Recently, I read an interesting article about how jobs are becoming obsolete. The author argues that with technology, productivity is up so we don’t need the kind of jobs we needed back in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution.
While I agree that some jobs (like bank tellers) are becoming passé, I cannot believe that technology has become so proficient that we will not require people to perform some jobs in the future. Health care, for one, requires a human touch, unless you want your colonoscopy done by RoboPlungr.
The author does acknowledge that is not good news for the millions looking for employment. I certainly believe many unemployed people read this article and thought, “FML!” The author talks about lost jobs as if actual human beings did not perform those tasks. Like those people were ghosts.
With fewer jobs, our society requires a new way to exchange goods and services, the author contends. People produce a service somebody else or a company wants. They then exchange that product or service for something they need. So, in other words, in this Utopian society, I can exchange a chocolate cake for a Chevy? Not so sure about that. (Too be fair, the author, Douglas Rushkoff, doesn’t predict what this new jobless society will ultimately look like.)
What I am sure about is that our job-based economy has been altered, probably forever, as the result of decades of changes in how we work, aided, of course, by technology. It’s also the result of the weakening of unions and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. At least with manufacturing, someone without an education could get a job, retire with a pension and stand firmly in the middle class. Now, only those rich to begin with can advance.
This country’s economy has historically thrived when we built things. Now, we build nothing; hence, we don’t export anything. Our economy is based on consumerism and the goods and services consumers require (that is, when they have the money to buy). Yet it seems like we are servicing only a small, upper stratum of society that afford those goods and services.
Every day on my way to work I pass by abandoned and graffiti-smudged factories standing side by side with luxury apartment and condo buildings, some of which were built using the existing structure of an old manufacturing plant. It’s a poignant commentary on how our society has devolved from an industrialized economy to one that revolves around a monied class that desires the design elements—hardwood floors, brick walls, high ceilings and windows—in those once-thriving factories. They are the only ones who can afford them. Sometimes, I can almost see the ghosts of lunch-pail-toting working men emerge from those empty factories, clad in their stiff-cotton work pants and open-necked shirts with rolled ups sleeves.
I’m not romanticizing a past that looks better in hindsight than it was in reality. Perhaps it wasn’t a sustainable economic model and was destroyed by the same people working within it. It’s just sad that way of life is gone forever.
Now, we’ve shifted to an economy based on financial services, a rollercoaster ride of an industry. It’s no coincidence that our economy began to have more mood swings than a menopausal woman off her hormone meds when Wall Street took over.
What needs to happen, and this will take decades to evolve, is new training for new technologies that, hopefully, put people back to work. But it will take a long time for our educational system to catch up and devise the training necessary for those jobs, whatever those may be.
In the meantime, it’s inevitable that our social safety net will need to expand. More and expanded jobless benefits, training funds for the long-term unemployed and increased Social Security and Medicare money in the future to financially support all those 50-somethings tossed out of work with a mortgage to pay, kids in college and zero retirement funds.
Yet the rich and the money-hoarding corporations don’t want to pay any more taxes to support those programs. Well, we all might have to. What we need are not tax cuts or increases, but tax fairness. Let’s start by getting rid of some stupid tax loopholes, like the ones for corporate jets.
How those taxes will be assessed is another matter. Do we increase taxes on income or on assets (which don’t count as income)? That’s for the politicians to decide. With the lobbyists big business and the wealthy can afford, it’s hard to believe taxes will be distributed fairly.
Which brings me to the protests on Wall Street. I’m of two minds on this. I think it’s great people are finally speaking out against corporate greed and the growing gap between rich and poor in this country. Our poverty rate is increasing at the same time Wall Street corporations are raking in record profits.
But most of the protestors seem to be young people looking for their “Vietnam” moment. I wonder, too, if they are mostly spoiled rich kids who can’t find a job after party-filled and parent-funded college years and are now upset because, as one Facebook friend said, daddy cut them off. If they were offered a six-figure job on Wall Street most would jump at the chance and switch sides so they can live in a downtown loft, far from the people who have been truly hurt the most by corporate greed: the millions of laid-off workers who have no voice and don’t have the time to protest because they are too busy trying to find work, pointlessly attending job fairs, and attempting to make ends meet.
What exactly are they protesting anyway? That Wall Streets make too much money (it always has) and has yet to do anything with that money, like create jobs that would help the middle class? Are they protesting economic inequality? Is this class warfare? A way for the left to counterbalance the Tea Party Movement on the right? Do they want a redistribution of wealth? Good luck with that. And from what I’ve seen, most of the protestors are, dare I say it, white. Where’s the diversity?
And where is the real anger? To these protestors, it’s a party, a way to show their social networking prowess. A more apt representation of middle class ire was the protests in Wisconsin when the governor tried to cut union benefits. And where did that get them?
Yet I think one of the reasons there has been relatively little anger about Wall Street greed is that there is a social safety in place that has helped the jobless through long stretches of unemployment. However, if that safety net is cut, and it surely will be, there will more anger. It’s unhealthy for a civic society to have a small, rich ruling class and a large, economically deprived underclass. At some point, those forces will clash and it may not be pretty or as relatively peaceful as the protests now on Wall Street.
Yet, count me cynical, but I don’t see much changing. Wall Street is probably laughing at the protestors, all but putting a sign out that says: “We don’t give a s**t.”
People who have jobs don’t care about the jobless and the politicians sure don’t. We’re seen as losers who are a drag on resources.
To Wall Street fat cats, the protestors are nothing more than an inconvenience on their way to their corner offices, A commentator I once heard said it perfectly: Wall Street’s job is to make money for investors, not job creation. President Obama has a hard sell on his jobs bill. With politicians of both parties beholden to Wall Street cash, it’s doubtful true financial reform will happen.
All this points to the fact we’ve become a nation of hypocrites. We want bountiful social services, but no one wants to pay the taxes that make those programs possible. We want to attack the rich, but we want to be rich like them. And how many times do we hear politicians and others tout their working class roots, yet they are part of the same system that has systematically destroyed the working middle class.
We scream “No blood for oil,” except when that oil fuels our SUVs. We don’t want one political party to control our government, yet we complain when the warring sides—which we put in place—can’t stop fighting each other long enough to get things done.
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