Vanishing Jobs and What Comes After Work
Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible dont apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.
Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just arent coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero and if they do return from the dead, theyll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.
And dont tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isnt a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?
But, wait, isnt our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Havent the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change you can deny them if you like, but youll sound like a moron when you do.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem