The Jobs Question

Work Is A Human Right

BY WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Pretty much everybody understands at some level that the question of jobs is at the heart of America’s politics today. An old world of stable, reasonably well paid jobs in manufacturing (stuff processing) and in corporate or government bureaucracies (information processing) is passing away. What comes next is up in the air, but as things stand we see growing insecurity, inequality and a darker outlook for youth.

The argument about how to address the jobs question is the single political issue that has the most to do with how the country will develop for the next twenty years. Political disputes over hot button social policy issues like gay marriage or affirmative action often get more attention, but underneath the noise it is the question of jobs that will shape the way our institutions and policies develop. After all, creating the best possible conditions for large numbers of Americans to make good livings and achieve their personal goals engages the electorate’s attention year in and year out. Scandals and controversies come and go, even long wars come to an end sometime, but in times like ours when people aren’t sure that the economy will allow them to make a good living, the job question never really goes away.

But if the debate over jobs is central, it is also confused. As a nation, we haven’t thought very deeply about what an information economy will look like, much less thought about what kinds of government policies can help or hinder the growth of an information-based middle class.

There seem to be two main kinds of confusion at work: the widget fallacy and a skewed idea about what work is and how it relates to human life overall.

The widget fallacy is the idea that only the production of concrete objects really matters. It leads many people to deny that mass prosperity under an information economy is even possible. For this crowd, if you aren’t bashing metal in a noisy place, you aren’t really working. If America isn’t “making things,” these people say, the economy will wither and die.

That may be true, but the jobs question isn’t about whether “America” is making things, but about whether people or machines are making the things “America” or any other country makes. You can have, indeed we have now, a healthy industrial economy that doesn’t create many jobs because factories increasingly use robots and computers rather than human beings. There are going to be fewer and fewer people in the widget works even as widget production hits all time highs. The world’s factories are going to be spewing out widgets like nobody’s business in the next generation, but there won’t be many people involved.

This inevitably means that when we talk about the jobs of the future we aren’t talking about jobs in the widget works. There will still be some factory jobs, just as two percent of American workers still grow food, but manufacturing will never again employ one third of the American workforce or anything close to it. 

Because manufacturing jobs have been well paid and many service jobs (like flipping burgers) are not, the collapse of the manufacturing job market is often seen as leading to an inevitable and permanent decline in living standards for American workers. For widget fetishists, this is pretty obvious. Jobs that aren’t ‘real’ can’t possibly pay much because they don’t add real value. From this perspective, a world in which most people aren’t “making things” in factories, will be one in which most people don’t create much if any value and therefore they won’t earn much pay. From this point of view, most of us will be flipping burgers and serving fries when the singularity hits, road kill on the information highway.

Widget fetishists wring their hands pretty elegantly from time, but they have no practical solutions to offer. Just as all the efforts to save the family farm were doomed to fail once most family farms stopped making economic sense, so any effort to build the economy around human manufacturing jobs in first world will run aground. Too many of these jobs are too vulnerable either to low wage foreign competition or to automation and those realities aren’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that all these jobs are going to disappear tomorrow, and there are things we can do that support the development and retention of the existing jobs base. The ‘insourcing’ of manufacturing won’t bring back the 1970s, but hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs can still be created. For some time to come, “brown jobs” in oil and gas and associated industries can help support the middle class and ease the transition to a new kind of economy.  Even after the housing bubble, it remains the case that homebuilding for a new generation can provide a lot of jobs.

These jobs will not undergird the economy or the middle class long term, but they have their place and it is important that we make the transition to the new economy in the most favorable possible circumstances. Policymakers should not be so carried away by the new economy that they forget the old; America needs to be firing on all cylinders going forward and economic transitions of this magnitude in any case work themselves out over decades and generations rather than a couple of presidential terms.

But caveat all the caveats and except all the exceptions, and you are still left with a tough truth: jobs in the widget works (and clerical and even professional information processing jobs that are the white collar equivalent of making widgets) can’t create the future of the American middle class.

There is another mistake people make about the nature of work that inhibits creative thought about the jobs question. For thousands of years most work was pretty laborious and, much of the time, unpleasant. Carrying buckets of night soil out to the rice paddies every morning is not most peoples’ idea of a good time. Even as mechanization reduced the amount of backbreaking labor in the world of agriculture, the rise of the dirty and dangerous factories of the industrial age reinforced the connection of work with dirty, horrible and degrading activity that breaks the body, dulls the mind, and keeps the worker in a state of anxiety and dependence incompatible with the full expression of human potential.

