Peter Frase

Today, of course, isn't the real [labor day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Day), merely a fake American version with origins in the machinations of [anti-labor politicians](http://curiousnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/09/origins-of-labor-day.html).

Still, we can celebrate any day that's a holiday. It may be true, as [this *New York Times* op-ed says](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?ref=opinion), that "Labor Day is meant to be a celebration of work". But as the same article goes on to say:

> The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling over 1,000 adults every day since January 2008, shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.

Rather than celebrate work, I'd prefer to celebrate *workers*. And the best way to truly pay respect to the workers of the world is not to glorify the [misfortune of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/undercover-boss-and-the-misfortune-of-labor/), but to celebrate those temporary moments of freedom from wage labor that the workers' movement has managed to win.

Here are a couple of relevant passages on that theme. [Via](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1473) Malcolm Harris, I was recently reminded of [this passage](http://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/struggle-against-labor/) from Mario Tronti that makes that's still relevant after nearly 50 years:

> The contemporary forms of workers’ struggles in the heartlands of advanced capitalism unmistakably reveal, in the rich content of their own spontaneity, the slogan of __the struggle against wage labor as the only possible means of striking real blows against capital.__ The party must be the organization of what already exists within the class, but which the class alone cannot succeed in organizing. No worker today is disposed to recognize the existence of labor outside capital. __Labor equals exploitation: This is the logical prerequisite and historical result of capitalist civilization.__ From here there is no point of return. __Workers have no time for the dignity of labor. The “pride of the producer” they leave entirely to the boss.__ Indeed, only the boss now remains to declaim eulogies in praise of labor. True, in the organized working-class movement this traditional chord is, unfortunately, still to be heard – but not in the working class itself; here there is no longer any room for ideology. Today, the working class need only look at itself to understand capital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital. It has to recognize itself as political power, deny itself as a productive force. For proof, we need only look at the moment of struggle itself: During the strike, the "producer" is immediately identified with the class enemy. The working class confronts its own labor as capital, as a hostile force, as an enemy – this is the point of departure not only for the antagonism, but for the organization of the antagonism.

> __If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, it is a highly revolutionary one. The organization of alienation: This is the only possible direction in which the party can lead the spontaneity of the class.__ The goal remains that of refusal, at a higher level: It becomes active and collective, a political refusal on a mass scale, organized and planned. Hence, the immediate task of working-class organization is to overcome passivity.

And then there's this, from André Gorz's misunderstood classic [*Farewell to the Working Class*](http://books.google.com/books?id=7wxpl7sYYCYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gorz+farewell+working+class&hl=en&ei=Nb5jTpqyF6rv0gG1heGKCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false):

> For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the traditional strategy and organisational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker but of winning the power no longer to function as a worker. The power at issue is not at all the same as before. The class itself has entered into crisis.

So enjoy the beer and barbecues folks, and revel in your power not to function as a worker.

Here's something timely for Labor Day: a couple of my colleagues at CUNY have produced a report on the state of union membership--focused on New York State and City, but with national numbers included as well. (I did some work on the report as well, but my role was limited to designing the layout, so I can take no credit for the writing or data analysis.)

The broad findings will not be surprising to those who follow these things: the percentage of workers who are members of labor unions has fallen at a fairly rapid pace in the past ten years, and has continued to fall during the recession. This trend is driven primarily by the decline in private sector unionization--union density in the public sector is both much higher and fairly stable over the past decade.

There are lots of other interesting details in the report, which includes breakdowns by age, gender, race, education, industry, and immigration status. You should [go read the whole thing](http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/second-annual-state-of-the-unions-report-released-in-commemoration-of-2011-labor-day), but here a few semi-randomly chosen facts that I found interesting:

- People with at least a 4-year college degree are the most likely to be union members.
- This is probably because the sector of the economy with by far the highest unionization rates is education, which is also one of the biggest sectors. It's not surprising to see teachers bearing the brunt of anti-union attacks, when you realize what a huge portion of American union members they constitute.
- In the U.S. as a whole, men are more likely to be union members than women. In New York City, though, women are actually more unionized--largely because they tend to work in the highly-unionized public sector. Women are the future of the labor movement, if it is to have one.
- Blacks and whites are unionized at roughly equal rates nationwide, but blacks are much more highly unionized in New York, again probably because blacks are more likely to work in the public sector.
- It's true, as you might expect, that immigrant workers are less likely to be unionized than native born workers. But that's really just a small subplot of the broader story of declining unionization: workers who immigrated recently are much less unionized than those who immigrated earlier, just as young workers are much less unionized than older workers; people who immigrated before 1990 are unionized at a higher rate than native-born workers.

For more analysis, and lots of graphs and tables, go [check out the report](http://www.urbanresearch.org/news/second-annual-state-of-the-unions-report-released-in-commemoration-of-2011-labor-day).

These facts about unions bear on some of the recent [discussions](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/policy-politics-and-strategy/) of [theories of politics](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/20991/) and the political basis of progressive politics under neoliberalism. Leftists and liberals still don't really have a credible strategy for building a winning progressive coalition that isn't centered on the labor movement. The decline in union density, and the transformation of the labor movement from a private sector to a public sector institution, force us to ask some hard questions. Either the labor movement has to be revived, or we need a new institutional basis for the left. I tend to be pessimistic about reviving labor in anything like its traditional form, since we really only have one historical example of sustained union strength, and that was based on an industrial economy that [isn't coming back](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/04/the-united-states-makes-things/).

