Letter 2 America for June 11, 2013

Dear America,

My children have recently graduated from college, both with bachelor's degrees.  They are now engaged in employment that is gainful to one degree or another, but neither of them is employed in a way that is reflective of their academic achievements.  It takes time and assiduous application of one's resources to accomplish a college education, as everyone who has gotten one knows, and it should be useful in terms of employability, but in this day and age, it isn't really.  My son works as a lineman for one of those independent companies who repair utility infrastructure on contract, and while he makes a good bit of money, he could have done that work without his degree, and his degree in philosophy may well never qualify him for anything else.  Apparently more medical students majored in their undergraduate years in philosophy than in any other discipline, but they probably didn't have any lost years during their college careers as my son did, and they probably have grade point averages that are unblemished rather than reflective of the kind of social mania that afflicts some young people when they realize that once outside the range of their parents' gaze they can get away with it.  Combine those factors with the fact that my son doesn't want to be a doctor and the value of his philosophy degree begins to look almost nil.  My daughter has a degree in marketing, though I must confess that I don't know what that means.  And given the fact that she has two jobs--one as an "administrative assistant in a civil engineering firm and the other waiting on customers at a snooty clothier for women whose husbands make too much money--apparently those in business aren't too impressed with a marketing major either.  In short, it seems that, like many of their peers, my two young-twenties children are being told by a business community that is making more profit now than at any time in history that they are lucky to have their jobs, and they should thank those in charge for breaking their backs with undesirable tasks that they must perform at odd and inconvenient hours for low wages.  The days when a college degree were a ticket to a white collar life are over.

The experience my children are having is not unique by all accounts.  The generation now entering the job market is more likely than any predecessor to experience a quality of life lesser than that of their parents, yet the advent of more and more means of acquiring artificial wealth...that is wealth that is not a function of any socially useful enterprise...has created more undeserved riches than ever before as well.  Areas of human economic activity that have been nothing more than lucrative backwaters are now college majors that pass for career preparation.  At the same time, business and industry, which used to train workers for a future with a single company, now want to rely on public educational institutions to prepare students to be workers for low wages on the pretext that those institutions have thus far been providing the wrong kind of education for the jobs of the future.  Unfortunately, those jobs don't pay much and as a result, wages have stagnated while the wages of management have gone, in the case of CEO's, from 40 times those of the average worker to 400 times those low wage levels.  Wealth is being concentrated at the top of the economy while it is being diluted at the bottom; a recipe for disaster of historic proportions in my opinion.  When the worker cannot afford the goods he produces, the economy fails, and that is what is happening.  The mechanism is the export of jobs to low wage countries, which then produce cheaper, lower quality goods that American workers can afford until their jobs get exported to those lower wage countries, and all the while management thrives and the "financiers" get ever fatter by producing nothing but taking a cut off the top of our economy for the sole reason that they have access to financial markets that the common man cannot hope to access.  We are headed for a depression...a the decline of American hegemony in the world economy from which we will never recover.  It may take a hundred years, but unless American labor puts a stop to it, it is inevitable.  Simply put, we need a resurgence of "the Wobblies" and maybe that is already happening.

On ABC's This Week this past Sunday, there was a discussion about the economy, and naturally the issue of the jobs report of last week came up.  It was pointed out by Representative Keith Ellison of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that while the number of jobs created was adequate, it wasn't remarkable, and Matthew Dowd had already brought up the fact that real wages haven't increased in fifteen years...the consensus is more like thirty.  Ellison then mentioned that minimum wage food handlers in Minnesota, his state, were on strike in some places to get raises over and above minimum wage rates and that their efforts denoted a positive trend in labor directed toward addressing the lack of economic progress among the bottom 50% of earners, some of whom are considered to be the working-poor...people who are gainfully employed but not making enough to raise them out of poverty.  The Wobblies, or the Industrial Workers of the World, were formed in 1905 and effectively became an ad hoc union that took up labor causes where extant unions were weak or non-existent.  It was a politically radical organization leaning toward socialism or even farther left, which led to government interest in the organization and some suppression of its efforts.  But it still exists, albeit on a very limited scale, and what it offers is still the same: an ethos that is labor oriented and advocacy for consistent labor efforts.  There are many other unions, some with millions of members while the Wobblies are only about 5,000 in number today, but maybe that should change.  Perhaps what we need now is an organization with a broader agenda than organizing for higher wages.  Maybe we need an organization that will promote the realization that, while capital may be necessary, it is useless without labor.  At any rate, something has to change or our children will be the first in recent history whose lives will be of lesser quality than their parents' were.  That's a distinction that we baby boomers don't want...nor should anyone else.

Your friend,

Mike