Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era: And My Own Looming Job Crisis
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
09 March 21
Long ago, I first worked as a printer and, after that, a journalist for a
small West Coast news service. In the years that followed, I've been a
freelance editor and writer and would, for decades, be an editor at two
publishing houses, Pantheon Books and Metropolitan Books (where I co-ran the
American Empire Project). For the last nearly 18-plus years, I've also run
the website TomDispatch, which turned out to be as close to a 24/7 job as
I've ever had (though, unlike so many other jobs, a largely self-imposed
one). And as I head for the age of 77 in July, I still can't imagine the
idea of "retirement." Even if TomDispatch were to end, something I don't
expect anytime soon, I think - being a pack rat of the first order - I'd
promptly head for the top of my bedroom closet. There, over these many
decades, I've packed away letters and papers of every sort (including World
War II-era documents from my parents). Up there, in garbage bags, are things
I wrote from the age of 12 to relatively recently and that people wrote to
or for me. There are letters by the hundreds (from the era before emails and
texting), my unpublished novels, my earliest journalism, and god knows what
else. Somewhere in that mass of material that undoubtedly won't outlive me,
I dream that I might find the inspiration for a new late-in-life career
looking back and writing something. But retire? Not work (however I might
define that word at any moment)? I truly can't imagine.
Of course, I've had one great luxury most of my life that so many Americans
haven't had. I've generally been paid to do what was, to my mind, meaningful
work that mattered if not to the world, then at least to my own small
universe, the one I inhabit every day. That, I know, has been and remains a
luxury of the first order in our American world, a reality the pandemic of
the last year-plus has only made worse for so many of us, forced into
unwanted, unfunded, unneeded "retirement" in a world from hell. Today,
TomDispatch stalwart Rebecca Gordon looks at work itself in the pandemic
moment and in the context of a society in which, when you work, with rare
exceptions, someone is always making money off you - often to your
detriment, often to your bitter disappointment and pain.
She takes up the very nature of work, a subject rarely addressed not just at
this website but more generally in this country at a time when the issue of
raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour is at least a major point
of political contention (and when, for the first time in god knows how long,
an American president has come out strongly in favor of union organizing).
In a country where work is often hell and inequality at record levels (even
as America's billionaires made an extra $1.3 trillion in the pandemic
period), this is certainly a time to consider, once again, the role of work
in our lives. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era
And My Own Looming Job Crisis
year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the
pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire
was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop. Friends
knowledgeable on such matters examined photos I took of it and assured me
that all the parts were there, so my partner (who puts up with such
occasional infatuations) helped me wrangle it into one of our basement rooms
and I set about learning to weave.
These days, all I want to do is weave. The loom that's gripped me, and the
pandemic that's gripped us all, have led me to rethink the role of work (and
its subset, paid labor) in human lives. During an enforced enclosure, this
68-year-old has spent a lot of time at home musing on what the pandemic has
revealed about how this country values work. Why, for example, do the most
"essential" workers so often earn so little - or, in the case of those who
cook, clean, and care for the people they live with, nothing at all? What
does it mean when conservatives preach the immeasurable value of labor,
while insisting that its most basic price in the marketplace shouldn't rise
above $7.25 per hour?
That, after all, is where the federal minimum wage has been stuck since
2009. And that's where it would probably stay forever, if Republicans like
Kansas Senator Roger Marshall had their way. He brags that he put himself
through college making $6 an hour and doesn't understand why people can't do
the same today for $7.25. One likely explanation: the cost of a year at
Kansas State University has risen from $898 when he was at school to $10,000
today. Another? At six bucks an hour, he was already making almost twice the
minimum wage of his college years, a princely $3.35 an hour.
It's Definitely Not Art, But Is It Work?
It's hard to explain the pleasure I've gotten from learning the craft of
weaving, an activity whose roots extend at least 20,000 years into the past.
