CSotD: The view from both ends
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Clay Bennett on the shift under way in the global economy. I'm not in the least surprised at what is happening. I just wonder if he's being sarcastic or making a prediction?
I guess I'm surprised at how easily it's all happening. I remember when jobs went from the Northeast to the Southeast because of the weakness of unions down there. And then Free Trade and the end of tariffs sent the jobs overseas, where there were no minimum-wage laws, 40-hour weeks or OSHA regulations.
The big concern now is getting manufacturing jobs back in the US, and, by golly, it's gonna start happening and the flag-wavers will cheer, but these are not the jobs we lost.
It reminds me of a column I wrote nearly 20 years ago. The quaint reference to newsgroups being the only real anachronism, I might as well just replay it now, complete with its original upbeat, naive ending:
Will minimum wage workers replay 1920s strife?
(Press-Republican, Plattsburgh NY, Sept 17, 1995)
A conversation came up recently on the Internet soc.hist.moderated newsgroup about whether Benjamin Franklin would be a socialist today. Naturally, the relative fairness of our economy, then and now, became an issue.
"I would suppose that the fraction of the population that worked as servants of the well-to-do was larger in colonial times than it is today," wrote John McCarthy, from his computer lab at Stanford. "It was certainly larger in 1900. In London, before World War I, the largest occupational category was servant."
Gerry Foley piped in from Columbus, Ohio, "See last Sunday's New York Times. Our servant class is working at McDonald's."
McCarthy objected to skewing statistics with muddled definitions, but I think Foley was right on target. I had read the story in the Times, too — It was about inner-city kids in one of those programs that helps at-risk youth finish school and learn job skills
Problem is, the article said, the kids complete the program, get their high-school diplomas, dress up nice, have their resumes all prepared, and then find out they still can't get career-track jobs because there's nothing out there but fast-food gigs.
There's nothing wrong with fast-food work, but, for the 99 percent of workers who won't end up running the place, flipping burgers is only supposed to be a step on the ladder to somewhere else, a way for high-school kids to make a little money or for college students to supplement tight budgets.
Today, however, those minimum-wage jobs are increasingly being held by young people who have finished school, begun life and are struggling to meet grown-up responsibilities on a kid's minimum-wage paycheck.
And it's not just at the fast-food restaurants and mall shops, either: This economic recovery we're so proud of is based on 30-hour, low-pay, no-benefit jobs that save industry the expense of hiring full-time employees.
The result is a lot of young parents working two jobs each and a lot of latchkey children with no health insurance.
I brought this up recently in a conversation with a local factory owner and a Labor Department official from Albany. One of them replied that, back in the 1920s, people got by without the government having to provide a social safety net.
I guess so, if you call it "getting by" when angry, desperate workers face off against goons and Pinkertons and the blood of former servants, the blood of World War I veterans, even the blood of their wives and children, stains the streets of the steel towns, the rocks of the copper fields and the rich soil of the orange groves.
They got by, if you don't count the Great Depression, and if you never heard the 1920s definition of a bayonet as a weapon with a workingman on each end.
In his Labor Day speech this year, Labor Secretary Robert Reich noted that the merger of Chemical and Chase Manhattan banks cost this country 12,000 jobs. Those jobs, he said, were not lost because of illegal immigrants or welfare mothers or any of the other convenient underclass scapegoats.
They were lost because the people at the top of the heap could rake in more profits by eliminating the people at the bottom of the heap.
To compare today's fast-food workers with the pre-WWI servant class may not be statistically pure, but the parallel is there nonetheless, and, if Scott and Zelda had a great time in the Jazz Age, there were plenty of their contemporaries who didn't enjoy the 1920s so much.
They had seen some of life and had gotten to know their "betters" in the intimacy of the trenches, where the mud and blood obscured the bars and stripes, and men were grouped, not by the class into which they had been born, but by those who came home from the war and those who didn't.
They came to realize that they were just as smart and just as deserving of a slice of the pie, and they came home discontent with the world as it had been. For Russia, Ireland and Germany, the result was civil war and chaos. But America, Britain and France also saw their share of anger in the streets.
There is, however, one crucial difference between the servant class of that era and the 30-hour, no-benefits workers of today: For all the attempts to organize labor in the latter part of the 19th century, those workers had gone to World War I with only the vaguest idea that their lives as servants and manual laborers had been unfair, and they had certainly never been promised anything better.
Our kids know what they have been promised, they know they aren't getting a fair shake, and it isn't going to take World War III to spark their discontent.
(Update: While that anger has indeed emerged, it's been channeled in some ways I did not predict, except in my reference to the quote about the bayonet, which, thank goodness, remains for the moment a metaphor. But here's a three-and-a-half minute video of those non-metaphorical times, from "the other" Richard Thompson. Note that a "blackleg" is a scab.)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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