America doesn't need jobs.
America needs careers. America needs something better than stressed,unhappy, underutilized people who earn not enough to get by and spend their days worrying whether today is the day they get the axe for impersonal -- or personal -- reasons.
Follow me over the fold, if you like. I promise a ramble with a bit of a rant, but no hard figures, snazzy charts, or unimpeachable statistics. Everyone's seen those, and if you're reading this, you know where to find them.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Now that the theater of the debt ceiling has been resolved, we need to start thinking about jobs.
Jobs. Americans work hard. We put in more hours with less vacation than other industrialised countries, with less job security and less in the way of benefits. Every few days I run across some conservative who says "I work 60 hours a week, get off your lazy bum and do the same and you wouldn't be broke." I always want to say the same thing to them: it's because of people like you that employers get away with having two people do the work of three. Yes, that's a broad generalization, but there's a fundamental truth to it -- if you are an employer, and you could have one person on salary and a crew of cheap temps rather than a full-time crew who might end up getting paid an hour or two of indirectly earned wages when work is slow, what would you do? If you are a small business person, you might keep that "extra" person on, maybe 32 hours rather than 40, until work picks up. You might accept lower profits for now to have a stable, experienced, loyal workforce later. But if you are a corporation, you not only won't, but you can't. It would violate your charter, and violate the fundamental business principle "Nothing matters but this quarter. Maybe next quarter, if you want to go long-term."
Jobs. There are many reasons the job market is so bad. One is automation. Hey, I would not want to go back to the days when it took an army of clerks just to file and organize the basic paperwork to keep an operation going. But... those were the kind of jobs that are gone forever. And while they were not great jobs, they were decent jobs. Jobs that needed to be done, and jobs you could have a little pride in, jobs you could be good at. Automation's also taken a huge chunk out of manufacturing jobs, but not, I would venture to guess, as offshoring.
Jobs. I've spent some time in teleservices -- specifically fundraising, with a serious chunk of that time raising money for Democratic parties and candidates. Those of you familiar with this Accidental Rodent from years past now know what kind of job I got laid off from. It wasn't the fault of the Democrats -- it was the fault of working for a corporation that could not see its way to keeping me on the payroll for a few months until the election cycle turned around again, and also couldn't justify bringing me back at my decent salary when they could hire someone without years of experience (and raises) and have the remaining experienced staff put in extra unpaid hours (salary, remember?) to cover the gap.
That job was a career. It paid well enough that for the first time in my adult life, in my late 30's,I did not have to worry about which bill I wouldn't pay that month.
I went back to school. This summer, I worked a short time as a telefundraiser again (different company, same drill). It was a job. No benefits, no future, hand-to-mouth paycheck-to-paycheck. The company I used to work for laid off an entire shift and is replacing them (as far as it is replacing them) with temps. Temps that don't need to be offered raises or benefits.
Jobs. Temp jobs. Jobs with low wages, low skills, no stability, no future. Offshoring -- my spouse had a student loan. Sallie Mae, the companie servicing this federal student loan, occasioanlly called -- from somewhere offshore. Sounded like India. One day, when enough was enough, she said point blank, "I'm late on my payment because I work in teleservices and you've got the job I should have." It didn't do any good, because the person who made the choice didn't see the human side of their decision to move the work to a cheaper phone center -- and likely wouldn't have been able to do any different even if they did care.
As a country we don't even have enough of these kind of cruddy little entry-level jobs available, but even if we did, even if we could somehow get to full "employment" this way, it would not be enough to fix the economy.
We don't need jobs. We need careers. Employment where people go to work with the expectation that the job will be there tomorrow, that pay not only the bills but leave enough over for a dinner or a trip to Sears or a new freezer. Employment where enough people are working that when one person gets suspended (for, let's say, coming in late too often) their co-workers don't find themselves working extra hours to cover, because the workforce is stripped so lean in the interestof some cold mechanical goal of efficiency that there is no slack, no room to adjust. When someone gets fired their co-workers shouldn't have to give up their vacations (what little vacation they get) to cover until someone else is trained in -- training that takes a day or a week, because these are not skilled jobs, these are not professional jobs, these are not career jobs.
Jobs. Don't talk to me about jobs. Jobs won't save us. Jobs won't create the kind of demand that is required to prime the pump of commerce. No, that is going to take good jobs. Career-level jobs. Middle-class jobs. You know, they don't even say entry-level anymore, because the expectation used to be, "Start off in the newsroom running copy and someday you'll be a real reporter." Technology has eliminated the copy runner. But the culture of lean and mean and ruthless efficiency has done as much as automation. Hire a temp, offshore it, lay them off when they are almost to a level where they could draw unemployment.
I have a friend who works in retail. He barely gets by. He has a wealth of specialized knowledge in the area of retail sales he's in (he works in the gun department of a large Midwestern chain of rural-needs department stores). He remarked to me the other day, "30 years ago this would be a decent job. Pension, benefits, and a little respect. I'd be buying a house."
Everywhere I look, I see Randians blaming the parasites, the lazy, the welfare cheats. Telling the un- (and the under-) employed to just get it together, swallow their pride, and get a job. Don't be around anyone who's smoking something funny, or have a bit of it yourself, because that drug screening will get you. Don't let your credit rating go down, even though you're unemployed, because we have to know you're responsible enough to work twice as hard for half the money. Don't complain about a former employer to your friends online, or be friends with people We don't approve of, because there are 10 or 20 or 100 other people who want this job we've advertised, because We're job creators.
Short of a whole new economic paradigm that takes into account unpaid work, or a massive goverment stimulus applied correctly (What do we need? The WPA! When do we need it? Two years ago!), I don't see any way out of this mess.
Thanks for listening. I go back to school in three weeks. Only four years to go before I can get started on my career.