In truth, I could devote the next (and most likely last) 20 years of my life
just to playing with "plain weave," its simplest form - over-under,
over-under - and not even scratch the surface of its possibilities. Day
after day, I tromp down to our chilly basement and work with remarkable
satisfaction at things as simple as getting a straight horizontal edge
across my cloth.
But is what I'm doing actually "work"? Certainly, at the end of a day of
bending under the loom to tie things up, of working the treadles to raise
and lower different sets of threads, my aging joints are sore. My body knows
all too well that I've been doing something. But is it work? Heaven knows,
I'm not making products crucial to our daily lives or those of others. (We
now possess more slightly lopsided cloth napkins than any two-person
household could use in a lifetime.) Nor, at my beginner's level, am I
producing anything that could pass for "art."
I don't have to weave. I could buy textiles for a lot less than it costs me
to make them. But at my age, in pandemic America, I'm lucky. I have the
time, money, and freedom from personal responsibilities to be able to
immerse myself in making cloth. For me, playing with string is a first-world
privilege. It won't help save humanity from a climate disaster or reduce
police violence in communities of color. It won't even help a union elect an
American president, something I was focused on last fall, while working with
the hospitality-industry union. It's not teaching college students to
question the world and aspire to living examined lives, something I've done
in my official work as a part-time professor for the last 15 years. It
doesn't benefit anyone but me.
Nevertheless, what I'm doing certainly does have value for me. It
contributes, as philosophers might say, to my human flourishing. When I
practice weaving, I'm engaged in something political philosopher Iris Marion
Young believed essential to a good life. As she put it, I'm "learning and
using satisfying and expansive skills." Young thought that a good society
would offer all its members the opportunity to acquire and deploy such
complicated skills in "socially recognized settings." In other words, a good
society would make it possible for people to do work that was both
challenging and respected.
Writing in the late 1980s, she took for granted that "welfare capitalism" of
Europe, and to a far lesser extent the United States, would provide for
people's basic material needs. Unfortunately, decades later, it's hard even
to teach her critique of such welfare capitalism - a system that sustained
lives but didn't necessarily allow them to flourish - because my students
here have never experienced an economic system that assumes any real
responsibility for sustaining life. Self-expression and an opportunity to do
meaningful work? Pipe dreams if you aren't already well-off! They'll settle
for jobs that pay the rent, keep the refrigerator stocked, and maybe provide
some health benefits as well. That would be heaven enough, they say. And who
could blame them when so many jobs on offer will fall far short of even such
modest goals?
What I'm not doing when I weave is making money. I'm not one of the roughly
18 million workers in this country who do earn their livings in the textile
industry. Such "livings" pay a median wage of about $28,000 a year, which
likely makes it hard to keep a roof over your head. Nor am I one of the many
millions more who do the same around the world, people like Seak Hong who
sews garments and bags for an American company in Cambodia. Describing her
life, she told a New York Times reporter, "I feel tired, but I have no
choice. I have to work." Six days a week,
"Ms. Hong wakes up at 4:35 a.m. to catch the truck to work from her village.
Her workday begins at 7 and usually lasts nine hours, with a lunch break.
During the peak season, which lasts two to three months, she works until
8:30 p.m."
"Ms. Hong has been in the garment business for 22 years. She earns the
equivalent of about $230 a month and supports her father, her sister, her
brother (who is on disability) and her 12-year-old son."
Her sister does the unpaid - but no less crucial - work of tending to her
father and brother, the oxen, and their subsistence rice plants.
Hong and her sister are definitely working, one with pay, the other without.
They have, as she says, no choice.
Catherine Gamet, who makes handbags in France for Louis Vuitton, is also
presumably working to support herself. But hers is an entirely different
experience from Hong's. She loves what she's been doing for the last 23
years. Interviewed in the same article, she told the Times, "To be able to
build bags and all, and to be able to sew behind the machine, to do
hand-sewn products, it is my passion." For Gamet, "The time flies by."