But there are obviously a lot of things that would help labor to recover at least a bit (EFCA, sigh). I'll close with one thing that's based on a personal observation, from on my experience as a member of a union bargaining committee that recently [negotiated a first contract](http://psc-cuny.org/new-union-contract-cuny-research-foundation-workers). I'm convinced that severing the connection between health care and employment would be really good for unions, despite the labor movement's opposition to [some of the moves](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/15/nation/la-na-health-congress15-2010jan15) in this direction. A huge amount of our negotiating time was taken up with a fight over how the cost of health insurance would be divided between employer and employee, in the context of premiums that are accelerating rapidly for reasons neither workers nor bosses can control. The need to hold down our members' health care costs sucked up a huge amount of bargaining time and money that could otherwise have gone to providing raises or addressing other aspects of the work environment. If there were a real, quality public option for health care, I would have considered trying to sell my fellow members on a radical idea: let's propose phasing out employer-provided insurance, getting people onto public plans, and putting those employer savings into big wage increases. But for now, that's just a dream for the future, and instead the best I can tell those members is that we successfully fought for their health care costs to skyrocket less rapidly than their non-union counterparts.

NPR has a [nice little feature](http://www.npr.org/blogs/babyproject/2011/08/08/139121410/parental-leave-the-swedes-are-the-most-generous) on parental leave policy in Sweden. This relates to my own research on working time, and I think parental leave is a particularly interesting case when it comes to the politics and sociology of time. That's because I've come around to thinking--partly under [the influence](http://realutopias.org/the-real-utopias-project/gender-equality) of my adviser, [Janet Gornick](http://web.gc.cuny.edu/liscenter/pages/gornick.html)--that the issue of reducing working hours is connected to feminism and gender equality at a fundamental level.

That's because paid work time isn't the only working time we need to think about--there's also the unpaid cooking, cleaning, shopping, care of children and elders, and so on, that's done for free. This work is still disproportionately done [by women](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/women-lead-in-unpaid-work/?partner=rssnyt). Given that fact, it's highly likely that any reform that makes it easier to reduce paid working time will inadvertently tend to reinforce the gender division of labor, in which men do paid work and women do unpaid work in the home that is not as highly valued. This moves us away from the ["dual caregiver, dual earner"](http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/GornickMeyers.pdf) model that I think would be preferable from the standpoint of gender equality.

As things stand now, women will generally be more likely to reduce their hours than men when the opportunity presents itself. Women may then face discrimination in the labor market because employers start to assume that men will work longer hours. This is a concern even in [a country like the Netherlands](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/world/europe/30iht-dutch30.html), which has a lot of protections for part-timers and a huge number of part-time jobs, and hence is a beguiling model for shorter-hours advocates like me.

Even if men and women do reduce hours equally, there's no guarantee that the man will contribute to the unpaid labor of the household even if he's around. In the long run, the only solution to this dilemma is to figure out how to make men do their share of the housework--which means that to some extent this is a matter of cultural change that the state doesn't have much control over. Still, getting the guy to spend time in the home is a good start, and so there is still a role for well-designed policy that facilitates reductions in paid working time for everyone.

This brings us back to the Swedish parental leave model: Swedish couples are guaranteed a total of 480 days of paid parental leave, but 75 percent of this is taken by women. The Swedes are aware of this imbalance, which is why 60 of the 480 days are set aside specifically for men, and cannot be used by the woman in a couple. This is a good start, and it seems to be having some genuine impact on the gender division of labor, although it would probably be even better if we could move closer to a 50/50 split.

But since traditional gender roles are a pretty tough nut to crack, more aggressive policy is probably warranted. For instance, [this article](http://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jbl/articles/volume9/issue2/Ayanna9U.Pa.J.Lab.%26Emp.L.293(2007).pdf) suggests a policy that doesn't just replace a man's wage when he's on paternity leave, but actually pays *more* than he was making at his job. I'd be in favor of that kind of approach if that's what it takes to make us guys take equal responsibility for unpaid work.

And if Don Peck [is right](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/can-the-middle-class-be-saved/8600/) that men are likely to face increasing difficulty in the labor market as the transition away from an industrial economy proceeds, then us guys may have no choice but to rethink our relationship to wages and labor.

There's a joke [going](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/07/d-squared-argues-for-industrial-policy-of-a-sort.html) [around](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/11/293629/pay-for-jobs-programs-by-borrowing-money-at-low-rates/), due originally to [Daniel Davies](http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2011/07/worlds-second-lowest-productivity.html)*, to the effect that unemployment is an extremely low productivity "industry", and that "There have been no major efficiency gains in unemployment in the last hundred years." All of the linked bloggers use this to make a case for an "industrial policy" of sorts, oriented toward moving people out of unemployment into some higher-productivity activity.

That's all well and good, but it made me think: maybe we should also be figuring out ways to increase the productivity of unemployment! That's a point that's sort of implicit in some of my [recent](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/) [posts](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), where I argue against the standard paradigm in which wage labor seems to be the [cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUVwR0rw5fk). If you believe, as I do, that it's a good idea to reduce the amount of time people spend in paid employment, it would also be nice to increase the productivity of whatever they do in the time thus freed up.

And I would argue that we *have*, in fact, seen improvements in the productivity of unemployment--or at least, of *non*-employment. People without jobs can work in a community garden, or contribute to Wikipedia, or post funny videos on YouTube. Those may be small things, but they do improve our collective well-being--and two of them would have been impossible ten years ago.

