I have been seeing these monthly jobs reports for years — decades — and have always questioned what they really mean.
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 199,000 in November, and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care and government. Employment also increased in manufacturing, reflecting the return of workers from a strike. Employment in retail trade declined.
Did 199,000 people suddenly join the workforce from somewhere else? Were they in school or somehow out of the market? And are the new jobs a net gain or are there some losses that offset them? There is a lot of detail in these reports and perhaps some of these questions can be answered. For instance I have often wondered about earnings…are these “new jobs” good paying jobs or are they lower-wage replacements from jobs that are no longer available…
In November, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 12 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $34.10. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 4.0 percent.
12¢ an hour over 40 hours isn’t a lot but it’s more…more is better.
But the bigger question I find myself drawn is, what is a job anyway? Maybe I have read too much David Graeber — or maybe not enough — but that’s where I think this is coming from.
Jobs are not work. Let’s establish that. We all do work that isn’t paid, whether it’s household tasks or childcare or meal prep, for others, it’s work that has to be done, just like the work we are paid for. There is a lot of work that needs to be done, public service like education or park maintenance or caring for those who are unable to take care of themselves — the very old or very young. Is that work being done to the extent it’s needed? Ask anyone who works in the paid workforce in those sectors and they will tell you there is more work than they can find workers for, and even with willing volunteers, there is work that is left undone.
So what is a job? A job is a tranche of work that can be monetized and sold in the market. This often means it comes with a performance requirement, like some number of hours to cover benefits and taxes, the costs of doing business which is how these jobs are created — to enable businesses, in most cases. So jobs are commoditized labor, not unlike the collateralized debt that was at the root of the 2008 housing crash. In that instance, risky loans were underwritten by the finance industry and wrapped up in bundles, then sold as assets themselves. No one knew what was in the bundle, but the underwritten value was taken at face value with results we all remember.
I see jobs as commoditized bundles of work, in much the same way, but mostly without the risk. We have often heard someone talk about wanting to hire staff but the hours are not there; in other words, the costs associated with adding someone to the payroll are too high in comparison to the revenue gained by adding them. It might breakeven at 20 hours a week or even 10, but most jobs are 40 hours week, with anything less than that coming with reduced benefits and the general sense of not being a full member of the staff. Part time comes to mean a partial person, as far as status goes.
So how we more clearly delineate the idea of work from our concept of a job? You could work all day long collecting trash or cleaning public spaces but if someone asks you if you have a job, you would have to say no. You could volunteer at a school or senior center, tutoring or managing appointments or any number of really useful tasks but do you have a job? Again, it would be no.. since you didn’t get paid for it and because it was not counted in the bureau of labor statistics jobs reports, your work has no value. You will likely be as tired as someone who does any number of the bullshit jobs David Graeber discusses, some of which actually do harm. But you don’t have a job.
I recall a passage from the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, where someone posits a worker making land mines…imagine that being your contribution to the economy, making reliable ways to make land unusable and impassible using death or severe maiming as the means. And the amount of effort needed to remove them and restore that land to use: that is the byproduct. But that job would be counted in whatever nation’s BLS numbers.
So how do we get to those sunlit uplands? Single payer healthcare would be one way, since access to healthcare in the USA is linked to jobs and is often one of the differences between full and part time work. When we hear any politician claiming to be a champion of small business, consider their stance on single payer vs corporate healthcare, and how easy it is for someone to get paying work if their employer doesn’t have to weigh the cost of adding them against the overhead of benefits. If you don’t support a plumber or carpenter taking on some help, even part-time, to better serve their customers, you are not a champion of small business.
Consider also that labor statistics don’t included unpaid or volunteer labor. How many Meals on Wheels volunteer cooks and drivers are out every day providing necessary service but uncounted because it isn’t paid? What about school volunteers, filling the gaps that classroom teachers can’t cover with reading or math support for those who need it? We have to remember, the recipients of Meals on Wheels were once members of the labor economy: their jobs were listed in those statistics, just the schoolchildren of today will be doing work that will be included in reports yet to come. Why is the work being performed on their behalf not counted?
The economy is bigger than the remunerative labor market. The root of the word economics — eco — stems from the Greek oikos which referred to “three related but distinct concepts: the family, the family’s property, and the house.” Ecology and economics both stem from that root, the idea of a system of mutual exchange or interdependence. To exclude unpaid labor is akin to excluding the need for sunlight in a garden because it can’t be purchased.
We continue to learn more about the ecological systems that surround us and Adam Smith’s 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was just that…an inquiry, an exploration of what he saw as natural phenomena that he wanted to understand and explain (Smith’s book has a similarity to the Bible as being often quoted but rarely read in full or understood). Not a week goes by without some new revelation about an unseen link or process in nature, most often because humans have disrupted it and are now seeing the consequence, whether it’s beavers managing flood control better than the Army Corps of Engineers to flowers evolving to self-pollinate as their insect and bird partners are declining in population.
Maybe the idea of sunlight as the unpurchasable but necessary component to life as we know it is apt. We all do necessary work that goes unpaid and perhaps is impossible to value in any market. We feed each other to fortify each other for the work that needs to be done. Sometimes presence is what’s being given, being there without being busy. And where that is the work, it should be counted. Does this mean that caregivers should draw a salary? I wouldn’t argue against it but maybe the work we pay to have done isn’t worth paying for. It’s always been interesting me that some jobs get wages while others get compensation…I think the work that requires compensation is work that we know is not worth doing (see Bullshit Jobs above), and we admit that we are compensating people for the waste of their precious time spent doing it.
The fact of the matter is it sits on 1/5 of an acre of land on Lake City Way, a busy arterial/stroad/busway, where housing or mixed-used development would be welcome. As you can see, the tavern is a teardown, valued at $1000, the lowest value you’ll see. And the land is valued at $1.1 million, up from $71,000 at the end of last century and $528,000 10 years ago.