Both these women have been paid to make bags for more than 20 years, but
they've experienced their jobs very differently, undoubtedly thanks to the
circumstances surrounding their work, rather than the work itself: how much
they earn; the time they spend traveling to and from their jobs; the extent
to which the "decision" to do a certain kind of work is coerced by fear of
poverty. We don't learn from Hong's interview how she feels about the work
itself. Perhaps she takes pride in what she does. Most people find a way to
do that. But we know that making bags is Gamet's passion. Her work is not
merely exhausting, but in Young's phrase "satisfying and expansive." The
hours she spends on it are lived, not just endured as the price of survival.
Pandemic Relief and Its Discontents
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived at the White House with a commitment to
getting a new pandemic relief package through Congress as soon as possible.
It appears that they'll succeed, thanks to the Senate's budget
reconciliation process - a maneuver that bypasses the possibility of a
Republican filibuster. Sadly, because resetting the federal minimum wage to
$15 per hour doesn't directly involve taxation or spending, the Senate's
parliamentarian ruled that the reconciliation bill can't include it.
Several measures contained in the package have aroused conservative
mistrust, from the extension of unemployment benefits to new income
supplements for families with children. Such measures provoke a Republican
fear that somebody, somewhere, might not be working hard enough to "deserve"
the benefits Congress is offering or that those benefits might make some
workers think twice about sacrificing their time caring for children to earn
$7.25 an hour at a soul-deadening job.
As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently observed, Republicans are
concerned that such measures might erode respect for the "natural dignity"
of work. In an incisive piece, he rebuked Republican senators like Mike Lee
and Marco Rubio for responding negatively to proposals to give federal
dollars to people raising children. Such a program, they insisted, smacked
of - the horror! - "welfare," while in their view, "an essential part of
being pro-family is being pro-work." Of course, for Lee and Rubio "work"
doesn't include changing diapers, planning and preparing meals, doing
laundry, or helping children learn to count, tell time, and tie their
shoelaces - unless, of course, the person doing those things is employed by
someone else's family and being paid for it. In that case it qualifies as
"work." Otherwise, it's merely a form of government-subsidized laziness.
There is, however, one group of people that "pro-family" conservatives have
long believed are naturally suited to such activities and who supposedly
threaten the well-being of their families if they choose to work for pay
instead. I mean, of course, women whose male partners earn enough to
guarantee food, clothing, and shelter with a single income. I remember well
a 1993 article by Pat Gowens, a founder of Milwaukee's Welfare Warriors, in
the magazine Lesbian Contradiction. She wondered why conservative
anti-feminists of that time thought it good if a woman with children had a
man to provide those things, but an outrage if she turned to "The Man" for
the same aid. In the first case, the woman's work is considered dignified,
sacred, and in tune with the divine plan. Among conservatives, then or now,
the second could hardly be dignified with the term "work."
The distinction they make between private and public paymasters, when it
comes to domestic labor contains at least a tacit, though sometimes
explicit, racial element. When the program that would come to be known as
"welfare" was created as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in
the 1930s, it was originally designed to assist respectable white mothers
who, through no fault of their own, had lost their husbands to death or
desertion. It wasn't until the 1960s that African American women decided to
secure their right to coverage under the same program and built the National
Welfare Rights Organization to do so.
The word "welfare" refers, as in the preamble to the Constitution, to human
wellbeing. But when Black women started claiming those rights, it suddenly
came to signify undeserved handouts. You could say that Ronald Reagan rode
into the White House in 1980 in a Cadillac driven by the mythical Black
"welfare queen" he continually invoked in his campaign. It would be nice to
think that the white resentment harnessed by Reagan culminated (as in
"reached its zenith and will now decline") with Trump's 2016 election, but,
given recent events, that would be unrealistically optimistic.
