Whether you choose to put away the seersucker suit for the season is up to you, but Labor Day was established in 1894 to celebrate the “contributions and achievements of American workers” in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when working conditions were so dangerous and horrific as to be unfathomable to today’s worker. And thankfully, legislation changed much of that, between the Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and later the Civil Rights Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act and Equal Pay Act, workers have enjoyed vast improvements over the past century.
But what about now? According to MIT prof David Autor, while pandemic benefits have played a role in the current labor shortage, the rules is insignificant. The lack of affordable child care has also been raised as a reason, but that, too, doesn’t empirically bear out as the cause of the problem. He posits another rationale.
Let’s entertain a third possibility. People’s valuation of their own time has changed: Americans are less eager to do low-paid, often dead-end service and hospitality work, deciding instead that more time on family, education and leisure makes for a higher standard of living, even if it means less consumption.
If the lack of enthusiasm for bad jobs lasts, does this bode ill for the U.S. economy? The answer is no — and here’s why: The U.S. doesn’t have a job quantity problem; instead, it has a job quality problem.
People no longer want to work in lousy jobs? It’s unclear that anyone ever aspired to work in a lousy job, but they did so because the failure to do so had consequences. You didn’t eat, for one. Autor contends that this is a rebalancing of priorities, from “less consumption” to a better quality of life.
For the past 40 years, our economy has generated vast numbers of low-paid, economically insecure jobs with few prospects for career advancement. On almost every measure — pay, working environment, prior notice of job termination, and access to paid vacation, sick time and family leave — non-college-educated U.S. workers fare worse than comparable workers in other wealthy industrialized nations.
And there is no question but that our economy relies on these low-paid jobs, from mowing the lawn to serving your burger to picking the apples from the trees. In basic compensation theory, the proper wage paid is the amount necessary to get sufficient competent labor required to perform a function. If you have a job that no one will take, you’re paying too little. If you have a job where you get ten applicants for every position, you’re paying too much. Benefits and working conditions offset to some degree wages, as do unquatifiable factors such as personal satisfactin and fulfillment, although some jobs, garbage collector for example, rarely turn out to be as personally fulfilling as one might expect.
But someone has to collect the garbage, even though it’s prospects for career advancement are limited. Other jobs which require neither education nor skills, are fungible whether we like it or not. For people who lack education and skills, it’s pretty good that these jobs exist. For young people who aren’t working part of their career path, but to make a buck for the moment, low-paying jobs are a gift, for without them there would be no opportunity.
The filling of low-paying, insecure, futureless jobs relied on people needing to survive. Autor takes for granted that people’s basic needs are already satisfied such that even the uneducated and unskilled can survive without working. While he dismisses pandemic relief, including the eviction moratorium (a penny save, you know), as the cause, he offers no explanation for how people who don’t work manage to eat or have a roof over their head. And many don’t, of course. Are they disinterested in work such that they could find a home or are they frozen out of even low-paying jobs by their circumstances?
Couldn’t raising wages spur employers to automate many low-paid service jobs? Yes — but that’s not bad. There’s no future in working the fry station at White Castle. We should welcome the robot that’s now doing that job at some locations. Automating bad jobs has positive consequences for productivity. When employers pay more for human labor, they have an incentive to use it more productively. Otherwise, workers aren’t worth paying for. And one way to use people more productively is to train them. This may be one reason that employers provide more training opportunities in a tightening labor market — something happening now.
What does Autor see them being trained to do? We can’t all have a corner office and write for Salon. In smaller numbers, training is a great incentive. But that’s only as long as there are fulfilling, well-paid jobs to be had. And marginal increases in wages, even if the minimum wage was increased to $15 per hour, wouldn’t make garbage collection more personally deeply fulfilling. But they would make things more expensive.
Don’t higher wages mean higher prices for consumers? Yes. Restaurants and hotels may get a bit pricier, and customer service agents may be more scarce at big box stores. But most of us are workers as well as consumers. Everyday low prices for consumers partly reflect subsistence wages for many workers. And that’s no bargain for the workers whose low pay keeps those prices low.
