Miner Queries | Cherie Miner
On Monday April 17, Paul Krugman’s New York Times column was headlined with the question, “Why don’t all jobs matter?” It’s a question I’ve asked watching income inequality expand here in the U.S.
Specifically, Krugman addresses the Trump administration’s focus on mining and manufacturing jobs, which, he notes, won’t be coming back due to automation, lower demand and other factors. Additionally, he cites recent job losses in the service industry and asks why these losses have been underplayed.
Krugman suggests several likely possibilities, including: mines and factories serve as anchors in local economies; environmental and workplace regulations make convenient scapegoats for closings; and workplace demographics. In other words, a majority of miners and factory workers are white males.
I found a similar thread running through a book I’m reading by Beth Shulman titled, The Betrayal of Work. Written during the George W. Bush years, Shulman traveled across country to talk with those working full-time without earning a living wage. She found one in every four workers are employed in low-skilled jobs for poverty wages and without benefits. For these Americans, the promise that you can live decently if you work hard is broken.
She also writes: “This ‘low-skilled’ label is a distancing device. ... Undervaluing low-wage job skills, most of which involve working with people, is especially ironic in our consumer-driven, service economy. But denigration is no accident. Many low-wage jobs have historically been ‘women’s jobs.’ These jobs involved nurturing, caring, and communicating with people, skills that have been historically trivialized.”
Yet as Paul Bucheit points out in an AlterNet article titled, “The Shocking Reality of a Future of Shrinking Jobs,” the sunny jobs report recently released belies conditions for much of the American work force. While the report indicates unemployment is down to nearly optimal levels, most of the new jobs created are service jobs without benefits that underpay employees. These jobs only increase America’s growing income inequality.
Like Krugman, Bucheit notes automation is replacing some workers, and he says corporations often blame education for not giving workers the technology skills needed. However, if the choice is between automation or the ongoing costs to hire a person, which do you think wins?
Bucheit asks what are the living-wage jobs of the future, and answers that with alternative energy, infrastructure repair and jobs that focus on human interaction. Yet many of these service jobs are deep in the fight for living wages.
Bucheit concludes: “Indeed that is happening now, with the health care industry growing faster than any other industry, and with service-providing sectors projected to capture 94.6 percent of all the jobs added in the next decade. The Economist calls them ‘caring’ jobs.
“These are the jobs that deserve higher pay as our population ages. These are the jobs that show the need for cooperation rather than self-serving individualism. These are the jobs that should command respect, now and in the future.”
Yet Americans seem content to let corporate management determine the value of our labor. Do we value our own work? Sometimes I wonder.
Cherie Miner is a local parent, community volunteer, freelance writer and artist. In a former life, she was a corporate writer and public relations professional. Contact her at news@redoakexpress.com or on Facebook.