Tag Archives: unemployment

To Prosper We Need More Than Jobs

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I’m always thrown by attempts to measure prosperity purely in terms of economic growth or high employment figures. Those measures are too restrictive, and they are also disorienting. Politicians who offer jobs leave me cold, and do us all a disservice. As I’ve written several times, the country is, or ought to be, more than a workcamp.

There’s an opportunity to reflect on that last point in Close to Home, the documentary Ofra Bickel made for Frontline about the 2008 financial crisis. In Chapter 4, we see Rob, a human resources executive who has “been out of work for a year,” attending a series of “networking functions.” He has found the job search an “insurmountable” challenge, and he hopes – in vain – that these networking events will help him get over the hurdle.

We see Rob and his fellow networkers – all of them out-of-work middle management types — exchanging business cards, practicing their pitches, learning how to introduce and present themselves. It’s an endless rehearsal for a debut that never comes, and Bikel finally decides to give up on Rob and on the networkers: it’s pretty clear none of this is going to pay off.

As Bikel realizes, there is something pathetic in their efforts. There is something ridiculous — and telling — here as well: a gathering of able-bodied, educated, smart American adults, all in dire economic straits, and all they can think to do is to practice for their next job interview. It never occurs to Rob or any of his fellow networkers to do something together, to join efforts and start something, to create something where there is nothing. In a word, they never really build a network. They simply want to get back on the corporate payroll. It’s disturbing to think that that’s all they know how to do.

What happened to that can-do spirit? American gumption? Bootstraps? Independence? Entrepreneurialism? Nowadays, over 90 percent of adult Americans are regular employees (as opposed to self-employed people); whether they have jobs or not, most Americans can think of themselves only as employees. Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, before the industrial era and the great waves of immigration it brought, when the majority of Americans did not have a “job” and wouldn’t take one unless they had to. “Being an employee was considered a form of bondage, only a step above indentured servitude,” as John Curl puts it in his history of American cooperative movements. “One submitted to it due to economic hardship, for as short a time as possible, then became free once more, independent, one’s own boss.”

We still like to pay tribute to the freedom from wage slavery we once enjoyed, or lament its loss. Take another film, this one from 1961: The Misfits, directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. Gable plays Gay, an aging cowboy who thinks that most anything beats “working for wages” and sees employment for what it is – a loss of freedom.

Gay’s tragedy is that he has outlived the possibility of that freedom. The Wild West has become nothing more than a rodeo show; the cowboy life Gay leads is “like roping a dream. I just gotta find another way to be alive, that’s all,” he realizes, “if there is one anymore.” In the film’s closing scene, Gay, bloodied and defeated, drives off toward a new life, or at least what’s left of his life, with his friend Guido yelling after him: “Where’ll you be? Some gas station polishin’ windshields? Makin’ change in a supermarket? Try the Laundromat! They need a fella there to load the machines!” That’s all that’s left for cowboys in Miller’s postwar America.

The most important thing to realize is that it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to succumb to the despair of another networking meeting or turn in your cowboy hat for a Walmart greeter’s cap. And you don’t have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Few people can or ever have. Throughout our early frontier history and well into the industrial era, independent Americans relied on altruism, mutual-aid societies and cooperative working arrangements to build houses and raise barns, protect one another from fires or other losses, or “to accomplish their liberation from wage slavery.” That’s the story Curl’s book tells — a side of the American story we don’t usually acknowledge, but ought to understand and appreciate if we hope to prosper, together, with or without jobs.

What’s Wrong With Howard Schultz’s Proposal To Save America From Itself?

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A letter from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been making the rounds, asking other CEOs to join with him and “forgo all political contributions until Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally-disciplined, long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.”

The idea has gained plenty of admirers: “thousands of Americans – both CEOs and everyday citizens” (as CNN puts it) have contacted Schultz to express their support. Joe Nocera dedicated his entire column in the Times last week to Schultz’s proposal, praising the boycott as “hardheaded and practical, the kind of idea you would expect from a good businessman”.

That it is. But its virtues are also its limitations. Schultz wants to tackle a very big, very difficult problem: what he calls “the lack of cooperation and irresponsibility among elected officials as they have put partisan agendas before the people’s agenda. This is not the leadership we have come to expect, nor deserve.”

We can debate that last point: the current crop of ineffectual cowards in Washington might be exactly the leadership we have come to expect and deserve. Be that as it may, I am a little suspicious of grassroots movements in which angry “everyday citizens” find themselves in cahoots with angry CEOs; and it seems odd that we are being asked to entrust “the people’s agenda” to Schultz and his gang of CEOs – who may be well-meaning, but whose agenda (it seems fair to say) may not exactly match up with the aspirations and priorities of everyday citizens, or at least those of us who don’t happen to be leading multibillion-dollar multinationals.

I know that Starbucks bristles at the suggestion that multibillion-dollar companies might not always put the interests of its people, its “baristas” and “partners,” front and center. (But just a couple of weeks ago, baristas in Chile went on hunger strike because the company refused to negotiate with them over wages.) And I understand that Schultz prides himself on being a good CEO – one who has done well by doing good. He is, in fact, regularly singled out for praise by the business press as a CEO who defies the “the power-hungry stereotype,” and who will put the long-term good of his employees, his company or the environment over short-term advantage. (That’s the story Motley Fool’s Alyce Lomax told just last week in a Howard Schultz puff piece on AOL’s Daily Finance site.)

I’m not questioning Schultz’s good intentions. But the effort he’s mounted so far has a whiff of benevolent corporate paternalism about it; and the prospect of well-meaning CEOs around the country banding together on behalf of all the little people to fight political paralysis in Washington DC should — at least — give us pause. It sounds like a bloodless coup in the making, a plutocrats’ putsch.

There is something absurd here as well: aided and abetted by a pliant and misguided Supreme Court, corporate interests have already hijacked the political process; now they plan to withhold ransom payments until the ineffectual cowards we elected to represent and defend our interests – the public interest – deliver the economy back to them in sound condition, and deliver them from all “uncertainty.” Then they will create jobs. (Be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the uncertainty canard here.)

That said, the real trouble with Schultz’s proposal is not its presumption or its absurdity or its patronizing benevolence. The real trouble here is that Schultz fails to see the big picture, the broad agenda, the scope of the problem we face right now. Like most political and corporate leaders, he sees the people’s agenda – and the country’s uncertain prospects — through the narrow lens of jobs and economic growth. And while jobs and sustainable economic growth are undeniably important, and can be made to serve the public interest, the public interest can’t be reduced merely to those things; they may sometimes even be at odds with the public interest, as they sometimes are in human rights, labor or environmental disputes.

Real prosperity can’t be measured simply in terms of economic growth or high employment figures. I fear that what we have here is a failure to imagine the American future as anything more than a sunny financial forecast, the country as anything more than a happy work camp.