How Safe is Your Job?

From CounterPunch:

For a number of years the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly payroll jobs reports have been sending US policymakers dire warnings, only to be ignored. The March report repeats the message. Ninety-five percent of the new jobs created are in domestic services. The US economy no longer creates jobs in export or export-competitive sectors.

Wholesale and retail trade, waitresses and bartenders account for 46% of the new jobs. Education and health services, administrative and waste services, and financial activities account for another 46%. (Wholesale and retail trade jobs for March were 40,000. These jobs would be sales clerks ringing up sales on registers, people stocking the aisles at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc.

Leisure and hospitality (primarily waitresses and bartenders) accounted for 42,000 March jobs.) In contrast, computer system services accounted for 3,600 jobs.

The biggest item (half) in education and health services is "ambulatory health care services."

This has been the profile of US employment growth for a number of years, along with some construction jobs filled by legal and illegal immigrants. It is the job profile of a third world economy.

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Years ago, when I was home from college for a summer break, I expressed frustration to my father about how difficult it seemed to find a summer job. He pulled out a newspaper classified section and opened up the want ads. "Look. There are hundreds of jobs here. What's your problem?" My problem, back then, was that all those jobs sucked. I wanted something interesting, something that wouldn't suck the soul out of my chest. Everything listed that didn't require specialized education or skills was in the service sector, burger flipping, waiting tables, telemarketing, convenience store clerk--you get the idea.

Of course, my real problem, back then, was that I was a lazy and spoiled child of a bourgeois neighborhood. I didn't really want to work; I wanted to have fun. Since then my attitudes about working have changed a great deal: in order for society to function, we all must work. Those crap jobs that I wanted nothing to do with when I was nineteen serve an important function, excepting, of course, telemarketing, which is a pox on the economy. There is dignity, whether people admit it or not, in shit work. My problem today, on the other hand, is that these jobs are increasingly the only ones available for most people, let alone for people who are just beginning to enter the work force.

Never mind, for a moment, that such a development signals grave problems with our economy, which increasingly produces less while consuming more: Americans cannot live on wages from shit work. Well, I guess we can live, if you want to call a paycheck-to-paycheck existence, without healthcare, without the ability to raise a family, without any real prospects for economic advancement, "living." But then, that's not the America I've been told to believe in. The America I'm supposed to believe in is one where the people who work hard and are responsible citizens will do well, have a better life, and have an inheritance for their children. It's really starting to look like the old myth of the "American Dream" will soon be unable to fool people. Reality is just becoming too hardcore.

It seems to me that if service sector work for most Americans is what the economic geniuses belive will make America economically stronger, there ought to be some kind of legislation that guarantees that workers will be able to make ends meet, that is, a massive hike in the minimum wage, universal health care, lower tuition at colleges and universities, you know, a welfare state to make up for the fact that the economic reality, apparently, is such that individuals and families cannot make it on their own. Of course, I'm laughing while I write this because that's never going to happen, at least as long as the current political dynamic is reality.

But if the US really is descending into a third world existence, that dynamic may change: history has shown us that there's nothing more dangerous to a ruling class than masses of starving desperate people. If we're lucky, America's economic and political elite may someday suffer the same fate as Czar Nicholas II and his family. If we're lucky.

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