Why Work Isnt Working in Trumps America
Job seekers wait in line at a 2017 job fair at the Dolphin Mall in
Sweetwater, Fla. (Alan Diaz / AP)
Donald Trumps popularity rose this spring to a new personal best45 percent
(up from a dismal 38 percent in April). The boost was because the U.S.
unemployment rate has hit lows not seen in decades, according to a June
Gallup Poll. So runs a common story in the dominant corporate news media in
recent weeks.
There is likely some truth in the narrative. Americans have long tended to
give presidents higher approval ratings when the jobless rate drops.
Official unemployment continues to fall for reasons that have little to do
with Trump (its really about the timeworn ebbs and flows of the capitalist
business cycle), though he and his Republican Party partners are quite happy
to take credit.
But Trumps new high in approval remains quite low by historical standards.
Insofar as a presidents popularity reflects labor market conditions, his
persistent low approval rating may have something to do with the difference
between the official U.S. unemployment rate (U3) that is typically reported
in U.S. media and the real unemployment rate (U6) that Federal Reserve
chiefs have long recognized as the more relevant measure. The U3 number
defines the unemployed population narrowly as those jobless people who have
actively looked for work in the prior four weeks and are currently available
for work. It is currently at 3.8 percent, quite low by historical standards.
It hasnt gone below 4 percent since 2000.
The real U6 measure expands the definition of the unemployed to include
involuntarily part-time workers and discouraged and other marginally
attached workers who have been available for employment in the last year
but have given up on finding work for which they are qualified. By this
measure, U.S. unemployment is 7.6 percent.
Real unemployment would be over 9 percent if the 2.3 million people kept
behind bars in the U.S. (more than 1 in 110 of all Americans and 6 percent
of all black men in their 30s) were factored in. The United States globally
unmatched and racist mass incarceration system artificially suppresses the
U.S. unemployment rate (especially black and Latino joblessness) to a
significant degree.
Meanwhile, the overall U.S. labor force is shrinking, something that also
helps suppress official unemployment statistics. The civilian U.S. labor
force participation rate (LFPR)the percentage of all work-eligible,
nonmilitary Americans 16 years and older who are employed or actively
seeking workis currently below 63 percent, its lowest point since the late
1970s.
While Trump boasts about the recent U3 breakthrough, he is silent about
the shrinking U.S. labor forcesomething he used to harp on when Barack
Obama was in the White House. During the 2016 campaign, Trump ripped
government reports of falling unemployment rates for falsely inflated
numbers because so many Americans were not in the labor force. Our real
unemployment rate
is 42 percent, Trump insanely told Time magazine in
August 2016, because you have 90 million people that arent working, 93
million to be exact. Conflating the LFPR with U3, Trump was trying to refer
to monthly data on working-age Americans who were not in the labor force. It
was 94.3 million in August 2016. By April of this year, it was 95.7 million.
Of course, much of the shrinking labor force story reflects developments
that should be of no concern and might even be considered positive. The
aging of the baby boomer generation has combined with rising life expectancy
to increase the number of Americans who are retired and living off pensions
and Medicare. Young adults now spend more years in school than ever before
entering the labor force.
But education and retirement dont tell the whole story on declining labor
force participation. Prime-age (25- to 54-year-old) U.S. males are
generally past schooling but too young to retire. They are becoming less
attached to the labor market over time. Fully 11 percent of them are neither
employed nor seeing work today, up from 4 percent in 1950. This reflects the
collapse of the job market for unskilled workers left behind by
technological change and corporate globalization, something that millions of
working-age men face: the ugly choice between work for miserable wages or
life without employment. That is critical context for the surging deaths of
despairchiefly via suicide, alcoholism and opiate addictionthat have
shockingly depressed white male working-class lifespans (an unprecedented
development, with the anomalous exception of the U.S. Civil War period) in
recent years.
Another reason to be concerned about the declining LFPR is that wage levels
no longer permit most U.S. households to get by without more than one wage-
or salary-earner contributing to family incomes. The nations LFPR was much
lower in the 1950s and 1960s, but that had to do with something good: the
ability of families to get by on a single full-time job. The subsequent near
murder of U.S. unions and related long-term wage stagnation have made it
impossible for most folks to live decently on one job per household. Now,
the leftist economics blogger Pete Dolack writes, everybody works and still
cant make ends meet.
Which brings us to the unpleasant subject of wages. As Dolack reports, the
percentage of total national income going to workers (as opposed to
investors) has fallen significantly over the last half century (from 52
percent in 1969 to 43 percent today). If the U.S. labor market is so tight
now, under Trump, however, then surely U.S. wages must be getting made great
again, right? In theory, yes. But thats not whats happening.
As Bloomberg reported in early June, citing data from Trumps Labor
Department, average hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, were unchanged in
May from a year earlier, even as nominal pay accelerated to a 2.7 percent
annual gain from 2.6 percent in April. For production and nonsupervisory
workers, real average hourly earnings fell 0.1 percent from a year earlier.
