The Johnny Paycheck Misemployment Rate

We’ve reached “full employment.” So why are so many Americans unhappy?

Left to right: Johnny Lee, Johnny Paycheck, and Mickey Gilley 3/1/78. Photo: Cris57helpme via Creative Commons.

The latest official report says that the U.S. unemployment rate has been under 4 percent for a year and a half and under 6 percent for five years.

You’d think that everyone from old-school liberals to Wall Street Republicans to populists of all stripes would be jumping up and down with glee. After all, it’s been economic dogma for decades that “4 percent” means we’ve achieved “full employment;” that pretty much everyone who wants to work has a job or is in a short transition between jobs.

Yet no one would say that Americans are feeling happy these days, even about the economy. Polls find that only 16 percent of Americans think the economy is in “excellent shape”.

So, what’s the problem?

Part of it is undoubtedly partisanship. Anything that Democrats deserve credit for, Republicans are inclined to be skeptical about . . and vice versa. When a Republican is elected president, Republicans’ optimism jumps; when a Democrat is elected, Republicans get more pessimistic. (Democrats tend to be more even-keeled.)

It’s partly that there’s a small number (now 2.6 percent of the workforce) who want full-time work, but can only find part-time jobs.

And there’s also the stagnation in real wages, growing only 0.9 percent during the past 12 months.

The bigger problem is widespread frustration with the quality, not quantity, of jobs. That’s something that the official unemployment rate can’t account for. Nor does any government statistic that I’m aware of.

The disconnect is a product of most economists and politicians still focusing on the old problems of eliminating material scarcity, instead of the more important problems in today’s American age of abundance.

So, allow me to suggest to the U.S. Labor Department that it regularly calculate and publish the following new employment-related measurements:

• The Johnny Paycheck Misemployment Rate: Named for the country musician who popularized the song, “Take This Job and Shove It”. It measures the number of people whose work bores them to death, whose — in the song’s words — “foreman, he’s a regular dog; the line boss, he’s a fool,” but whose need for a steady paycheck keeps them chained to their job.
• The Bud Fox Guilty Conscience Rate: Named for the Charlie Sheen character in the movie, Wall Street, who gives up a high-flying “financial services” job because he can no longer stand his work’s terrible impact on ordinary people. It measures the number of people who know deep in their hearts that, on balance, their work is a net negative for the environment, for their community, and ultimately for their own soul.
• The Edwin Jackson Job Insecurity Rate: Named for the baseball pitcher who has been signed and let go by 14 different baseball teams in the last 19 years. It measures people’s degree of certainty that they’ll be working for the same employer in the near future. One can’t underestimate the trauma of losing one’s job mid-career — despite being totally competent — and having to search for a new one. (Of course, we all wish we had as much money to tide us through those bouts of insecurity as Jackson, who has earned $78 million in salary by the age of 36.)
• The I, Robot Dead-End Career Rate: Named for the 1950 set of science fiction stories by Isaac Asimov (later turned into a Will Smith movie), in which robots are increasingly deployed to do jobs formerly exclusively done by humans. It measures the number of people who know or believe that their jobs can be done more efficiently and safely by automation.
• The Hard Workin’ Mama Rate: Named for those (still mostly women) who put in a full day’s worth of socially valuable work (taking care of sick relatives, creating community groups, etc.), but who aren’t counted as “employed” because they don’t get a paycheck.

Are these serious proposals? You decide. But, if nothing else, coming up with these new measurements would provide more satisfactory work for the folks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More importantly, the rates would give the rest of us a better idea of whether we really are making progress in our effort to build a more perfect union and in our pursuit of happiness.