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Maybe There's a Way to Create Good Jobs Again
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-27/maybe-there-is-a-way-to-create-good-jobs-againAcademic economists don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to restructure society in order to provide a good life for the majority of people. They usually restrict themselves to quantifiable data, mostly ignoring non-monetary payoffs such as self-respect, freedom and community. Perhaps that’s because they want to avoid the appearance of politicization, or perhaps it’s because these intangible qualities are difficult to shoehorn into the mathematical models that economists use to demonstrate their intelligence to each other. Either way, the task of figuring out how to create a good economic life for the average person falls mostly to non-economists -- writers, politicians and the occasional sociologist.
The average American worker is confronting a number of problems right now -- stagnant income, an overhang of debt from the housing bubble, the high cost of college and the replacement of pension plans with high-fee, low-return 401(k) plans. But few would deny that one huge challenge is economic insecurity. Political scientist Jacob Hacker’s 2006 book, "The Great Risk Shift," discusses how many risks that were once borne by companies are now shouldered by individuals. That is probably an inevitable result of the transition from corporatism to neoliberal shareholder capitalism that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Basically, the era of "good jobs” is a memory for most workers. Private-sector unionization is disappearing, average job tenure has plunged and benefits have been cut.
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But turning the gig economy into a good deal for workers doesn’t just require government policies, it demands a cultural shift. That’s the kind of thing that economists have trouble wrapping their heads around. Technology is taking away one big benefit of the old corporatist economy -- security -- but in its place it’s giving us something we had almost forgotten how to value. It’s giving us independence.
In the pre-industrial U.S. economy of the 1700s and early 1800s, much of the work (other than farming) was done by skilled artisans who sold their own products -- basically, they were independent contractors. In "Battle Cry of Freedom," historian James McPherson describes how, in the very early days of the U.S.’s Industrial Revolution, wage labor was widely seen as a threat to freedom -- a form of slavery lite.
The average American worker is confronting a number of problems right now -- stagnant income, an overhang of debt from the housing bubble, the high cost of college and the replacement of pension plans with high-fee, low-return 401(k) plans. But few would deny that one huge challenge is economic insecurity. Political scientist Jacob Hacker’s 2006 book, "The Great Risk Shift," discusses how many risks that were once borne by companies are now shouldered by individuals. That is probably an inevitable result of the transition from corporatism to neoliberal shareholder capitalism that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Basically, the era of "good jobs” is a memory for most workers. Private-sector unionization is disappearing, average job tenure has plunged and benefits have been cut.
...
But turning the gig economy into a good deal for workers doesn’t just require government policies, it demands a cultural shift. That’s the kind of thing that economists have trouble wrapping their heads around. Technology is taking away one big benefit of the old corporatist economy -- security -- but in its place it’s giving us something we had almost forgotten how to value. It’s giving us independence.
In the pre-industrial U.S. economy of the 1700s and early 1800s, much of the work (other than farming) was done by skilled artisans who sold their own products -- basically, they were independent contractors. In "Battle Cry of Freedom," historian James McPherson describes how, in the very early days of the U.S.’s Industrial Revolution, wage labor was widely seen as a threat to freedom -- a form of slavery lite.
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