When you also factor in the overconcentration of wage growth in the most
well-paid segments of the workforce, it is clear that U.S. wages are heading
nowhere near what it would take to boost many Americans out of poverty and
near-poverty (low income), categories that currently describe a remarkable
140 million Americans, equivalent to 44 percent of the U.S. population. The
ratio of CEO pay to workers wages now averages 339 to 1.
U.S. job growth for years has been strong, but for what kinds of
positions? Low-wage and often temporary McJobs with no prospects for
advancement and benefits. Jobs that pay so poorly that hundreds of millions
of Americans have to borrow money or supplement full-time employment incomes
with food stamps and visits to food pantries to survive.
The exorbitant interest rates we pay on credit cards and for other forms of
modern-day debt peonage (including payday loans and rent to purchase
contracts that amount to usury) combine with inflation to mean that our
wages are not merely stagnant but actually declining in real terms. If we
earned a sustainable income, Truthdigs Chris Hedges notes, we would not
have to borrow money to survive.
It is certainly no mere coincidence that the 92-month Obama-Trump job
expansion has taken place alongside listless wage growth. The job creation
has been predicated on low levels of compensation that reflect the
persistently advantageous bargaining position of the employer class
vis-à-vis workers. The bosses remain very much in the saddle thanks to the
weakness and related bureaucratic conservatism of U.S. unions, the reality
and threat of technical labor displacement (automation), the corporate
globalization of the labor market and the ongoing neoliberal rollback of the
social safety net (weaker in the U.S. than in any other rich capitalist
state). U.S. employers and employees both know that workers have little
welfare-state backup and that there are still plenty of members of the
national and internationalthanks to capitalist globalizationreserve army
of labor: workers who are currently unemployed, under-employed or
completely outside the labor force but available for employment. Within and
beyond the labor market, the balance of class forces, to use an old
Marxist phrase, is very much on the side of the capitalist and broader
employer class, not the working class.
It is at this point, minus my references to class rule and power, that the
standard, mainstream discussion of workers plight and experience in the
U.S. stops. It is left to officially marginalized radicals, such as
myself, to go beyond the standard quantitative measures (unemployment, job
creation, wage rates, etc.) to mention the spiritually deadening
estrangement and despotism that reigns across what Marx called the hidden
abode of capitalist production. Much of what passes for meaningful and
supposedly dignity-conferring work under capitalism consists of the
performance of monotonous, narrow, highly specialized and alienating tasks
conceived for workers by employers and employers labor experts with no
higher purpose in mind than churning out profits for the nations obscenely
wealthy investor class.
It is an accurate Marxian truism that capitalists would not hire workers
without the promises of extracting a profit from employing people. But
surplus value is not the only thing workers lose to employers under the
profits system. They also commonly give away key components of their
humanity. Its not just about the indignity of the inadequate wage. Its
also about the ceaseless, soul-crushing execution of narrow and mindless
tasks designed by privileged others who would never trade places with
frontline workers. Its also about the insults and abuse handed down by
bosses and the pervasive danger and toxicity in the workplace, where
workers safety and health typically takes a distant second place to
employers cost and profits concerns. Its also about the absence of
anything remotely approximating democracy on the job, where most working-age
Americans spend the lions share of their waking lives. With U.S. union
density (the percentage of U.S. workers enrolled in unions) down to 10.7
percent, including just 6.5 percent in the private sector, few U.S.
employees have a shop steward or other union official to defend them against
arbitrary discipline and dismissal anymore. It doesnt help that, as Workers
Action writers Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer report, the nations fading
labor movement is ruled by an unresponsive and authoritarian bureaucracy:
Many unions have adopted a neoliberal corporate culture: They are top-down
with little information provided to their members about exactly what they
are doing. They do not engage their members in any significant
decision-making and treat them as customers, not comrades in struggle. They
process grievanceshopefullyand negotiate contracts behind closed doors.
Trueunionized workers fare substantially better than non-unionized workers
when it comes to wages and benefits. But doing better than Walmart employees
is not an inspiring success story.
Upper-middle-class intellectuals who like to rhapsodize about the pride,
purpose, self-esteem and stability supposedly conferred by contemporary
work (employment, that is; work should no more be conflated with
employment than sex should be conflated with the prostitution trade) ought
to spend a few months or years putting one bottle of shampoo or mouthwash
after another into rapidly moving boxes on high-speed packaging lines for
eight hours or more a day and five days or more per week. Or serving food to
long lines of students and faculty at a university cafeteria. Or checking
out (bar-code swiping) an endless sea of grocery purchasers. Or cleaning up
parking ramps or nursing home messes between midnight and 8 a.m. Or spending
10 hours a day driving a garbage truck to and from a landfill. Or
commandeering an 18-wheeler across endless stretches of interstate highway.