Improving the productivity of non-employment is what I think Juliet Schor is on about in her recent book, [*Plenitude*](http://www.julietschor.org/2010/05/welcome-to-plenitude/):

> It’s based on an idea that’s novel to the sustainability discourse, but is has been around in standard economics since the 1960s: __when the returns from one activity fall, shift one’s energy and time into others.__ This is the theory of time allocation pioneered by Chicago economist Gary Becker. It’s also just plain common sense.

> In the year 2010 __this approach counsels shifting out of [Business As Usual] jobs, to local, small-scale activity that helps reduce dependence on the market system__ and lowers ecological footprint. Why is this attractive? One reason is that the BAU market has less to offer. It is failing to provide adequate jobs on a staggering scale. __An estimated 26 million Americans are either unemployed, under-employed or have gotten discouraged and stopped looking for work. That problem won’t go away even if the recovery continues.__ Incomes have fallen and government services are being cut. Wall Street and the wealthy have protected their outsized share of society’s production, but for the vast majority the prognosis is austerity.

There's some localist, "small is beautiful" stuff going on here that I don't particularly care for, but this is still a valiant attempt at crafting a new paradigm. And Schor does at least understand the importance of [replicators](http://www.julietschor.org/2010/08/new-work-centers-and-htsp/).

\* *By the way, Daniel Davies is the best blogger in the world. That's just a fact, you should read him if for some reason you don't already. [Who are the greatest bloggers of all time?](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9lg6HqJeY0). Think about it. D-squared, d-squared, d-squared, d-squared and d-squared. Because he spits hot fire.*

Reihan Salam is by far the most interesting and creative thinker associated with the National Review. (To clarify: that's a pretty low bar, but I actually think he's interesting and creative in general.) So when I saw that he had [responded](http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/273043/cheap-labor-and-future-meaningful-work-reihan-salam#.TjLGDklI9GU.facebook) by my post on [cheap labor and technological stagnation](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/cheap-labor-and-the-great-stagnation/), I hoped to find some arguments that would challenge my assumptions. Instead, I found this:

> I’d argue that __fulfilling and valuable work is work that provides individuals with "obstacles that arise naturally and authentically in their path,"__ to draw on Richard Robb.

> It is fairly easy to construct a coherent story for Frase’s notion that supermarket checkout work isn’t sufficiently stimulating to merit survival. Unlike skilled trade work, it doesn’t involve the kind of problem-solving that allows us to stretch our capacities. Rather, it is about offering a service in a friendly and efficient way, which can be taxing but, over time, not necessarily very edifying. I definitely get that idea, and I certainly wouldn’t suggest that we should devote resources to saving supermarket checkout work per se.

> But supermarket checkout work needs to be soon through a different lens. __If I’m a young adult who had a child at a young age, my fulfillment could plausibly derive from the sense that I am contributing to the well-being of my child by engaging in wage work.__ The wage work in question might not be terribly stimulating, but to grin and bear it is to overcome an obstacle that arises naturally and authentically in my path to achieving some level of economic self-sufficiency. Granted, I might benefit from a host of work supports, including wage subsidies, etc., but __I (rightly) see myself as making a contribution. It is not the work itself that is fulfilling. It is the fact that I am doing authentic work — not make-work designed to teach me a lesson about the value of, say, convincing taxpayers that I deserve my daily bread, but work that someone will voluntarily pay me a wage to do__ — in support of a vision of myself as a provider that is fulfilling.

I actually have to hand it to him for coming right out and making the "wage labor is good for you" argument, which is a much tougher sell than the usual "we need wage labor or nobody will do any work" argument, and hence is typically delivered in an elided and concealed fashion. But the notion of "authentic" work that's being deployed here is one I have a hard time wrapping my head around, although I recognize it as a central element of right-wing metaphysics.

It's easy to glorify the dignity of wage labor when you have a stimulating job at the *National Review*, but this line of argument rapidly loses its plausibility when you get to the low-wage jobs I was talking about. A lousy supermarket job that you only have because your time is valued at less than the time of an automatic checkout machine is somehow more authentic because someone "voluntarily" paid for it. Presumably it's more authentic than being a firefighter, since they have to "convince the taxpayers" that they deserve to be paid. And Salam must not think his own job is all that authentic, since the *National Review* is [sustained by rich donors](http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/encounter-with-conservative-publishing/24259/) and could never survive if it had to get by on subscription revenue. I could go on about this, but I already did in my [review of "Undercover Boss"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/undercover-boss-and-the-misfortune-of-labor/) and my [first essay](http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue1/frase.html) for *Jacobin*.

As for the specific nature of supermarket work, [this comment](http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/273043/cheap-labor-and-future-meaningful-work-reihan-salam#comment-236808) on the original NR post says it more powerfully than I could. It starts out: "Having worked as a supermarket checker, I can tell you that no one I worked with got anything out of the job other than a paycheck, and the rates of depression and substance abuse among my colleagues were staggering."

And as a friend put it to me earlier today: "As if the unemployed are unfamiliar with natural and authentic obstacles". But look, if you *do* need some "obstacles that arise naturally and authentically in your path", try training for a marathon or something. Or I can recommend some excellent video games.

The authenticity stuff aside, we also have the patronizing suggestion that a young parent needs to feel that they are "contributing to the well-being of [their] child by engaging in wage work." As though they aren't already contributing to that well-being by *taking care of a child*, which requires a lot more skill and engagement than bagging groceries. Even without the childcare angle, though, maybe people would be less likely to feel they needed to take a crappy job in order to contribute to society, if people like Reihan Salam weren't running around telling them exactly that.

