That’s the title of a piece (pdf) I wrote in 2003 and published in The Political Edge. On this Labor Day, it’s more true than ever. The way we make the world we live in is seriously broken. There’s a lot of work to do, but mostly we’re not doing it. Then there’s a lot of jobs out there that should be abolished and the work stopped tomorrow! We’d be wealthier as humans, and the planet would be healthier immediately too (banking, insurance, advertising, real estate, military production, shoddy commodity manufacturing instead of making things to last 75 years, etc. etc.) The soaring unemployment rates, the crashing economic production figures, the severe ecological crisis (call it climate chaos, global warming, whatever), endless war and widespread famine and thirst”¦ it’s not rocket science to see that things aren’t right.
The most common demand and solution heard from the so-called “Left,” as well as the more populist strains of the Right, is for Jobs! At the recently held Community Congress in San Francisco, representatives of the Living Wage Coalition and Jobs With Justice were among many who put forth the demand for Jobs (albeit with wages that can support people in this expensive city). Local trade unions in the East Bay are clamoring to build the wildly expensive and completely unneeded Oakland Airport Connector because it will create “jobs.” Big Oil and other transnational corporations are on the bandwagon too, having the gall to launch an Astroturf campaign called “Jobs Not Taxes.” The mainstream liberal left, including the AFL-CIO and a number of Democratic politicians are calling for One Nation Working Together at a big mass rally October 2 in Washington DC, which is supposed to “put America back to work,” as though we’re not working all too much doing idiotic things already!
If you are unemployed, or underemployed, and certainly if you’re underpaid as at least a quarter of the working population of the U.S. earning $9/hour or less is (not to mention the rest of the world where it is even worse), the demand for jobs is misguided at best. In a capitalist economy what we need is a livable income, and to get that we need a radical redistribution of wealth. I read a stat recently that the past two decades’ severe skewing of wealth towards the top has led to the situation where 5,600 families in the U.S. have as much wealth as the bottom 138 million people. (An analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that despite several periods of healthy growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but the top 10 percent of the income ladder — nine out of ten American families — fell by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation. For three decades, economic growth in the United States has gone first and foremost to building today’s modern Gilded Age. The recipients of those gains don’t care about a fully funded Social Security system or a healthy Medicare program — they don’t need them.)
Obviously having a job and some income is better than abject destitution, but it fails to address the deeper issues we face. For many, the urgency and desperation that unemployed people face requires them to demand jobs. Why not demand income ahead of jobs? I suppose it’s because there’s something acceptable and supposedly “dignified” about “earning” your own living, even if most jobs put people into ridiculous situations of doing pointless, or pernicious, or just bad work, in exchange for inadequate wages and often no benefits.
A recent book, The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy by Lisa Dodson, tells heartbreaking stories of people trying to play by the rules, taking low-wage jobs and finding it impossible to make ends meet, especially when their children or elderly parents need care as most do. Dodson interviewed dozens of workers and middle-managers and what she reveals is that at least occasionally there is a well-developed conspiracy to pad workers incomes and reappropriate time and goods, often with the complicity of their front-line bosses (who cannot ethically enforce the rules of the market). It’s fascinating although exasperating too, especially when she’s recounting the interviews with the managers who repeat ad nauseum the casual racism and blame-the-poor mentality that sustains so many self-righteous American attitudes. Overall The Moral Underground dovetails well with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed of a few years ago, wherein she tried to live as a low-wage worker and found herself falling further and further into a debt trap.