Or sitting in a call-center cubicle for hours on end.
It wasnt for nothing that the 19th century American working class and the
pioneers of the U.S. labor movement referred to wage labor as wage
slavery. Now as in the past, working people short on resources (nearly 6 in
10 Americans lack $500 in savings) are compelled to sell and degrade their
species-defining human capacity for engaged and creative labor for the basic
instrumental purpose of obtaining enough money to buy necessities for
themselves and their families. Their own senses of how and why humanity
should interchange with itself and nature through the collective labor
process are coldly irrelevant under capitalism. The nature and purpose of
the tasks workers perform is, in Marxs words, external to the worker and
is therefore forced labor. Such work, Marx observed, is not the
gratification of a needof the natural human drive to produce or provide
something useful and/or beautifulbut merely the means of satisfying needs
external to it.
External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, Marx wrote, is a
labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Such estranged labor, as he
called it, lurks at the hidden and dark heart of modern dehumanization.
To make matters worse, the long hours of voiceless and alienating
mortification required to get by in a low-wage economy leaves workers with
too little time and energy for meaningful participation in whats left of
U.S. democracy beyond the workplace. (The United States has the longest
working hours among the worlds rich nations.) This relates back to their
workplace experience, where the despotism of the bosses is empowered by
corporate-captive government policies that favor employers over employees
within and beyond the jobs. Time, as is too rarely noted (but as the
pioneers of the U.S. labor movement knew quite well), is a democracy issue.
Even the instrumental goal of getting wages through employment is hostage to
the timeworn vagaries of capitalist accumulation and business cycles. Nobody
should be so dull and historically blind as to believe that the Obama-Trump
job expansion isnt headed for a major reversal. Thats not how capitalism
rolls. Nobody knows exactly when the next correction or, as seems
distinctly possible, collapse will occur, but the fact that it is coming and
will be traumatic should not be in doubt. All the standard signs are
thereextreme levels of inequality, massive debt, outlandish price-earnings
ratios, massive profits based largely on speculative and parasitic
nonproductive investment and over-easy credit. Millions of Americans will
lose their jobs and be plunged into despair when the Trump recession hits.
As Hedges recently reflected:
[The currently reigning] circular use of money to make and hoard money is
what Karl Marx called fictitious capital. The steady increase in public
debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately
lead, as [the Wall Street veteran and financial expert] Nomi Prins writes,
to a tipping pointwhen money coming in to furnish that debt, or available
to borrow, simply wont cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will
pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds
[and] the next financial crash
wont be like the last one. This is because, as [Prins] says, there is no
Plan B. Interest rates cant go any lower. There has been no growth in the
real economy. The next time, there will be no way out.
When the crash hits, Hedges writes, rage will explode
into a firestorm
and the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look
sagacious and benign.
On the positive side, the breakdown will slow the pace of capitalogenic
carbon emissions that are destroying livable ecology before our very eyes.
Americans will have more time on their handstime to organize for the
nationalization of the reckless and parasitic big banks, which are widely
and justly hated across the land (see Glen Fords recent Left Forum talk on
this topic here). With the banks stripped of their parasitic lords and
function and brought under popular control, we can use the nations
worker-generated economic surplus to move the nation off of profit, war,
empire, inequality and ecocide and on to the paths of democracy, social
justice, peace and environmental sustainability within and beyond the
workplace.
An essential part of this radical restructuring of society itself (what
Martin Luther King called in his final essay the real issue to be faced
and the real challenge posed by the black revolution) will be the
widespread creation of what the clever Marxist economist Richard Wolff calls
worker self-directed enterprises: firms organized such that workers become
their own bosses.
Wolff explains:
Specifically, that means placing the workers in the position of their own
collective board of directors, rather than having directors be non-workers
selected by major shareholders
the development of a majorand, if
possible, prevailingsector of the economy that is comprised of enterprises
(offices, factories, farms, and stores) in which the employees
democratically perform the following key enterprise activities: (a) divide
all the labors to be performed, (b) determine what is to be produced, how it
is to be produced, and where it is to be produced, and (c) decide on the use
and distribution of the output or revenues (if output is monetized)
therefrom.
Ordinary workers and citizens deserve the basic human right to be in charge
of their own work livesof how their core human labor powers interact with
nature and society. This is democracy and dis-alienation 101. It is also
survival and sustainability 101. We have endured a half-millennium of
capitalism, of societies and nations ruled (whatever their varying and
changing outward political forms, including parliamentary democracy) by
unelected and overlapping dictatorships of money, class and empire.
This profit-, accumulation- and growth-addicted regime has brought us to
previously unimaginable levels of social disparitythree absurdly rich
people now have as much wealth between them as the bottom half of the U.S.
populationpaired with a pace of environmental destruction that poses the
near-term risk of human extinction. Its long past time to, in Marxs words,
expropriate the expropriators.
Paul Street