If wages go up, and prices go up, such that our net buying power remains the same, has anything been accomplished? Ironically, many of the folks who decry the lack of affordable child care so parents to go to work also demand higher wages for child care providers. Math is hard.
At the turn of the 20th Century, children worked 12 hours a day in outrageously unsafe factories or they didn’t eat the next day. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, jobs are going begging this Labor Day as they fail to provide workers with self-actualization and a sufficient wage to tithe the ACLU.
Perhaps they’ll eventually get hungry or cold, or there will be a new “must-have” iPhone with the headphone jack on the side, and they will go back to work. Perhaps they will just get bored when they run out of Netflix zombie shows to watch. Or they will sit on the couch in the basement until they find themselves unable to move, whether from atrophy or an excess of Cheetos bolstered by the body image validation crowd on Insta. Those trillion dollar coins are bound to run out eventually, and not even the sweetest praise of a waiter whose thumb is in your soup is going to keep the customers paying super-size tips.
We’ve come a long way, baby. Happy Labor Day, and there’s nothing wrong with “winter whites.”
Blah,blah, blah…its a HOLIDAY, DAMMIT!….
There’s time for burgers later, Guiterboy.
They talk about people in the low paying jobs getting training and moving up.
Unfortunately, many in that job market can’t be trained to higher levels for various reasons, no matter how much you try.
Reality got in the way of McNamara’s Project 100,000 and it will happen to the current efforts.
Whether they can be trained or not is irrelevant. There are shitty jobs, but they still need to be done. And everybody can’t be the boss.
They can be taught empathy and hugging, and become counselors for all those poor people who are left behind to grow food and fix all the machines and ensure that the utilities keep running. I am sure that their efforts will be well compensated and appreciated by the farmers, fishermen, and techs.
Who says a fisherman can’t be empathetic?
I must applaud your economic literacy. It is a uncommon attainment for those educated in the sixties and seventies, and those educated today know almost nothing of economic principles.
I’m just happy his dentures stayed put as he wheezed out this paean to old man values. He doesn’t usually like tummy rubs, by the way. I’m betting applause is in the same category. And I’m not really asking, but what economic literacy?
I could have lived without the “applause,” but his point about economic literacy is something I think about a lot. Most young people are economic idiots, but they won’t accept the premise until the only business left standing is Amazon. Start a business and then we’ll discuss things like profit.
“O tempora, o mores” sums up your post. These young people you talk about aren’t as ambitious as you’d like to see. They should be cutting throats in business instead of lounging about. Classes in economics aren’t going to help. Maybe talk therapy would work better.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Your mother is sad.
It’s not about “ambition”, by many measures I’ve never been ambitious myself. My work goal in life was to have a job that 1) paid the bills, 2) let me put money away to have a decent retirement, and 3) gave me a little to enjoy life as I went along. I have a trade school degree and by those measures I’ve been successful enough that I am considering if and when I can “retire” early and maybe just take a part time job to fill time and pay for nicer vacations.
It’s about getting up and doing instead of sitting and whining that life is unfair because that interdisciplinary studies degree is almost worthless when trying to find a good career or that the GED you (maybe) got because you were to busy getting high to bother finishing high school doesn’t qualify you to sit in the CEO’s office at McDonalds. Lots of good jobs, and yes a lot more shitty ones, don’t require a collage degree but you have to be willing to get off your ass and work. There is work to be had and to be done if people weren’t to lazy to do it.
Scott, kill this if you want. I just get tired of entitled shits whining about how the world owes them an income to live like the Kardashians when they won’t get off their ass and work.
Shan’t kill it. It needed to be said.
You’re a dime a dozen, LY, just like me. The silver lining in all this is that those who are willing to work should make more and be treated better what with the labor shortages and all. At least those who will benefit will be those who “get off their ass and work” until the robots take over.
Here’s an alternative way to think of it. Those unwilling to work get bupkus and those willing to work get paid. The notion that you need not work if you don’t find the works and benefits “fulfilling” is entirely fine, provided neither you nor your kids want to eat everyday. And if you lack the skills and education to do better, then do whatever you can to make sure your kids enjoy a better life than you do.