Reagan began the movement to undermine the access of poor Americans to
welfare programs. Ever since, starving the entitlement beast has been the
Republican lodestar. In the same period, of course, the wealthier
compatriots of those welfare mothers have continued to receive ever more
generous "welfare" from the government. Those would include subsidies to
giant agriculture, oil-depletion allowances and other subsidies for
fossil-fuel companies, the mortgage-interest tax deduction for people with
enough money to buy rather than rent their homes, and the massive tax cuts
for billionaires of the Trump era. However, it took a Democratic president,
Bill Clinton, to achieve what Reagan couldn't, and, as he put it, "end
welfare as we know it."
The Clinton administration used the same Senate reconciliation process in
play today for the Biden administration's Covid-19 relief bill to push
through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act. It was more commonly known as "welfare reform." That act imposed a
32-hour-per-week work or training requirement on mothers who received what
came to be known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It also gave
"temporary" its deeper meaning by setting a lifetime benefits cap of five
years. Meanwhile, that same act proved a bonanza for non-profits and Private
Industry Councils that got contracts to administer "job training" programs
and were paid to teach women how to wear skirts and apply makeup to impress
future employers. In the process, a significant number of unionized city and
county workers nationwide were replaced with welfare recipients "earning"
their welfare checks by sweeping streets or staffing county offices, often
for less than the minimum wage.
In 1997, I was working with Californians for Justice (CFJ), then a new
statewide organization dedicated to building political power in poor
communities, especially those of color. Given the high unemployment rates in
just such communities, our response to Clinton's welfare reforms was to
demand that those affected by them at least be offered state-funded jobs at
a living wage. If the government was going to make people work for pay, we
reasoned, then it should help provide real well-paying jobs, not bogus "job
readiness" programs. We secured sponsors in the state legislature, but I'm
sure you won't be shocked to learn that our billion-dollar jobs bill never
got out of committee in Sacramento.
CFJ's project led me into an argument with one of my mentors, the founder of
the Center for Third World Organizing, Gary Delgado. Why on earth, he asked
me, would you campaign to get people jobs? "Jobs are horrible. They're
boring: they waste people's lives and destroy their bodies." In other words,
Gary was no believer in the inherent dignity of paid work. So, I had to ask
myself, why was I?
Among those who have inspired me, Gary wasn't alone in holding such a low
opinion of jobs. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for instance, had been
convinced that those whose economic condition forced them to work for a
living would have neither the time nor space necessary to live a life of
"excellence" (his requirement for human happiness). Economic coercion and a
happy life were, in his view, mutually exclusive.
Reevaluating Jobs
One of the lies capitalism tells us is that we should be grateful for our
jobs and should think of those who make a profit from our labor not as
exploiters but as "job creators." In truth, however, there's no creativity
involved in paying people less than the value of their work so that you can
skim off the difference and claim that you earned it. Even if we accept that
there could be creativity in "management" - the effort to organize and
divide up work so it's done efficiently and well - it's not the "job
creators" who do that, but their hirelings. All the employers bring to the
game is money.
Take the example of the admirable liberal response to the climate emergency,
the Green New Deal. In the moral calculus of capitalism, it's not enough
that shifting to a green economy could promote the general welfare by
rebuilding and extending the infrastructure that makes modern life possible
and rewarding. It's not enough that it just might happen in time to save
billions of people from fires, floods, hurricanes, or starvation. What
matters - the selling point - is that such a conversion would create jobs
(along with the factor no one mentions out loud: profits).
Now, I happen to support exactly the kind of work involved in building an
economy that could help reverse climate devastation. I agree with Joe
Biden's campaign statement that such an undertaking could offer people jobs
with "good wages, benefits, and worker protections." More than that, such
jobs would indeed contribute to a better life for those who do them. As the
philosopher Iris Marion Young puts it, they would provide the chance to
learn and use "satisfying and expansive skills in a socially recognized
setting." And that would be a very good thing even if no one made a penny of
profit in the process.
Now, having finished my paid labor for the day, it's back to the basement
and loom for me.