To be fair, Salam does acknowledge that rather than stigmatizing the unemployed and people who do non-waged labor, we could try to break down the fetishization of waged work that gives it such "nonmaterial and psychological importance". And I don't dispute his point that this is a hard thing to do. But he doesn't even seem interested in it. Instead, at the end of the post, he lays out his hopes for what's to come: "In my scenario, the number of 'working poor' will likely increase", and "servants and nannies will be the jobs of the future":

> This raises the question of what will happen to those trapped in the low end of the labor market. Recently, the cultural critic Annalee Newitz offered a provocative hypothesis: "We may return to arrangements that look a lot like what people had over a century ago," Newitz writes. As more skilled women enter the workforce, and as the labor market position of millions of less-skilled workers deteriorate, we’ll see more servants and nannies in middle-class homes.

This "back to the 19th Century" vision is a scenario that has occurred to me as well, but I certainly never thought of it as a desirable end point. But hey, if the right thinks that's the best thing they have to offer, they are welcome to make that their platform.

My question for Reihan Salam, though, is this. If *National Review* laid you off tomorrow, would you rather collect unemployment or go bag groceries because it would allow you to feel you were doing "authentic work" and had "overcome an obstacle that arises naturally and authentically in your path"? Maybe the answer would really be the latter, but I suspect for most people it wouldn't be.

The National Employment Law Project has a [new report out](http://www.nelp.org/goodjobsdeficit) Called "The Good Jobs Deficit", in which they note that the terrible job market is even worse than people realize. Not only are few jobs being created, but those that are being created are predominantly low-wage jobs, worse than the ones they are replacing. Thus the wages of American workers are stagnant or even falling in some cases.

This isn't really surprising, as we've known about the problem of [low-wage job growth](http://www.urbanresearch.org/projects/low-wage-work-metropolitan-america) for a while. But the report made me think about something else: Tyler Cowen's recent book, [*The Great Stagnation*](http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS). In that book, Cowen took note of the stagnation of incomes for the broad majority, but he interpreted it as a symptom of a deeper problem:

> Median income is the single best measure of how much we are producing new ideas that benefit most of the American population. Yet the picture is depressing . . . You can see the rate of growth of per capita median income slows down around 1973, which I take as the end of the era of low-hanging fruit. As an approximation, if median income had continued to grow at its earlier postwar rate, the median family income today would be over $90,000.

Cowen goes on to say that "The American left has pointed out and indeed stressed measures of stagnant median income, but it usually blames politics, insufficient redistribution, or poor educational opportunities rather than considering the idea of a technological plateau." So for Cowen, the causal story is that technological stagnation leads to stagnating income. He treats the innovation slowdown as basically exogenous, the result of a lack of "low hanging fruit", easily discovered and exploited technologies that can increase our standard of living. So at the end of the book, Cowen's recommendation is essentially that we should try to make science a higher-prestige occupation, and then just wait around and accept stagnation until somebody finds some more low-hanging fruit.

But I think Cowen gives insufficient attention to the reverse causal story: one cause of technological stagnation is that labor is too cheap. As Daron Acemoglu [explains](http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/14809.html) in this paper, you can use the tools of mainstream economics to construct a model in which the development of labor-saving technology is more rapid when there is scarcity of labor. Economic historians [have suggested](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habakkuk_thesis) that one of the reasons that technological progress in the 19th century was faster in the United States than in Britain was that labor was scarce in the U.S.

The reasoning here is pretty straightforward. A rational manager will only adopt labor-saving technology if it is cheaper than the labor it replaces. And when labor is scarce, wages rise as employers compete against each other for workers, making it more attractive to save on labor by using machines instead. For instance, suppose a [self checkout](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_checkout) machine for a grocery store ends up costing $10 per hour over its lifetime, when you account for purchase and maintenance costs. If your cashiers make $8 per hour, there's no reason to use the machines. But if they make $12, you have an incentive to replace cashiers with machines, and manufacturers have more incentive to come up with this kind of labor saving technology.

This isn't great for the cashiers who lose their jobs, obviously. But in the larger scheme of things, working at a supermarket checkout isn't the kind of fulfilling and valuable work we really want to preserve, and this kind of technological change is necessary if we want to improve our overall standard of living and move in the direction of a [post-scarcity society](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/). That's one of the reasons I argued that preserving and creating jobs [shouldn't be the left's main preoccupation](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/). Instead, we need to ease the pain of unemployment for those who are displaced.

But in addition, we need to raise wages. So how do we make labor more expensive? One way is to raise the minimum wage and increase rates of unionization, which are both good ideas. And rising wages [in China](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977049.htm) will hopefully start to improve the situation on a global scale. But in the United States, the most important thing is to get back to full employment--i.e., create labor scarcity throughout the labor market. Just keep in mind that we don't necessarily need to do it by [creating a ton of jobs](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/).

Mike Konczal [said something](https://twitter.com/#!/rortybomb/status/95569439671590913) on Twitter that pointed out the odd resonance between [this Will Wilkinson post](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/07/unemployment-and-jobs) at the *Economist* and the rant against obsessing over "job creation" that I wote for [*The Activist*](http://theactivist.org/blog/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs). Actually, I originally wrote it for the newsletter of the political organization that I'm a member of, the [Democratic Socialists of America](http://dsausa.org/dsa.html), and my argument was directed at my fellow leftists who I think sometimes lose sight of our historic criticisms of wage labor as a source of alienation and domination.