I reckon this author doesn’t recognize that advances in AI technology could soon make his job obsolete too. The “robot” could do it faster, with more eloquence and no grammatical or punctuation errors. I hope he has a hobby or something to fall back on.
But when robots do it all, the rest of us can sit home and eat Cheetos. What a glorious world that will be.
OK, I’ll bite. What is it with you and Cheetos?
I’m reliably informed that young people today love Cheetos. I hate them.
As noted by that great poet George Frayne (Commander Cody) from a bygone era which has been made obsolete by the wonders of plant genetics.
“I’m sittin alone, Saturday night, watching the Late Late Show
A bottle of wine, some cigarettes, I got no place to go
Well, I saw your other man today, he was wearing my brand new shoes
And I’m down to seeds and stems again, too
Well, I met my old friend Bob today from up in Bowling Green
He had the prettiest little gal that I’d ever seen
But I couldn’t hide my tears at all ’cause she looked just like you
And I’m down to seeds and stems again, too
Now everybody tells me there’s other ways to get high
They don’t seem to understand, I’m too far gone to try
Now these lonely memories, they’re all I can’t lose
And I’m down to seeds and stems again, too
Well, my dog died just yesterday and left me all alone
The finance company dropped by today and repossessed my home
That’s just a drop in the bucket compared to losing you
And I’m down to seeds and stems again, too
Got the down to seeds and stems again blues.”
I’m one of those low level workers. I’m not ashamed or proud it is what it is.
My observation after many years; too many bosses.
I have seen enough I believe to know that many places have managers/bosses that have to make up things to do as managers. Employees notice this and it does not impress them!
Have a great Labor Day…. it used to be a big deal here in the Detroit area. It’s not anymore.
You raise an important point that I missed, although today is not Dipshit Boss Day. There are a lot of dispshit bosses, too, who would do well to understand that everyone works better and happier when all the laboring oars are rowing in the same direction. But petty people are petty and (apologies to Peter) rise to the level of incompetence.
Once the government gives away enough magic money from the magic money well, everyone will get to ride the cart while the robots pull it.
Kinda makes education and skillz seem pointless when you can just sit on the couch in mommy’s basement and complain.
I think a lot of people missed this part:
“On almost every measure — pay, working environment, prior notice of job termination, and access to paid vacation, sick time and family leave — non-college-educated U.S. workers fare worse than comparable workers in other wealthy industrialized nations.”
And you can add access to healthcare to the list. And overall, this picture is accepted as true.
I’m not an economist but I believe a big part of what makes this possible is that workers above the median pay grade earn less in Europe than in the US. I remember an example from years ago that, in Germany, pay for doctors fell from the equivalent of $300,000 US to $100,000 or less. That’s a hard sell for the governing classes.
The higher incomes are very heavily taxed to pay for the benefits provided the lower, and the lower still are constantly dissatisfied, which is why various European nations are in a constant state of nationwide strikes.
And yet, people choose to emigrate here rather than there. Go figure.
>We can’t all have a corner office and write for Salon
I’m pretty sure Salon has already been taken over by the robots. No way humans can put out that amount of barely coherent garbage.
I would argue just the opposite. No way robots would write such inane drivel. They are not so shameless.
Kinda on topic.
Nancy Pelosi.
“Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”
I’ve read about those economies, they only exist in science fiction or fantasy books and usually come with some serious downsides.
Every few decades or so we hear about some grand new technology that will launch us into a post-scarcity economy. Last time it was nuclear power, the next one is supposed to be viable fusion technology, or asteroid mining or some such. I’ll believe it when I see bigfoot come ’round the mountain riding a rainbow unicorn.
Ronald Reagan.
“There you go again.”
When you enter the labor market don’t complain about the work. Especially if you are young. Your mindset will deform to the point where you don’t believe in any sense of dignity deriving from work.
I quote the philosopher (quite successful) DMX:
“The minute you get too big to mop a floor or wipe a counter, that’s the exact minute you have life f**ked up.”
Are all of these kids getting too big before they even gain any work experience?