Bleak Sept. Jobs Growth Report No
Surprise
Edward Renner
“The
Jetsons are a family residing in Orbit City…George Jetson lives with his family
in the Skypad Apartments: his wife Jane is a
homemaker, their teenage daughter Judy attends Orbit High School, and their early-childhood son
Elroy attends Little Dipper School. Housekeeping is seen to by a robot maid, Rosie, which handles chores not otherwise rendered trivial by
the home's numerous push-button Space Age-envisioned
conveniences.”
Wikipedia, August 2015
The low level of job
creation and lack of gains in hourly pay for private-sector workers after the
financial crisis should not come as a surprise to anyone. We need to stop thinking
that private-sector job creation is the path to an economic recovery. Instead,
we need to be talking about the distribution of work and wealth in the economy
of the future; this is the path to a sustainable recovery.
Remember George Jetson from the 1962 TV series, with his
driverless car and his one-hour per day, two days a week job? Then, the
expectation was that benefits of technology would be felt by everyone. Everyone
would have more leisure time, more happiness and stronger families. We’d all
experience a New Renaissance of art and culture. The future was going to be less
work and more play, and it was only one lifetime away!
Although it was never
made clear when in the future the Jetson’s lived, it is now clear we are on the
verge of actually making that transition from the present to the future. Today,
cars can park themselves and Google has experimental driverless cars on the
California highways. Robots like George Jetson’s Rosie have already started to
replace workers. But, most important of all, we are well on the way toward the
end of work as we know it.
The increased productivity resulting
from technology will continue to eliminate jobs and reduce labor cost for each
article produced and every type of service delivered. Pumping our own gas,
using ATMs and auto-checkouts are just the beginning. The elimination of entire
occupational careers in the immediate future will be just as true for jobs requiring
higher education and technical skills as those requiring less education and
simple skills.
At the high end, more than half of all higher education
faculty are now part-time. These adjunct professors get paid by the course and
do not have job security or benefits. A report from the University of
California based on U.S. census data found that 25% of adjuncts received some
sort of public assistance, such as Medicaid, food stamps, cash welfare or
Earned Income Tax Credits. This highly educated group is now among the working
poor.
At the other extreme are health, homecare and fast food jobs,
paying at or near minimum wages. Half of these workers are also on some form of
public assistance, similar to Adjunct Professors. To qualify for these subsides
a family’s income must be below an eligibility criterion. For the school lunch
program – which last year served over 30 million children -- it is 130% of the
poverty line. Today, someone would need to work 63 hours a week at minimum wage
for 52 weeks to earn the $23,850/year required to support a family of four at
the poverty line. But, a family of four cannot live on that amount of money
This elusive search for an economic recovery from the
financial crisis of 2008 has presented us with the opportunity for a real
choice: We may either continue on the current economic path of fiscal
austerity, tax cuts, low interest rates and deficit spending intended to
stimulate private sector corporate growth to create more jobs, or we may chose
the political alternative of creating a public-works, social-development path for
actually making the transition into a future that would fulfill the
expectations that inspired the Jetsons TV series in 1962.
If we continue on the current path, the aging faculty will
never be replaced. The next level of savings is for a few elite universities
and well funded information technology companies to use the new electronic
communication capacities to create high quality practical courses that can be
administered locally by low-paid facilitators. When we reach this point,
information and knowledge increasingly will be a commodity under the control of
those who own it.
For the fast food
worker the future is no better. They are constantly reminded that they are
lucky to have a job at all. There is now a commercially available iPad point of
sale system that allows a credit card payment at the table. You pre-pay your
order from the online menu and a runner delivers your food. In a restaurant in
Japan, the runner is a robot who looks remarkable similar to Rosie.
The
profit from the increased productive per hour of human labor will continue to
go into the pockets of those who own the knowledge and information responsible
for the technology, not to those who apply it.
In the US, the top one-tenth of 1% now have as much wealth
as the bottom 90%; this is similar to just before the great Depression of 1929.
All of the gains in prosperity of the middle class following the end of WW II
have now been reclaimed by very wealthy. We need to find an approach more
appropriate for 2015 than 1945; the economic growth that put people to work
following the war is not a 21st Century solution. Today,
environmental constraints, globalization and post-industrialization technology
will limit private-sector job creation and wage growth in the US.
Currently, we are once again creating an economy in which
most of the people have little money to spend. Unless we reverse the current
strategy, the economic engine will stall, creating hardship and social unrest
as it did before. However, choosing the alternative political path of
public-sector social development will require a radical change in how we think
about the distribution of work and wealth, and about the economy of the future.
The diminishing amount of private-sector work will have to
be shared. In the short-term, to replace the lack of traditional job growth and
inadequate hourly wages, public-works projects can provide meaningful employment
to create the infrastructure required for a new energy efficient green economy
of tomorrow. The New Deal, after all, was the start of the way out of the great
depression of 1929. In the long-term, public-sector entitlements,
compensations, responsibilities and civic activities will have to expand to
fill our social needs, to occupy our time and to constructively engage our
minds. Sports, recreational facilities, music, art, hobbies and civic
participation will become the new social fabric to replace roads, bridges and
other physical definitions of human progress
.
However, for this to happen in the economy of the future, a
much larger proportion of the profits from information and knowledge must fall
to those who apply it, not to those who own it. Simply put, the accumulating wealth
from information and knowledge must increasing belong in the public domain,
rather than a commodity for personal and corporate financial gain. Redefining
the purposes to be served by wealth is a social value to be implemented through
the democratic political process. At any given time,the nature of the economy is a
function of our social beliefs and political choices.
To actually make such a transition to the Jetson’s Utopia, the
role and functions of government needs to be much different in the future than
they are today. Perhaps the most mind altering change will be the necessity of
expanding, not reducing personal entitlements. We need to believe that a
social, not economic, fabric should be the basis for describing the human
condition. A starting point for making a gradual transition to this future
economy could be the introduction of a mandatory 40-hour maximum workweek at a
realistic living wage as the minimum, thus sharing the existing work and
creating a more inclusive economy.
Life in this alternative future will be no less
busy, just very different. The concept of a balanced life not dominated solely
by economic values has other precedents
Manfred Max-Nerf, a third world economist and university
professor, worked with the Peace Corps. He tells the story of a village where
10 women would each spend the whole day making one basket. The Peace Corp
volunteers showed the women how they could make 20 baskets a day if they
specialized their tasks and formed a production line. When the volunteers
return several months later the women were using the new production methods,
but still only making 10 baskets a day. When asked why, they replied: “Now we
have so much more time to spend with our children.”
The women in the village did not necessarily lack
industriousness, they may simply have used good judgment. Our current obsession
that the sole purpose of information and knowledge is to drive gains in corporate
profitability may not be industriousness, it may be simply be a matter of bad
judgment. In its most basic sense, the new lifestyle in the village enabled by
the application of technology is fundamentally similar to the anticipated life-style
for the Jetsons, all within the time frame of a single life time – that of the
Millennials.
The shift over hundreds of centuries from land and resources
as the source of new wealth, to information and knowledge in the 21st
Century, provides us with the political opportunity to define this new source
of wealth as a public resource, not as private property. Politically,
establishing knowledge as open-source and public would allow human progress to
be measured as improvements in the human condition rather than as GDP units of economic
growth.
By choosing a public rather than private-sector strategy for
personal economic security, traditional work as we know it will no longer need
to dominate our life and define our sense of self. What an exciting time to be
alive, simply by starting to live in the future tense.
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