Wilkinson, by contrast, is kind of a softcore libertarian. And yet here he is echoing a longstanding commonplace of Marxism:

> David Ellerman, one of my favourite challenging thinkers, argues that the employer-employee relationship is more like the master-slave relationship than we are inclined to believe. I know this sounds a little crazy, and I don't entirely buy his argument. But take a look; he's on to something. Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.

This is not really very different from Marx's account of alienated labor in capitalism. (It is, incidentally, especially hilarious to see this is published by the *Economist*. It has existed since Marx's day, and you can actually find passages in Marx's work where he trashes the *Economist* for basically the same reasons people trash it today.) I was making basically the same point in my essay:

> Most of the unemployed don't actually want jobs -- that is, they don't just want a place to show up every day and be told what to do. The real problem these people have is not that they need jobs, but that they need money. We've just been trained to think that the only way to solve this problem is to get people jobs.

In other words, wage labor sucks, and a lot of people will only do it if the alternative is destitution.

Of course, Wilkinson's argument differs from mine in important ways. In particular, he conceives of the alternative to wage labor in terms of other kinds of monetized interactions, like "cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort", whereas I focused more on socially beneficial activities that are outside the money economy altogether, like taking care of children and writing open source software, and on the inherent benefits of simply increasing everyone's free time. Hence his policy recommendations, while overlapping with mine somewhat, are focused on deregulation and opening up the informal economy.

I'm not necessarily against deregulating the labor market. But deregulation would have to be paired with a far more robust social democratic safety net in order to ensure that a life outside the control of the boss is possible for everybody, and not just for a small labor aristocracy of people like Will Wilkinson (and me). That's why my essay talked about national health care, more generous unemployment, efforts to reduce the work week, and ultimately some kind of guaranteed income that allows people to survive outside of the labor market. (As for where the money for this should come from, please see [John Quiggin](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/25/where-the-money-is/).) Those are the things that make exiting the labor market a real option for the non-rich. And just as importantly, they reduce the risk and uncertainty that's associated with not having regular, full time employment. As it stands, the downside risk of losing your job is much greater if you're less educated, less healthy, or have more dependents than Wilkinson does.

I view all of this as an alternative strategy for getting back to full employment that doesn't rely entirely on job-creation programs. I want to clarify this point, because it wasn't made well in my original essay, which was constructed to be as brief and inflammatory as I could make it in order to attract as much attention to the argument as possible. I've noticed that some people conflated my rant against *jobs* with an opposition to *full employment*.

So I should make clear that I'm not opposed to full employment; in fact, I think that achieving and maintaining full employment is of paramount importance if we want to give people the real option of cutting back hours or quitting their jobs. For example, we know that there are lots of people who [wish they could work fewer hours](http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/social_forces/v081/81.4reynolds.html), but whose employers won't let them. And studies like these probably understate the desire for fewer hours because they don't do a very good job of distinguishing the desire for work from the desire for money. But whatever people would *like* to do, they don't have much leverage to negotiate or to find new jobs if they face a millions-strong reserve army of the unemployed. In a high-unemployment environment like the current one, we see people who have jobs [being worked harder](http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speed-up-american-workers-long-hours), but quitting at [historically low rates](http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/23/news/economy/trapped_in_a_job/index.htm).

However, the demand for full employment is distinct from the demand for jobs in ways that are politically salient. It is important to bear in mind that "full employment" is not just another way of saying "lots of jobs". It is a piece of economic jargon, a technical term for the situation in the labor market when employers' demand for labor meets or exceeds the supply of people looking for jobs across all the broad categories of employment. Keeping the economy in this state is highly desirable for working people and for leftist politics, for reasons best explained in the 1940's by the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, in his important essay on ["Political Aspects of Full Employment"](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html):

> [U]nder a regime of permanent full employment, the 'sack' would cease to play its role as a 'disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension. It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire, and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders.

Demands for government-led job creation target full employment by increasing demand for labor in the hopes that this will both soak up surplus labor directly and spur increased private sector demand for labor through the multiplier effect of public investment. However, there is no *a priori* reason why creating more demand for wage labor should be the only or the primary mechanism of reaching full employment. To the extent that job sharing schemes reduce unemployment by distributing work across more workers, the economy can approach full employment without creating new work in the aggregate. Just as importantly, since the definition of full employment depends on both the supply of and the demand for labor, full employment can be reached by reducing the supply of labor rather than increasing demand.

Why would we want to reduce labor supply? One reason, which I emphasized in "Stop Digging", is that wage labor is a form of domination that lots of people find inherently unpleasant, and that a lot of what people do for wages is less socially desirable than what they could do if they had control over their own time. But another good reason is that certain political priorities that the left supports for other reasons have the effect of decreasing labor supply. Hence a focus on the labor supply side can help us to ensure that the quest for full employment is not at cross purposes with our other goals.

Take, for example, health care reform. It is [generally accepted](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/theres_no_job-killing_health-c.html) that there are a certain number of people who would like to retire or otherwise leave the labor force, but who stay in their jobs because that is the only way they can maintain access to health insurance. A program of national health care that successfully guaranteed universal coverage and severed health care from employment would cause these people to drop out of the labor force; all things being equal, this would move the economy toward full employment as these jobs were filled by the unemployed and the total pool of people seeking work shrank. However, this move toward full employment involves no net job creation since it is entirely targeted to the labor supply side.