Building on a tradition that has roots in both Chinese and Greek antiquity (Aristotle and Confucius both believed that a certain leisure and elevation were necessary for the full cultivation of human potential), the thinkers and social critics behind progressive, blue model society divided the world into two quite different camps. Work was a Darwinian sphere of competition and aggression set among the dark, Satanic mills; innocent wives (“hearth angels” to our Victorian forbears) and virginal children populated the clean and happy suburbs where all was sweetness and light.

It is not hard to understand what made them think in this way. In the 1890s, conditions for workers in European and North American manufacturing looked something like life in Bangladesh today. Factory workers routinely worked 14 hour days six or even seven days per week. Young children were at the mills instead of in school. Factories were dark, noisy, and as polluted as anything you would find today in China. There were no safety and fire inspections in most plants; plant fires like the tragedy in Bangladesh were common here. Wages were so low that few working people could save; without unemployment insurance, disability insurance or old age pensions, workers lived hard, insecure and dismal lives.

People looked at this and could not see work as anything but a blight. Progress from this perspective is almost identical to liberation from work; it is about shrinking and ultimately erasing the dark world of work so that all can frolic in the groves of consumption. Nothing was more common in the mid-twentieth century than for reformers and utopians to dream about the ‘end of work’ and the ‘leisure society’.  In a 1930 essay  (“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”) that has been getting some play on the internet lately , John Maynard Keynes, the Great Blue Prophet, predicts that as technologically assisted affluence grows, work will just wither away.

Given the rising productivity of humanity based on the increase of technological knowhow and the availability of more capital to invest in using it, Keynes suggests, humanity is on the verge of solving its “economic problem.” Looking 100 years or so ahead of 1930 he predicts that output per capita will be so high, and automation so well developed, that everyone will have enough of the necessities of life that work will gradually disappear. This is revolutionary, says Keynes; humanity is making its escape from the human condition as it has been known since prehistoric times.

Keynes’ vision of the age of leisure saw two kinds of ‘work’. Most work was toilsome and degrading, though practically anybody could do it. The other kind was ennobling and fulfilling: singing grand opera, painting or writing masterpieces. The trouble, he felt, was that most people don’t have the talent for interesting work. Once the world no longer needs the labor of the untalented masses for survival, the shlubs have no work to do. They lie about listlessly, unable to make good use of their free time, watching the talented tenth create, but condemned to be spectators in the game of life.

Nietzsche connoisseurs and Fukuyama readers will have noted something interesting here; Keynes’ vision of post-industrial man is very much like Nietzsche’s vision of the Last Man, and Keynes’ understanding of the end of economics is largely the same as Alexandre Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s end of history. The purpose of history has been fulfilled, the great economic problem solved, but deprived of the challenge and drama of meaningful events and real challenges to overcome, humanity will become rather dull.

The widget fundamentalists and the Keynesian visionaries agree that the mass of humanity has no meaningful economic function beyond the brute labor necessary to wrest a living from reluctant nature. Once a certain stage of development has been reached, they have no further economic role to play. Keynesians and widget fans also agree that since most people won’t have jobs but will need incomes, there must be large transfer payments to make the economy of the future work. The surplus created by the workerless corporations and the handful of talented humans still able to function effectively will have to be distributed to the rest of the population. The information economy will be the greatest and most comprehensive welfare state ever seen. The economy will be large enough to support very large entitlement programs, and the majority of the population will rely on those payments as its chief if not only means of support.

From this perspective, incredibly influential in the shaping of modern progressive consciousness, the core task of politics is to ensure that as the surplus grows in size and becomes concentrated in ownership, the state spreads that surplus around. It can do this by legislating better working conditions, higher wages and earlier retirement; it can also do it by progressive taxation on profits with the funds gained in that way to be spent on entitlements for a majority that would otherwise be left behind. For progressives who embrace these ideas, the transfer state must inevitably grow as the economy develops; the purpose of the political process is to make sure that this happens.

