over and watch it grow, while “work” that produces something, creates something is rewarded if at all by smaller and smaller margins, something is most definitely wrong.

After all, it wasn’t that the economy just found itself on that ledge. It was dragged there by the big banks and then held there with a gun pressed to its temple, the banks threatening to dive over the edge and take the economy with them if the government didn’t accede to their demands. And when the Obama administration, stuck with the original bailout, tried to pass a bill that might actually provide work for the rest of the country, a clutch of Republicans and conservative Democrats who call themselves budget hawks but never met a defense program they didn’t like held out for tax cuts rather than job creation programs.

So now we need a second stimulus, people are starting to agree. John Nichols wrote at The Nation:

With unemployment now in the double digits, and at the highest rate in more than a quarter century, it is clear that bold steps — passage of a fully-funded and ambitious transportation infrastructure bill; allocation of additional funds for hard-pressed states, cities and school systems; establishment of new trade policies; perhaps the development of schemes to reward businesses that start hiring; perhaps the development of a 21st-century variation on the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New deal programs — must be launched quickly if they are going to shape a recovery that works not just for Wall Street but for Main Street.

Bold steps, as Nichols said, are indeed called for now. But more than just putting Americans back to work, we need to look at the reasons that we were able to be dragged to that ledge in the first place. We’ve accepted for too long that a certain amount of unemployment and poverty were acceptable. We live in a country where a person working full-time at minimum wage probably can’t support themselves, and we seem to think that’s OK. If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as CEO pay in the United States since 1990, it would now be $25.50 an hour–$53,040 a year. For comparison’s sake, the median income in the U.S. was $45,113 for a man and $35,102 in 2007.

If we accept as a given that work is required to earn money, how do we create a country (and world) where poverty-level wages are not seen as acceptable? How do we create jobs that not only pay decent wages, but actually treat people as human beings and not cogs in a machine? Sure, someone’s always going to have to take out the trash, scrub the toilet, flip the burgers, but there are steps that can be taken to make each of those jobs less alienating and miserable.

Work carries all sorts of signifiers, after all. One of the first questions most of us ask upon meeting new people is “What do you do?” For me, until recently, there were always multiple answers: what I did to pay the bills, and what I did that defined me. Most of us have to do jobs that don’t fulfill us at one time or another; choosing a field and only working in it as long as we love it is a privilege not available to the vast majority of people on the planet.

We pass a million tiny judgments on people as soon as we hear what they do for a living. Certain jobs are degrading, beneath us, raced or gendered in addition of course to being classed. We think we know all about someone when we hear that they are a sex worker or an investment banker, an actor or a lawyer.

The definitions of work and jobs are shifting again, though. Outright anger with those who sit atop the economic ladder has rarely been stronger, and it’s bubbling up and over in strange ways—some productive, some seemingly counterproductive. Poor people without health insurance protesting the government’s attempt to fix the health insurance industry because it would hurt profits? Without any sort of class consciousness, let alone solidarity, in this country, we’ve been handed aspirational associations instead and told that the government is the reason that we don’t have more—so our anger is directed at politicians, rightly identified with the corporations that fund their campaigns.

With the anger has come fear, and with fear has come more exploitation—as Brad DeLong noted, productivity is up while labor costs (those would be wages) are down. “You should be grateful to have the job,” we hear, and we don’t complain—especially those of us in fields that seem like luxuries. We’re so busy trying to get through the day that we don’t have time to march on Wall Street with our pitchforks raised.

But I’d like to get beyond that fear for a few moments at least, and think about work. What kind of work would we like to do, and how can we make the work that we don’t like to do less miserable? How can we make sure that all people are paid fairly for their labor, and have more freedom to choose the labor they do?

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be looking at various forms of work, various groups of workers, and thinking about how we can change our perceptions of work—and by doing so change our cultures.