More generally, any reform that makes it easier to survive outside of employment may have the effect of reducing labor supply, if you believe--as I do and Will Wilkinson does--that lots of people would prefer not to work for wages if they can avoid it. Health care, government-funded child care, social security, welfare, and disability benefits are all steps toward what sociologists of the welfare state [refer to as the "de-commodification"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) of labor power. To the extent that people can get by without working for wages, they are able to avoid commodifying themselves and selling their labor.

Even at the height of an economic expansion, large numbers of people are not participating in wage labor. Among Americans aged 16 and older, about a third are neither working nor looking for work--and this was true even before the recession. Some of these people are so-called "discouraged workers" who want a job but have given up looking for one, but many others are retired, or are in school, or unable to work due to disability, or are taking care of children and elders, or are voluntarily out of employment for some other reason. There are ways that public policy could be used to force many of these people into the labor force. But doing so is in general a *right-wing* policy goal: for the same reason that full employment is politically good for workers, it is bad for capitalists, and the political agents of capital understand that one way of avoiding full employment while maximizing profits is to keep the supply of labor as high as possible. Which is why Republicans are currently obsessed with [increasing labor supply](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/26/279048/the-bigger-the-government-the-taller-the-people/) while doing nothing to increase the demand for labor.

"Against jobs, for full employment" seems at first like a paradoxical demand, but I hope I've shown that it isn't. By opposing the narrow rhetoric of job creation, I didn't intend to diminish the importance of tackling the crisis of the unemployed head-on; I merely wanted to suggest that there are alternative avenues for addressing this crisis that are both more humane and more radical.

*[Editors Note: I wrote this a while back, originally for [The Activist](http://theactivist.org/blog/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs), but I never bothered to post it here. I'm reposting it now because I have a whole lot more readers than I did a couple of weeks ago, and because I'm going to post a follow-up in the next couple of days.]*

Much of the left has, mostly without debating it, coalesced around "jobs" as a unifying political demand. The motivation for this is clear: one of the biggest problems the country faces is that there are 20 million people who are unsuccessfully seeking full time employment. But while it may seem obvious that the solution to this problem is to create millions of new jobs, this is not in fact the only possible solution--and there are major drawbacks to a single-minded focus on increasing employment. For one thing, it may not be feasible to create that many new jobs. Moreover, it's equally debatable whether, from a socialist perspective, it is *desirable* to create these jobs even if it is possible.

We should differentiate three separate reasons why it might be desirable to create jobs. One is that a job provides a source of income: we often talk about the need to create jobs when what we really mean is that people need income. Most of the unemployed don't actually want *jobs*--that is, they don't just want a place to show up every day and be told what to do. The real problem these people have is not that they need jobs, but that they need *money*. We've just been trained to think that the only way to solve this problem is to get people jobs.

A second argument for creating jobs, and not just handing checks to people, is that having a job gives a person a greater sense of self-worth than getting a handout. To the extent that this is true, however, it's largely because we, as a society, treat wage labor as though it is a unique source of dignity and worth. The left has historically perpetuated this view, but we should be challenging it. We should point out that there is a lot of socially valuable work that is not done for pay. The biggest category of such work, as feminists have long pointed out, is household labor and the care of children and elders. But today we are seeing the growth of other categories of valuable unpaid work, in everything from community gardens to Wikipedia.

This is not to say that all of the socially necessary labor of society could be performed by volunteers. The third reason to create jobs is that some useful things won't get done unless someone is paid to do them. But it's difficult to make the case that there are enough socially necessary tasks out there to make up our job shortfall and also replace the destructive jobs that we need to eliminate.

Some argue that if we could build the manufacturing sector and start "making things" in America again, we could solve our unemployment problem. The reality is that we already make plenty of things, and the decline of manufacturing jobs is due more to technology than to off-shoring. The U.S. economy produces more physical output now than at any time in American history, but with fewer workers.

Public works are another of the usual suspects. Our infrastructure is indeed in a pretty sorry state, but repairing bridges is not going to create 20 million jobs--and in any case, it's a short-term fix, since eventually we'll clear out the backlog of neglected infrastructure projects. Then what?

Finally there is the call for "green jobs", based on the laudable idea that we need to put lots of people to work moving us away from our dependence on fossil fuels. This may be a source of some new jobs, like people making solar panels or weatherizing buildings. But the more common pattern is that old jobs are turning into different, greener jobs. The construction worker is now a green construction worker, and the corporate lawyer is now a corporate environmental lawyer, and so on. These are positive changes--but they don't create new jobs.

On top of all this, many of the jobs people are currently paid for are socially destructive: forget job creation, we need to do more job killing. Cutting the military budget, reining in the financial sector, and dismantling the prison-industrial complex will destroy many jobs. So, too, would a single payer national health care system: the Republican attacks on Obama's "job-killing" health care law were lies, but only because Obama's plan is so inadequate. As long as the left remains fixated on more wage labor as the solution to our problems, we'll always be vulnerable to the argument that the socially beneficial changes we want will "kill jobs".

What, then, should the left support, if not more jobs? Shortening the work week disappeared from labor's agenda after World War II, and we need to bring it back. We should also make unemployment benefits more generous in order to ease the pain of joblessness. Ultimately, though, we need to get more radical than that, and move away from tightly linking jobs and income. To reiterate, the real problem of the unemployed isn't their lack of jobs, it's their lack of money. That's why some on the left are coming around to the idea of just giving people money: a guaranteed minimum income, which everyone would be entitled to independent of work.

