The headline is taken from the New York Times article quoted below, but I thought it fitting to keep. The article talks about how wages should be much higher, by various historical measures, and how the vast majority of workers have basically been cheated out of wages. But there’s another point that the headline could refer to: in the (hopefully) long span of human history, “jobs” as currently conceived could end up being a historical anomaly. Someday we may not have to “work.” Nevertheless, addressing more pressing concerns…
The immediate Post-War era was a unique event in human history so far. To those who survived it, it was clear that World War II happened in part because power had concentrated too much: anyone who wasn’t part of the elite was treated as expendable, and the downtrodden masses threw in behind anyone that promised them a better deal. In some countries that meant warmongering autocrats.
The Great Compromise that followed the war laid down a path to ensuring peace, through ensuring a large middle class: much higher taxes on the wealthy, to constrain their power and pay for new social support services so fewer people would fall into permanent poverty; and the deliberate support and creation of middle skill/middle wage jobs, so one’s wealth was largely determined by how hard you wanted to work (well, if you were white; extreme racism was still pervasive). This arrangement lasted the better part of two decades, and the economy flourished. In fact, economists of the time looked at the trend and speculated that by the new millennium, the country would be so rich that everyone would only have to work a few hours a day to maintain a middle class lifestyle. But that assumption rested on the fact that wages for all jobs were growing with national productivity (as they had for the basically the whole course of human history). Unfortunately, that wouldn’t last.
Almost as soon as the new policies were implemented, greedy sociopaths began undermining it, slowly building power and rigging the legal system and economy in their favor once again. We’ve had steady economic growth ever since (excepting a few recessions, and the big housing bubble, which were temporary setbacks), but during the 70s, wages stopped rising along with national production. While productivity has continued to grow, profits have steadily gone to fewer and fewer at the very top, instead of being broadly shared as either higher wages or more free time. The rich grow richer, and everyone else slowly sinks deeper and deeper into debt, as wages aren’t keeping up with inflation.
No-one should wonder why our political system is so screwed up! Power (money) is again concentrated in too few hands. Some of them just don’t care about the rest of us and are fine if people die because they’re poor. But even those who do care can’t see the big picture (because we’re all just tiny humans, in our own worlds), nor should they be the only ones making decisions about how to handle all of the tough, complex issues. If we’re going to have a vibrant, free society, we’re going to have to literally spread the wealth around, and an obvious place to start is restoring the link between national wealth and wages, including boosting the minimum wage to its historical level.
Longer-term, though, we’ll still run into major issues if we remain wedded to the notion that traditional “low/middle/high skill” job categories should determine the level of one’s wage. Food for thought, for those skeptical of something even as simple as raising the minimum wage: what happens if/when robots are able to perform most menial and middle-skill jobs?
Some numbers on the decline of wages, from Matthew Desmond in the New York Times:
These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
…Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.
…
America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”