Why We Should Value ‘Invisible Labor’

For society to survive, contributions of all kinds must be rewarded

Credit: Giacoff/iStock/Getty. Why am I illustrating an essay about labor with an image of child care? Read on.

More and more jobs are vanishing, and they aren’t going to come back.

But it’s a weird sort of vanishing. Until the late ’70s, our increasing worker productivity meant more pay per worker, and a drop in prices of goods. At that point, we started to need fewer workers to make all the stuff anyone would want, and that meant that wages dropped, too. Some of this briefly got hidden by “offshoring” — it was cheaper to move manufacturing to China, then to Bangladesh, and so on — but now those countries are starting to see automation take jobs away, too. The cost of production is dropping to zero.

The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart

What’s really stupid about this is that it leads to people starving amid plenty. That’s because we actually use jobs for three things:

1. To make things we need.
2. To allocate resources (via things like wages).
3. To achieve individual meaning in our lives.