The objections to these ideas are typically: "how do we pay for it?" and "how do we achieve it?". Finding the money shouldn't be a problem where the will of a powerful political coalition is present--the richest country in the history of the world can guarantee a decent standard of living for everyone. But building that political coalition is a harder question. The first step is to admit that the current consensus around job-creation is unworkable, and not really any more "realistic" than the ideas I've just proposed. The next step is to highlight existing proposals that are being ignored because of the obsession with job creation. For example, Congressman John Conyers recently proposed legislation to subsidize employers that reduce employee hours, a policy that has been effective in Germany. This is an inadequate policy in many ways, but it's still a more useful focus than just obsessing about how to create new jobs.

John Maynard Keynes famously observed that "If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths . . . and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment". One of the things that ought to distinguish socialists from liberals is that we think it's possible to do better than this. Today, it seems that hole-digging has come to occupy a central place in the imagination of the left. But socialism should be about freeing people from wage labor, rather than imprisoning them in lives of useless toil.

In his influential treatise on the modern welfare state, [*The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism*](http://books.google.com/books/about/The_three_worlds_of_welfare_capitalism.html?id=Vl2FQgAACAAJ), Gøsta Esping-Andersen proposed that one of the major axes along which different national welfare regimes varied was the degree to which they de-commodified labor. The motivation for this idea is the recognition--going back to Marx--that under capitalism people's labor-power becomes a commodity, which they must sell on the market in order to earn the means of supporting themselves.

Following Karl Polanyi, Esping-Andersen describes the *de*-commodification of labor as the situation in which "a service is rendered as a matter of right, and when a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market" (p. 22). So long as the society remains a capitalist one, it is never possible for labor to be *totally* de-commodified, for in that circumstance there would be nothing to compel workers to go take a job working for someone else, and capital accumulation would grind to a halt. However, insofar as there are programs like unemployment protection, socialized medicine, and guaranteed income security in retirement--and insofar as eligibility for these programs is close to universal--we can say that labor has been partially de-commodified. On the basis of this argument, Esping-Andersen differentiates those welfare regimes that are highly decommodifying (such as the Nordic countries) from those in which workers are still much more dependent on the market (such as the United States).

In the lineage of comparative welfare state research following Esping-Andersen, de-commodification is generally discussed in the way I've just presented it: in terms of the state's role in either forcing people into the labor market, or allowing them to survive outside of it. However, from the standpoint of the worker, we can think of the de-commodifying welfare state as giving people a *choice* about whether or not to commodify their labor, rather than forcing them to sell their labor as would be the case in the absence of any welfare-state institutions. The choice that is involved here is not merely about income. It ultimately comes down to how we want to organize our time, and how we want to structure our relations with other people.

What is ultimately at stake here is not merely the commodification of labor-power, but the commodification of all areas of social life. For based on the institutions that exist and the choices people make within them, we can imagine multiple social equilibria. Social life could be highly commodified: everyone performs labor for others in return for a wage, and also pays others to perform social functions which they don't have time for. But we could have a much lower level of commodification where people work less, because their cost of living is much lower: they are able to satisfy many of their personal needs without spending money.

To elucidate this point, consider a simplified thought experiment. Suppose you and I live in adjacent apartments. Now consider the following ways in which we might satisfy two of our needs: food and a clean habitat.

In scenario A, I cook my own meals and clean my own bathroom, and you do the same for yourself.

In scenario B, you pay me to cook your meals, and I pay you to clean my bathroom.

In scenario C, I pay you to cook for me and clean my bathroom, and you pay me to cook your meals and clean your bathroom.

This hypothetical is a bit silly, since with only two people involved we could just barter the trade in services rather than paying each other money. But in a more complex economy with many people paying each other for things, the medium of exchange becomes necessary, so I leave that element in place even in this simplified example.

What might make each of these three scenarios desirable?

The advantage of scenario A is that each of us has maximal control over our labor and our lives. I cook and clean when I choose, I eat just what I like, and I will do just enough cleaning to ensure that the bathroom meets my standards of cleanliness.

The advantage of scenario B is that it might be more efficient, if each of us has what economists call "comparative advantage" in one of the tasks. If I'm a better cook, but you're better at cleaning, then each of us ends up with overall better meals and cleaner bathrooms than we would have had otherwise. The downside, however, is that each of us has now partly alienated our labor to some degree. I have to monitor you to make sure that you're doing a complete job of cleaning, and you can boss me around if you dislike my food or I don't have dinner ready on time. What's more, the only way for this exchange to be fair to both of us is in the unlikely event that you enjoy cleaning the bathroom just as much as I like cooking. In the more likely case that both of us find cleaning much less pleasant than cooking, you get a raw deal.

Scenario C would seem to combine the worst elements of the other two scenarios. There is no efficiency gain, since we are both performing both tasks. And our labor is maximally alienated, since we are doing all our cooking and cleaning at someone else's command rather than for ourselves.

The point of these examples is that they represent different visions of how the economy might work. Scenario A is the one I sympathize with, and it's one that motivates many socialists, feminists, social democrats, and advocates of shorter working hours and less consumerist ways of living. Scenario B is more like the traditional vision of 20th century liberal capitalism: by commodifying more of social life, we increase our material abundance but at the expense of living alienated lives as commodified labor.

However, I would argue that a lot of political and economic discourse in the United States is actually dominated by the third scenario, which sees commodification as a good in itself, irrespective of its efficiency or its effect on our working lives. I said above that scenario C didn't have anything to recommend it, but this is not exactly true. For in a society where labor-power is still commodified and people are dependent on the labor market, it is essential that we constantly create new jobs for people to perform--otherwise, you end up with mass unemployment just like we're seeing right now. Scenario C is the one that maximizes job-creation and GDP growth, even though it is by no means obvious that it is the scenario that maximizes human happiness and satisfaction.