This vision is not wholly wrong; twentieth century progressives were absolutely right to insist that as the economy reached an appropriate level of development, conditions for workers had to improve, social goals (like the conservation of parks and the provision of clean water and air) needed to be reached, and the extremes of poverty and insecurity that characterized earlier stages of industrialization should no longer be tolerated.

But the progressives were wrong about both the nature and the future of work, and those errors today are making it harder to realize the promise of the information economy. The next stage of prosperity is not going to be about wholesale job destruction compensated by growing transfer payments; if we try that route we will find it leads into a dead end.

To understand the place of work in human life, it’s useful to drop Aristotle and consult Genesis. That ancient work may not be a good guide to paleontology or astrophysics, but its insights into the human condition remain unsurpassed. When God creates Adam, he sets him into the Garden of Eden and gives him a mission. Adam is to tend the garden, naming and ordering its animals and plants, and, like God, to express himself in creative engagement with the world. Later, when God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, God cursed human work: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee… In the sweat of they face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” (Gn 3:17-19)

Work, in other words, has a dual nature. Laborious, soul-killing toil and drudgery is often part of work but it is not what work is ultimately all about. Curse aside, work is an essential aspect of human nature. When people speak about the right to work, they aren’t just talking about the right to earn an income. They are talking about the right of all of us to take our place in the common enterprise of human life. To be shut away from work is to be marginalized in the most destructive way. There are few things worse for human beings than to feel useless.

That said, the industrial age was an age when work was particularly alienating and depressing. Few large populations have ever been expected to devote so much of their lives to such intrinsically alienating and belittling tasks as Fordist industrial workers on the assembly lines of 20th century factories. Peasants, by contrast, however heavily taxed and exploited, worked at a variety of tasks over the course of a single day and even more over the year. Their work had plenty of toil and sweat in it, but it was also closer in some ways to the Edenic ideal than was industrial work. This is why so many people saw the Industrial Revolution as a step backward from the standpoint of human happiness.

When thinking about the future of jobs during the Information Revolution, it’s important to remember that the drive to work is embedded in human nature rather than in economic scarcity. Human beings don’t just work because they want to get paid so they won’t freeze and starve in the dark; they want to make meaningful contributions to the societies in which they live, and they want to be recognized and esteemed for the contributions they make to the common good.

There is a horrible snobbery lurking beneath the idea that most people will not be able to find meaningful work when the age of scarcity ends. Once the working classes aren’t needed to dig coal anymore, in this view, there is nothing to be done for the mass of mankind than to sit them in front of the TV on a comfy couch with a big bag of chips. They are good for nothing else.

This is a premise which any serious theist or humanist must reject. If we believe that every human being has a unique real worth, we must also believe that every human being has a contribution to make. Keynes rather snidely remarks that few people have the talent to live creative lives; writing about the difficulty many will have adjusting to lives without toil he warns of the intense boredom that most will suffer.  “Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

Actually, a good many more of us can sing than Keynes thought; it’s just that life in the coal mines and the factories means that many people haven’t had the same chances to develop their talents that a son of privilege like Keynes did.

Thomas Gray showed a greater understanding of the vast untapped human potential all around us in his “Elegy in A Country Churchyard” and this 1750 poem can give us some sense of the dynamism we shall experience as freedom from want gives more people more education, more tools and more opportunity than ever before.  Looking at the humble headstones in a quiet English country graveyard, the poet speculates on the lives that the graveyard’s residents might have lived in other circumstances: 

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll; Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation’s eyes…

In the old days, when most of humanity had to work in agriculture simply to keep everyone fed, not many people had the opportunity to be teachers or students. Few learned to read, many fewer were able to travel. Humanity was tied down to the material plane; many people spent much of their working lives staring at the buttocks of the ox that was pulling their plough. This was not a very stimulating view.

In the 21st century more of humanity than ever before will escape from “chill penury”; fewer flowers will blush unseen and more people like Milton and Cromwell will be able to take their stands and speak their piece. More than that, as a smaller and smaller share of our total production is made up of the material goods that ensure our basic survival, more and more of the economy is going to be about other things.

Far from approaching a time of rest, idleness and a golden age for couch potatoes on welfare, we are moving into a period of unprecedented activity, endeavor and strife. There will be more than enough work in coming years as newly liberated humanity spreads its wings; a final essay on the jobs question will look at what this means in policy terms.