Has anyone besides me been irritated by the manner in which the term “job-creator” (like “Homeland”---a term I never heard until I was over 60) has slipped into the political dialogue? Who would care normally, but it’s pretty easy to see the stamp of funded think tanks and partisan intellectuals) picking a term that carries with it a great deal of freight. Because the freight itself is invisible, I am moved to inquire, “What is that freight?”
“Job creators” is a metaphor for owners of businesses and wealthy men and women with capital to invest in commercial enterprises. It is never used for Government infrastructure products like The Hoover Dam or the Interstate System, or the development of the Computer. It is always reserved for the private sector. The term carries with it the implication that the larger the business, theoretically the larger number of jobs created. Certainly the richest 1% considers themselves job-creators (so may criminals, who often view crime as self-employment) and uses that as the justification to demand specific loopholes and tax-breaks from the Federal Government, shifting the burden of their costs onto you and I. These are also the people that have coined the rather offensive term for the rest of us---- “consumers.”
I find such language offensive, because it implies that the vast majority of people are somehow “using up” what is inherently “theirs” and making no contribution to the society. Such a term eradicates the idea of the Commons, and the wealth that once belonged to all of us as a birthright, which has been purloined at under threat of or actual violence. As a consequence of this ‘original theft’, most people find themselves with nothing but our labor to sell. I’m not remotely exaggerating.
The briefest survey of American history will remind even a casual reader how; the Rockefellers had National Guardsman turn machine guns on striking miners in the West. Others hired gunsels to do it in the Coal mining states. Labor organizers were lynched and murdered, and Woody Guthrie sings of an entire community burned alive at a dance by Pinkerton men who set fire to the dance hall and locked the doors.
The early days of the 20th Century were a violent and bloody time, and the government, up until Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, always sided with the fat against the hungry.
There are other grounds on which to resist such framing language too. Although we all know the reason, I am bothered daily by the fact that these implications are never unpacked by the media to help the public protect itself. In September of 1908 Henry Ford released the Model T. It was kind of like the iPhone of its day, a sensational confluence of affordability, desire for privacy and escape from the growing density of cities. Henry Ford ingeniously solved several problems, which made automobiles available to normal working families and not just the wealthy.
One was that for the first time auto-parts became standardized and interchangeable instead of being manually adjusted for different types and models of cars, reducing costs and making repairs cheaper.
Secondly, he created a system of organization that allowed him to use unskilled and uneducated (and therefore easily replaceable) labor. In fact, for the first 100 men Ford hired, he had to interview 900, because skilled wheel-wrights, machinists, lathe operators, mechanics and the like would neither lower their standards, nor stand on their feet all day and tighten the same four bolts. In the next 19 years 15 million Model T Fords were sold, but was Henry Ford, really, the “job-creator?” I would argue not.
There were over 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States from 1896 to 1930. For one reason or another, the Ajax Electric, The Babcock, The Baby Moose, The Cartermobile, joined the De Tamble, the Crow-Elkhart, The Frontenac, The Mark Electric and 1792 others in disappearing like the Passenger Pigeon and the Dodo. Henry Ford had a great idea; had it at the right time, time, and like Steve Jobs appeared to be a rather unpleasant genius. It was the people however, who made it a success, the 15 million people, who for one reason or another bought that car that created the market for it, and the branch offices and dealerships and expansion and required the “jobs.” The previous models had short-lived, smaller numbers of jobs, but without an audience and a market they simply disappeared and could hardly qualify as the exalted job-creators we are meant to coddle through slipping their tax obligations.
Why is this distinction important? For two reasons: first, we tend to accept that we need jobs as inevitable, and yet overlook the fact that from the country’s earliest beginnings, (excepting indentured servants and slaves) until after the Civil War, most people lived in a grow-it, build-it and barter economy. Jobs per se were unusual until after the war and the industrial model of the North ended the agriculture and slavery economy (sort-of ended it) of the South.
“Grow-it, build-it and barter” implies that people had land-bases and access to the raw materials that allowed them their autonomy. I’d argue that at that time America was perhaps actually a Capitalist country, but we are certainly that no longer. If we were truly a Capitalist country citizens (the majority) would own property, patents, processes, or material to generate capital. In such a circumstanced we would not need Social Security and Medicare. That is nothing like a description of our current situation. What we call Capitalism really involves the disenfranchisement of most men and women, who are stripped of all resources except their labor and compelled to beg for work. How “free”, how “dignified” is a man or woman reduced to begging another man for a job?
Our culture is full of pithy, unexamined aphorisms like, “Don’t give a man a dollar, but give him the tools to earn a dollar.” That sounds fine, but if “the job creators” are allowed unchecked authority to speak for all the natural resources as if they are unquestionably theirs, what is left for workers to use for their own autonomy? Question one.
Question Two is why do these “job creators” not have to be pay the larger society not only for for the co-option of the Commons---the air, water, coal, oil, timber they use and the poisonous waste they leave behind, but also for the many contributions the Common society makes towards their success which they like to play down? There could be no successful business without a stable and (relatively) impartial legal system, paid for by everyone. (Let Russia or any wealthy corrupt Third World Government make my case.) Ditto for educated employees; airports, dams, harbors, airports, the Internet---all developed or paid for by the taxes and labors of the government the job-creators keep reminding us is a vile thing “to be drowned in a bathtub.
I don’t deny Henry Ford his wealth or his contribution, but he did not do it alone. Neither was his success won solely with his own resources. Shouldn’t there have been some payback mechanism to fun government based on fees and licenses of the air, water, soil, iron, coal, and pollution? When we join a country club, we do not say, “I’m not going to use the Squash court, so please extract that from my dues.” I may not have children in public school, but I reap an advantage by living with an educated hopeful public (remember them) than I do a dispirited and resentful class. Taxes are the costs of civilization. If we don’t want to see people establishing their own armed road-blocks and extending corruption farther into this country, it is important to recognize that we are all interdependent, and horizontally, not vertically organized. The job-creators are actually the base of the pyramid. Not the capstone.