It's worth belaboring this point precisely because so many liberals and even leftists take the "high-commodification" equilibrium for granted. Take the example of [Matt Yglesias](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/issue/) of the Center for American Progress. I write about him often (and once got [Yglesiassed](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/23/200322/endgame-419/) in return) because in many ways I find him a more congenial thinker than a lot of more traditional "leftists" who seem trapped in nostalgia for mid-20th century industrial capitalism. But the issue of commodification gets at a core area where we see the world differently.

Yglesias often writes about the fact that industrial employment is inevitably declining for technological reasons, and hence services are bound to make up an increasing share of the employment. This motivates some of his other hobby-horses, such as his crusade against occupational licensing, which he sees as an impediment to creating these needed service jobs. Now, I have no particular attachment to occupational licensing, and on the issue of manufacturing and industrial employment, Yglesias and I are basically in agreement. Where we disagree is in seeing the best future trajectory of the economy as one in which people perform more and more services for each other, for pay. [For example](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/07/200135/the-yoga-instructor-economy/):

> [T]his is why I’ve been saying that yoga instructors have the job of the future. Nothing in these trends suggests that the actual quantity of janitors is going to increase in the future. If anything, falling demand for office workers implies that the future can have fewer. So is the future a smallish number of wealthy office workers served by an "aristocracy of labor" of unionized janitors awash in a pool of unemployed people enjoying free health care? Presumably not. The people of the future will be richer than the people of today, and therefore will more closely resemble annoying yuppies. Nicer restaurants are more labor-intensive than cheap ones, and the further up the scale you go the more specialized skills (think sommelier) come into play. Annoying yuppies take yoga classes, or even hire personal trainers. Artisanal cheese is more labor-intensive to produce than industrial cheese. More people will hire interior designers and people will get their kitchens redone more often. There will be more personal shoppers and more policemen. People will get fancier haircuts.

It's easy to mock the idea that the future economy will be based entirely on giving each other haircuts and yoga instruction. But my objection is not that this is *implausible*--I think it's entirely plausible, and such a world could even feature a relatively egalitarian income distribution, depending on the bargaining power of labor and the intervention of the state. The real question, I think, is whether this is the only way for things to turn out--that is, is it really true that [the yuppie that is richer only shows, to the less rich, the image of their own future](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm)? And if not, is it the most desirable outcome?

I don't want to pre-judge this choice so much as just argue that it *is* a choice. Whether we end up in a low-commodification, low cost of living scenario A or a high-commodification, high cost of living scenario C will be the result of an interaction between the state and other institutions and individual choices within those institutions. It is thus both a political and a cultural question. Even now, not every country resolves these questions in the same way. In the Netherlands, for example, both incomes and working hours are lower than in the United States, and a good argument can be made that the well-being of the Dutch is [at least as high as our own](http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:129022).

This is why I think that the politics of de-commodification in the 21st century will be closely linked to the politics of time.

The other day I re-watched John Carpenter's [*They Live*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/)--which, for the record, is a pretty good satire of Reagan-era America, and deserves to be remembered for more than just that stupid Shepard Fairey [sticker campaign](http://obeygiant.com/). While watching, I noticed something pretty great that I missed the first time through. It shows up after the main character puts on magic sunglasses, which allow him to see that the billboards around him actually contain secret brainwashing messages. Most of these just say things like "consume" and "obey". But check out the sign in the upper left corner of this picture:

That command, of course, is a riff on an old slogan of the 19th century labor movement, which demanded the eight-hour day using signs like this one:

As David Roediger and Philip Foner remark in their [great history of American labor and the working day](http://books.google.com/books?id=h8P-uuyYe_YC&lpg=PA324&ots=xG4cd8F4rn&dq=roediger%20foner&pg=PA98#v=onepage&q&f=false):

> [T]he cry "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for recreation," acted as more than a common denominator. It embodied . . . the highest aspirations of the working population. It expressed cherised values. . . . In making the eight-hour system the key to equal education for children, to the continued mental development of adults, to the defense of republican virtue and class interest by an enlightened and politically active citizenry, to health, to vigor, and to social life, supporters viewed their demand as an initial step to major changes, not as a niggling reform. (pp. 98-99)

As is well known, the demand for shorter hours mostly disappeared from organized labor's agenda after World War II, for [complex](http://books.google.com/books?id=lv9cfP1QMAcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false) and [disputed](http://books.google.com/books?id=yV2xgJBNfo4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=cutler+uaw+hours&hl=en&ei=edPjTZqZAoPq0gH07Z2yBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) reasons. The sign I saw in *They Live* is one consequence of abdicating the postive class argument for shorter hours. By the time the movie was made in 1988, the eight-hour movement's greatest slogan could come to seem not like a cherished victory of the working class, but rather as a piece of dystopian propaganda. "Eight hours recreation" becomes the command to "play eight hours", and this "play" is refigured as obligatory participation in consumerist culture rather than the opportunity for political, intellectual and moral development that it signified for the eight-hour campaigners. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that these days long hours are often portrayed as an issue of individual preferences or "workaholic" psychology, rather than the outcome of organized labor's long political defeat.

I have a feeling this little vignette will end up in my dissertation somehow, although I don't think I mentioned doing any cultural studies in my fellowship proposal.