America Doesn’t Measure the Difference Between Good Jobs and Bad Jobs
This morning, President Trump played the media like a fiddle with the jobs report. We should be paying attention to the larger problem growing underneath.
This morning on Twitter, Donald Trump hinted that the upcoming May jobs report was going to be very good. (This was almost assuredly a violation of federal guidelines and raises some important questions about Trump’s reckless sharing of government secrets, but that’s a post for another day.) The tweet was a clever strategy for Trump, because it allowed him to frame the story for every news outlet in the world.
Once the report actually came out, journalists were primed to label it as a success. “The American economy roared into overdrive last month,” enthused Nelson D. Schwartz in the New York Times, cooing over the 223,000 jobs added to the economy, among other big numbers. In 2015, when the June jobs report under Obama showed the exact same number of added jobs, Schwartz sniffed in the Times that the report was “Not too hot, not too cold. But not, alas, just right.”
On Twitter, our pal Invictus pointed out that the numbers under Trump that the press lost their minds over were the same numbers that under Obama supposedly indicated an economy in desperate need of repair:
So the moral of this story is that context is everything. Trump broke the rules this morning, and he apparently did so in order to get in front of the story and write it before the journalists could. He was fabulously successful.
Of course, if you just report on numbers, it’s very easy to fall into a Trump-friendly video-game mindset, in which larger numbers are an unalloyed good to be accrued at all costs. Schwartz and all these other journalists didn’t ask the most important question of all: we know the quantity of jobs. But what about the quality of those jobs?
From stairways to dead ends
As Derek Thompson argued at The Atlantic back in 2012, America’s postwar economy has shifted dramatically. Since the 1950s, he reports, “The manufacturing/agriculture economy shrunk from 33% to 12%, and the services economy grew from 24% to 50%.” And as most anyone who’s worked in the service economy knows, there are an awful lot of awful jobs—low-wage, part-time, no-benefit kinds of jobs—in service.
But this is not just about Walmart. Service jobs don’t have to suck—and many don’t. But I could sit here and list stats all weekend long proving that quality jobs in America are disappearing:
- At the end of 2016, 6.4 million Americans who would prefer full-time work were stuck in part-time positions, instead—an increase of almost 45% over a ten-year period.
- Worker productivity has skyrocketed over the last 50 years, while wages have stayed flat.
- Barbara Garson at Mother Jones says that “ 21% of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were low wage, meaning they paid $13.83 an hour or less. But 58% of the jobs regained fall into that category.”
- CEO pay has grown 90 percent faster than an average worker’s pay since 1970.
And on and on and on.
The fact is, sometimes in the 1970s America made the switch from high-quality, high-wage employment to low-quality, low-wage employment—and the shift is getting progressively worse. It’s gotten so bad that Axios recently revealed that CEOs openly admitted that the American worker isn’t getting a cut of the economic prosperity anytime soon: “executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further.”
The report that Donald Trump touted today only counted the number of jobs created, not the quality of those jobs.
The truth is, this isn’t a jobs story at all. It’s an inequality story.
Pay no attention to the rot behind the bluster
All the “good” employment news just so happened to bury a story by Ed Pilkington, a New York-based journalist for The Guardian. Pilkington was sharing the news of a new special report by United Nations poverty watchdog Philip Alston. In Pilkington’s words, the report finds that…
…Donald Trump is deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin, cruelly depriving them of food and other basic protections while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy…
Alston’s full report (PDF) delves deep into our economic inequality problem and explains how America has failed its people. It also highlights how Trump is unquestionably making everything worse:
The United States has the highest rate of income inequality among Western countries. The $1.5 trillion in tax cuts in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality. The consequences of neglecting poverty and promoting inequality are clear. The United States has one of the highest poverty and inequality levels among the OECD countries, and the Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks it 18th out of 21 wealthy countries in terms of labour markets, poverty rates, safety nets, wealth inequality and economic mobility. But in 2018 the United States had over 25 per cent of the world’s 2,208 billionaires. There is thus a dramatic contrast between the immense wealth of the few and the squalor and deprivation in which vast numbers of Americans exist. For almost five decades the overall policy response has been neglectful at best, but the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship.
But hey, at least those poor, sick, and hungry people have work, right? What do they have to complain about? We added 223,000 jobs in May, baby! Wooooooo!
The high-score problem
There’s a brilliant speech by Bobby Kennedy that I think about a lot in times like this. When journalists get bamboozled by a new low-wage employer moving to town, or when a new jobs report gets blared all over creation uncritically, I think about this speech, which questions the limits of what data can tell us.
Speaking at the University of Kansas, Kennedy warned:
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
By blindly promoting economics numbers as though the highest score is all that matters, we as Americans are agreeing that the most important thing, above all else, is being employed. Never mind if you have to work two or three part-time gigs to pay the rent. Never mind if none of your employers provide health insurance. Never mind that workers are too tired and stretched too thin to find a new job, or to get training that might improve their conditions. Never mind that jobs which were once considered good careers are now paid a pittance.
When we blare the news of a great new jobs report—no matter which party is in power—we are advancing the narrative that as long as we hit our marks, nothing else matters. A job is a job is a job is a job.
Except that’s not true. Gradually, over the last half-decade, and without our consent, the deal has changed. Eventually, no amount of deft media manipulation will be able to hide that fact.
