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Not to offend any of my wise, decent, just and learned editors, but the headline for Bob Kuttner's in the latest Prospect, "Good Jobs for Americans Who Help Americans," sound like two 527s got drunk and ran into each other at a bar. The essay, though, is a smart exploration of how to imbue service sector jobs with the dignity, wages, and work conditions that the Labor movement once won for American manufacturing:
Many economists once thought that widening income inequality was caused in part by the shift to a service economy. Factory jobs, the argument went, tended to pay above the median wage because each job added a lot of value. The more productive and capital-intensive the machinery became over time, the more value each job added. So by the mid-20th century, industrial workers could command middle-class wages and good fringe benefits. By contrast, human-service jobs were hands-on and labor intensive. A nursing-home worker or a pre-k teacher was low-tech. So the pay was low, too.We now know that this picture was highly misleading. How do we know? Just look at the global economy. Autoworkers in Mexico use the same production technology as workers in Michigan, but their pay is about $2 an hour. In China, autoworkers may earn 50 cents a day. American autoworkers were paid middle-class wages not because of something inherent about making cars but because the United Auto Workers had the power to negotiate good wages. Conversely, Scandinavia has no low-wage human-service workers because it has made a decision that everyone who takes care of the sick, the old, or the young is a professional or at least a paraprofessional and is compensated as such.Since most human-service costs are paid socially, choices about how to compensate workers are social decisions. In the United States, with our meager social outlay, we define these human-service positions as low-wage, casual jobs. In the Nordic countries, the people who work in pre-kindergartens or child-care centers are either teachers or apprentice teachers. In France, to work in a crèche maternelle, you need more qualifications than a public school teacher -- additional courses in child development and public health.With the great majority of projected job growth expected to occur in the service sector, the question of how you convert those jobs into dignified, middle class positions is a central one. Lots of libertarian types will calmly tell you that the market will provide, but that's not really the history of America's middle class -- dignity and benefits must be won, and fought for. Wages are a mixture of market outcome and political phenomenon, and this is particularly true in the service sector, as nannies in Malaysia cannot, in fact, care for your child and then ship him back when he turns 18. Kuttner, happily, lays out a whole political plan for how to better these jobs, and makes some interesting observations about the casualization and Taylorization of labor along the way. My critique would be that Bob doesn't say enough about the political culture. We need to rehabilitate the idea that labor standards are set, in part, by society -- the idea that they're simply the work of impersonal market forces is a pernicious myth beloved by the managerial class and proven false every time anyone anywhere gets to have a weekend. Sadly, the piece is still behind the subscriber wall., so it's hard for you folks to weigh in. But if you subscribed to The American Prospect, then you could...
