Dave Johnson: Fixing Jobs: Normal Isn't An Option
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The \Jobs Summit\ is Thursday. Are they going to try to get
things back to normal? I hope not!
\Normal\ isn\'t an option anymore, because it is what led to where
we are.
The financial sector bailout is based on the idea that things will
get back to \normal\ if the credit machine is restarted and consumers
and businesses are able to borrow more. The stimulus is based on the
idea that the economy is an engine that runs smoothly and just needs
to be restarted and things will get back to \normal.\ While we wait
for \normal\ to return the government is stepping in to make up the
slack in demand, and to help those hit hardest by the downturn. (Never
mind that COBRA subsidies start expiring as you read this and
unemployment has been extended and extended.)
The idea that you can get the financial sector and the economy back
to \normal\ desperately assumes that a sustainable \normal\ existed in
the structure of the 20th-century western economy. It assumes that
there really is an \invisible hand\ that takes care of things without
human intervention. It assumes that perpetual growth of consumers and
their incomes and of consumables could just go on and on.
This all assumes that \normal\ was OK. This is such a nice,
comforting idea. It is wrong.
What if that \normal\ system really was unsustainable and that is
what led to its collapse? What if there was a limit to how many jobs
can be outsourced, wages cut, factories closed, people born, trees cut
down, fish taken from the sea, nutrients taken from the soil, water
taken from the aquifers? And, of course, the big one: what if there
is a limit to how much carbon can be put into the atmosphere?
If people and nature and markets finally reached a limit, and things
broke down -- what then? What then is we need to give up on returning
to that \comfortable\ dream and get to work designing a sustainable
system that benefits and respects all of us and the planet we rode in
on.
We need a restructuring, a redesign, a new direction. Our \normal\
system has turned into a low-wage, everything-to-the-top economy and
this must be restructured.
The Restructuring
The core of what needs to be restructured is that we have a system
where people with power and wealth benefit when they figure out how to
cause other people to receive lower pay and benefits -- or just lose
their jobs. The incentives come down to this: if someone can figure
out how to cut your pay and benefits or just get rid of you
(\eliminate your position\) they get to pocket what you were making,
and you get nothing. If you don\'t own the company you\'re out of
luck.
Now that is a perverse incentive if there ever was one. (Another
perverse incentive: People with power and wealth benefit when they
\externalize\ costs like environmental or health damages. If they
figure out how to hurt you or the planet without having to pay the
costs of healing those harms, they get to pocket the savings.)
In the past this perverse incentive was mitigated by people banding
together in governments and/or unions and forcing the wealthy and
powerful to share. But modern marketing science has been successful
at making people believe that government and unions are bad for them.
This was also mitigated by the ongoing need to find people to do the
jobs that needed to get done. But with continual improvements in
technology this need is reduced. For example, here is a story about a
factory that builds large-screen TVs without any employees.
Also, this perverse incentive assumes an infinite pool of customers
to sell to, ignoring that the transaction of benefiting from
eliminating a job also eliminates a customer. But modern business has
become so efficient at job elimination that this comes into play. Who
will be able to buy theTVs that the employee-eliminating factory
makes, if all the employees are eliminated and have no income?
Three decades ago productivity and wages decoupled. Where wages used
to always increase along with productivity Reagan initiated an era
where that increase was no longer shared, and the benefits of our
economy now increasingly flow to the few at the top. Now they have
all the money, and everyone else is loaded with debt from just trying
to keep things \normal.\
You might be lucky enough to still have a job today but you probably
haven\'t had a raise for a long time. And if you did rising costs of
health care, etc. took it back. But even if you are ahead, what about
tomorrow? Do you have a job that absolutely can\'t be outsourced or
replaced by technology? If you think so I have news for you, millions
of newly-unemployed can see that you have a rare necessary job, and
they\'re all going to try to get it from you.
So good luck with the Jobs Summit. But if we don\'t hear about a
fundamental restructuring that involves changing basic ideas of what
work means and who \owns\ the companies and shares the wealth in a
technologically advanced, overpopulated and overproducing world, well,
I won\'t think we\'re hearing the answers we need to hear. Put more
simply, my example of the employee-eliminating TV factory is becoming
more and more real. But certainly something can be done with a
situation where there are plenty of TVs being made, and everyone has a
lot of free time because there aren\'t enough jobs. How obvious is
the answer to that?
Yes, I\'ll be posting ideas so check back for future posts on this.
In the meantime please leave a comment with your ideas.
This post originally appeared at Campaign for America\'s Future (CAF)
at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America
project. I am a Fellow with CAF.
This news story was reported by Huffington Post 4 minutes ago
* Read the full article at Huffington Post:
http://bit.ly/4NqMAM
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