Some Thoughts on Labor, Work and a Job

Two weeks ago, on August 19, I started the first full-time job I've had in 19 years. So the post I am about to make here is a little ironic. But there is a difference between what could/should be and what is. Today, Labor Day, I want to talk about what needs to change.

First, I'm going to cheat and offer you a crash course in US economic history in the form of two episodes of Crashcourse, American History (I know, it is a bit like homework, but I really think these two videos set the stage better than I can):

And...

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 What strikes me most about this history is that it did cost us a lot of freedom.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I am a consumer of goods and services that are made possible by this history. I would never have made a good farmer as I killed every plant in my possession. I would never have made a rugged individual on the frontier as I don't know how to cook or sew and every serious attempt I've made has resulted in failure. I am, in a word, a city girl (okay, three words). As an urban dweller, I am inextricably dependent upon these goods and services and while I don't sport the largest footprint on the planet and never would (I hate shopping as well), I don't see myself heading for the mountains and living off the land in some Jeffersonian ideal any time soon.

 On the other hand, it seems patently obvious to me that the time for "jobs" has passed. Politicians keep promising "more jobs" but a job has become one of the most insecure thing in the world for most people, especially low-skilled people. The old narratives of "job-makers" and "job-killers" and "unionized labor" are falling short and they are falling short for a reason that no one on either side of the political aisle seems to want to discuss. A "job" is an industrialization concept and we no longer live in an industrial economy.

 What is the evidence for post-industrialization?

1. Most manufactured goods created in the United States from highly mechanized and robotic factories that employ mostly high tech workers who oversee these electronic gadgets. Even companies that employ factory workers have them working side-by-side with robots. The heyday of the factory job is over, even if some factories provide some jobs for a few skilled workers, we will not see 40% of the labor force employed by factories again. It just isn't necessary and it is too expensive.
   
   
2. The rise of e-commuting and the "on-call" nature of many jobs has blurred the lines of the "where" and "when" of a job. Factories were based on time and place. Workers arrived at specific times and they gathered in specific places to accomplish their work. This is less and less true. The "time" is always and the "place" is everywhere.
   
   
3. The original factory workers, as John Green notes in the first video, were mostly women and mostly temporary workers who expected to leave that employment within a few years. This was a good thing because if you worked too long you would probably die or become disabled as conditions were dismal. But with the rise of unions came job security and for a couple of generations, mostly men, who worked for a large corporation, expected to be there for life and to have a small, but secure, pension available in old age. The day of The Organization Man has long since passed. So called "job-hopping" is on the rise, with some estimates that so-called "Gen-Yers" will have 15 to 20 jobs in their lifetime. The concept of loyalty on both sides of the employment equation is gone.
   
   
4. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle-classes are disappearing or surviving only via debt. This trend is worldwide, but it is of particular concern in the United States. Such inequalities in the distribution of wealth resembles feudalism more than it does democracy or free markets. In fact, more than a few analysts are talking about our current political economy as "neofeudalism." 

"Our passivity has resulted... in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics."--Chris Hedges, Journalist, quoted by John W. Whitehead in The Age of Neo-feudalism: A Government of the Rich, by theRich and for the Corporations. 

I've been doing a lot of thinking in the past few years, especially living in the margins of the current economy, holding multiple part-time jobs and/or contracting for services and running a small micro-enterprise. I am coming to the belief that the sociological imagination could be applied to this history and its seemingly inevitable outcomes (note that the current situation is not the first time such inequalities in wealth distribution have occurred in our short history of both democracy and capitalism.) What is emerging in my thinking is a long project (either a book or a documentary, or both) that will sociologically examine several things at once and how they interplay with each other to create our current situation:

• the influence of the tax code on culture and culture on the tax code;
• our understandings of "work" including Weber's Protestant Work Ethic and how it continues to play into the wealth inequalities that exist and are growing;
• the long history of central banks as the new feudal lords under which we labor;
• and how organizational theory, group dynamics and specifically, a better understanding of the nature of group stability would be key to changing things for the better without resorting to outdated dichotomies like "socialism v. capitalism" or "democracy v. totalitarianism." 

In short, I think the time has come to think outside the box and I hope to find a way to do that. 

I leave you with a quote from Muhammad Yunis, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work on microlending, asset development and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. This radical approach to addressing poverty through wealth development rather than "jobs" is an excellent place to start:

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see

His big idea: "Poverty is unnecessary." 

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