Let’s Not Pivot to Jobs

There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple of weeks - the weeks after the loss of the Democratic “super majority” and with it the likelihood of any meaningful health insurance reform - that Obama’s best political move now is to “pivot” to jobs.  Why so-called progressives would encourage him to do this is beyond me.  In fact, to me it sounds like a Republican wet dream - first, the failure of health insurance reform, and then the failure to bring back jobs, a recipe for a disastrous presidency for sure. 

Liberal economists (especially Paul Krugman) have felt that the stimulus package wasn’t big enough to promote job growth, even if it was big enough to slow job loss.  But perhaps, even a bigger stimulus really couldn’t have promoted job growth in the same way that strategy may have worked in past economies.  In this meltdown whole industries collapsed, leaving millions of workers not just unemployed, but without an employable skill set.  Many disenfranchised workers are mid career, stuck with years of specific industry experience that’s now leaves them both overqualified and under-qualified at the same time.  Many others are entry level, living at home, working in internships and McJobs, unable to obtain career-building work in the first place. 

Economists tend to focus on data, and sometimes fail to fully appreciate the real world, day-to-day, lived experience beyond the numbers.  What jobs would have been created by a bigger stimulus?  I have a friend who worked in the publishing industry; I don’t think her job would have been saved.  The whole industry is disappearing before our very eyes.  She considers herself having “taken early retirement.”  I have many friends who are self-employed.  At what point is there so little business that you go from self-employed to unemployed?  And what’s the lived difference between the two categories, if you have no other skills to trade on anyway?  And eventually almost everyone who can’t find an actual job, gets tired of saying that they’re unemployed, and becomes self-employed.  That’s exactly what my friend who works in publishing did.  This middle ground between unemployed and employed skews the numbers, rendering them an inaccurate measure of what’s happening on the ground.  So much of the job loss has been due to industry transformation that I suspect that middle class jobs would not have been very impacted by more stimulus, even if the numbers camouflage that lived experience.  And this is what Obama promised he was going to turn around - we work harder, we get paid less, we’re tired, fatigued, exhausted and broke.

This brings up another important factor:  workers throughout history have had a tendency to migrate to places where there is work.  Well, for all the talk about borrowers “walking away” from their mortgages, it may not be so easy to leave home in a real estate market where you have to sell short or be foreclosed on to get out.  With ruined credit, and credit an increasingly important factor in securing a job, the lived experience of the majority is that of stasis – there’s nothing to do other than sit tight.  Regardless of numbers and statistics, it’s hard to pull up your bootstraps and move, especially when it means saying goodbye to your only asset for good, and wearing a scarlet letter around town.  I, for one, don’t see how a bigger stimulus would have impacted jobs more than the stimulus we had did.  I have a feeling that the middle path that Obama took was the best available road. 

But the problem is that progressives, including our President, are afraid to tell people the truth:  jobs are not coming back.  Companies operating in the industries in which American workers have skills have benefited from technology and need fewer workers to get the same result.  American businesses are no longer selling products, because they are selling brands.  Producing brands doesn’t require as many hands as making cars.  Technology has turned the playing field topsy-turvy.  From music to publishing from automated farms to outsourced call centers, whole industries have changed their business models from being worker-centered to being technology-centered.  I’m sorry to say it, but no stimulus can change this.

I keep coming back to this fundamental, critical point – there is something very different about the economy we now live within, than the one of our parents’ and grandparents’ time. Back then – and it’s not so far back – but back around the 1960s, a critical transformation got off the ground.  The moving image via the television set increased its potency - screens entered every American home.  The first TV president, Ronald Reagan, was a different breed altogether.  He harnessed the power of the medium to magnify an ideology and make radical changes, deconstructing government and allowing the forces of the market to go unfettered, unchecked, unleashed.  Left to its own devices, the market played dirty tricks and painful games with the lives of everyday Americans.  This moment created a critical breakdown in the meaning of work itself.  Work lost its ability to generate capital.  Instead money took on this role.  Deregulation, technology, and a new set of neoconservative, “show me the money” ethics to make it all okay conspired to get us where we are today:  a world in which companies no longer make profits by exploiting labor, a world in which labor is no longer necessary.

If companies no longer make profits primarily based on exploiting labor, then what will become of the democratic capitalist model of social organization?  Asking this question – and it’s only a question - is like touching the third rail of American culture.  But if we look at how things have changed, and ask what is different today, we must come to this question.  While politicians and bureaucrats are fighting over how big of a stimulus is big enough to “get the numbers up” the lived experience is not going to be impacted no matter how many people leave the job market altogether or change their category to self-employed.  The lived experience of the American middle class -- insecurity, precariousness and exhaustion is simply the day-to-day reality of a changing world, where nothing lies between the haves and the have-nots, where you feel yourself falling and know there is no net.  No jobs bill is likely to change this.  Ultimately, we are going to have to make a tough choice:  either we become a society without a middle class, grounding ourselves in an ethic of individualism and winners and losers, or we are going to have to talk about social programs that will soften this reality.