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The percentage of Americans who work in agriculture is about two percent of the population. That means that those two percent, along with the associated restaurants, grocery stores and other suppliers of food, feed the rest of us. This is a huge aberration in human history. Only about 120 years ago, about 1/3 of the population worked in some aspect of agriculture. That was a central function of human beings, growing and finding enough food to feed the population.
Taken from another viewpoint, it is easy to see that most of us these days don’t really do any work at all, not by historical standards. We don’t get out in the fields and dig in the dirt, or go down into the mines and bring up coal, or risk our lives out at sea. For those who still are engaged in these more physically demanding tasks, machines do almost all of the heavy lifting. Manual labor still plays an important role, but machines do five to a hundred times the actual lifting once done by humans, horses and leverage.
From the early 20th to the early 21st century, work has change radically and it changed again in the current epoch of digital computation and instant connectivity. If someone came to our society from the time of Abraham Lincoln, most of us would be described as lazy do nothings dependent on others for food and shelter. What happened?
Work was transformed. Now, we define work as being almost anything someone else will pay us to do. If we can get paid for drawing cartoons, that’s work. If we can get paid for pushing symbols around to create a website, that’s work. If we can paid to read the news on television, that is not only work but minor league glamorous work that thousands more would like as their job.
Here’s the problem: we can’t get paid for all of the things that need to be done. The capitalist, free enterprise system meets a roadblock when there are no profits to be seen or when the profits are too modest to please investors or Wall Street. For those kinds of jobs, we have the huge, growing nonprofit sector and, of course, government. Still, there are many things that need to be done for which we can’t be paid or can be paid only a little.
We are now spending enough, according to some estimates, to end all poverty in the United States and the very fact that we are spending anything is controversial. A huge amount of the money being spent stays in the hands of government workers who disperse the money and benefits and a lot more does a quick hop from the government to doctors and hospitals. The money flies over the heads of the poor, providing benefit, but little or no dignity.
Employment not only provides a sense of self worth and dignity, it offers those who have it choices. You could, instead of buying a lot of stuff, save up for ten years and then go traveling around the world, living the dream that many people have all their lives. You could use the money to help a sick parent or other relative. You could invest in yourself with education, training or the making of art works that provide a deep sense of personal satisfaction. None, or very little, of the money that goes to people through government programs can do any of this.
So, there is no doubt that people need work. It provides structure and a sense of purpose in life. And, when you make something of value to others, there is a greater satisfaction, at least for people who care about their society and the world around them.
It is possible that we are running out of work for people to do. No, not out of work per se, but out of the work that will pay people to do enough things to have a fully employed, healthy society. We can now make more things with less labor, less human involvement overall, than ever before. The answer for the 20th century was to create and encourage a consumer society where people worked to make things, made enough money to buy goods and services and it all spun around, feeding on itself. That cycle is broken or is moving toward being broken down.
Corporations no longer believe they have to pay their employees enough to buy the goods they make and sell. The leaders of American business want the cheapest labor, anywhere in the world they can get it. They will pay millions for shipping and for communications links to factories around the world, as long as the get cheap labor. Computer systems are taking over more and more of tasks once performed by humans, so fewer workers are needed than ever before. If more can be accomplished with fewer workers, where does that leave the rest of the population? Part of the answer in recent years has been with lower wages or flat out unemployed.
As work in the corporate world shrinks and as corporate leaders become more unwilling to pay decent wages at all, the challenge for the 21st century will likely be to redefine work (once again) and figure out how to pay for it. Some people are now suggesting the idea of a minimum income for all adult Americans. This is very unlikely to ever get off the ground in America, where self reliance and personal initiative are still paramount values (next to owning guns and the Super Bowl). Yet, some variation of this idea will probably have to be considered at some point. As long as money circulates and people are doing useful things, then something is gained, regardless of where the money to pay the workers originates.
In the Great Depression of the 1930s and ‘40s, the federal government created all kinds of jobs for a nation with soaring unemployment and little prospect of things getting better. The nation’s banks had collapsed. The industrial growth of the country was stopped cold and was slipping backward, fast. There were no new investment funds available because millions had lost everything on Wall Street. Farmers from across one third or more of the country were being driven off their land by drought and banks taking back farms which could no longer support the mortgage payments. The many government programs created by FDR became the “employers of last resort” for a nation desperate for something to do to earn money and retain self respect. Young people, in particular, went to work as fast as the government programs could hire them. Our nation is dotted with some of the results of those “make work” programs, such as Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park about an hour and half drive from Washington, DC.
As things stand now, most of what is defined as work is in the hands of businesses to make profits for their owners. This definition of work is too narrow. It doesn’t meet the need of doing all of the things that need to be done, nor does it seem likely to provide decent, full time employment for the people who want to work. We need to look beyond money making enterprises, and non-profits as well, to consider what it is we want done and how we will pay for it to provide an active, problem solving society and one that provides useful work for more people, more of the time.
The great difficulty of the necessary transformations is that most of us carry around ideas handed down from grandparents and great grandparents. We live in a mental world constructed for the 19th century while our bodies occupy the 21st. The ideas of order and necessity faced by those alive three or or generations ago, who themselves took ideas from three or four generations earlier in which they were inculcated, mean we have, and will have, a conflict between the realities we face and the images and ideals stored in the brain. The nature of work has changed drastically, but we have made slow adjustments. The definition will change more in the future, but will we be stuck in the past?
Can we change fast enough to meet present and future situations? The answer so far is no. We are still fighting over ideas and concepts that wore out their welcome somewhere deep in the early 20th century. Politically, we are hung up on the idea of a right/left conflict when events are rapidly sweeping those concepts into the dust bin. The problems don’t divide themselves up neatly into political corners. If we can’t escape old ideological concepts to look at new problems with fresh eyes, we are bound to fail.
More on this subject soon.
Doug Terry, 1.28.14
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