Category: observations

Andrew Goodacre, the chief executive of the British Independent Retailers Association said the cost of living crisis had made people “think of alternative ways of sourcing items that are essential to them”.

Yes, essential items…like food. This verbiage could have come from a business plan or some other document no one is expected to read. But this was a quote provided to a newspaper so here we are.

What if — instead of failed schemes like the derisory  “eat out to help out” — HM Government simply gave its hungry citizens money…money they wouldn’t keep, wouldn’t hoard or send offshore but would spend on those essentials the anodyne Mr Goodacre mentions above. Anyone who has any experience in the real world of economics, which excludes most of HM Government or the US congress, money at that level doesn’t have owners, only spenders ( © Omar Devone Little). Any money you give to the people mentioned in the article will be in someone else’s account, some store’s till, within 24 hours.

Not like I expect Labour to pick up this ball and run with it but maybe after they get in, they can start a scheme like this for the neglected cities of the north and elsewhere.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

With his own claims to originalism fading fast, Scalia suggests liberal judicial activism, practiced by some of colleagues on the Court, is part of what brought about the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. The speech was an address to the Utah State Bar Association.

[From Peak Scalia | TPM Editors Blog]

I wonder if this isn’t the wrong comparison to make, though I’m not looking through the lens of judicial activism.

Consider Barack Obama:
• as the inheritor of a lot of policies and mechanisms he claims to oppose (like domestic surveillance or inequality): whether or not he does and what he could actually do about it is another discussion
• with his non-aggressive (not to say passive) disposition (see above, what he could do about it vs someone more confrontational)
• his political disadvantages (minority in the House, bizarre anti-productive rules in the Senate, passive to oppositional big media)
• huge military expenditures, including politicized defense expenditures for weapons that will never be used (we’re buying tanks? Why? Do we need a navy larger than the next several nations’ fleets combined? And why the F-35, other than contracts and jobs it represents?)
• a massive state surveillance operation of which we have no idea the real cost, and the yet to be weighed divisive social effects
• and the current economic morass with consolidation of power and wealth in every industry and the resulting inequality.

Who do you think of as a 20th Century political figure, given that description?

The name Mikhail Gorbachev ring a bell? He rose to power just as the wheels were coming off the wagon and there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. He inherited a state that had been hollowed out by ideology-driven economic policies and ruinous military spending. He ended presiding over the dissolution of an empire, as Russia became independent of the USSR along with other nations that had been “unified” into the old USSR — Ukraine, Belarus, the central Asian states, etc.

There’s a lot of muttering about secession or breaking the country up, letting intransigent states or regions go their own way, but there’s an assumption of choice to those arguments, of a new CSA breaking away. But what if as a precursor to or result of that happening, the federal government was rendered powerless, through budgetary hijinks or other political stunts (maybe congress members from the intransigent states refuse to return to DC or some other personal veto)?

Crazy? Possibly. Unbelievable? I’m not so sure. I continually find myself thinking on that memo from Buchanan to Nixon on the “bigger half” [1][2] and am reminded there are people — a lot of people — who would break the country up rather than see it accommodate ideas or people they oppose. That and referring to Frank Herbert’s Dune as a political text: “He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” This has been the SOP of the Republican congress since the Gingrich era, though he was more loyal to the idea of a continuing United States than many of his successors.

1. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100163806/after-wisconsin-and-north-carolina-america-has-its-silent-majority-now-it-needs-a-nixon/

2. http://books.google.com/books?id=u7n3MMmktssC&pg=PA606&lpg=PA606&dq=buchanan+%22bigger+half%22&source=bl&ots=jgGr5VD-_8&sig=7s4xNXO1IAL_GEkxF5B9HhcV2xo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XCzsUZumBKepiAKi6IFI&ved=0CGkQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=buchanan%20%22bigger%20half%22&f=false

Following up on this post I realize I have a very serious problem: the lack of self-esteem or value makes it hard to sell yourself or your ideas. If your underlying belief system is that everything you say or do is of no consequence, it makes it hard to get through the interview process, assuming you can even get one.

If you don’t believe you deserve it, you won’t get it.

The best advice I could have given myself, had I realized it, is that relying on jobs that other people create and define is never going to work for me. Temperamentally and physically/biologically I’m better off doing my own thing. But then there it is: how do you sell whatever it is you’re doing or making if you don’t believe it’s any good? And how could it be good, if you made it?

Imagine how you would manage this if you were faced with having to find a whole new life for yourself in less than a month due to a failed domestic situation? If you’re a reasonably normal person, well-adjusted and comfortable with yourself, this may not be a big deal. You have friends or other resources.

But that’s not my situation. Thirteen years I have lived here and I have no network to draw on and not much in the way of local knowledge to use to navigate a new course. It’s going to be a rough stretch.

It’s taken me about 40 years to fully (?) process this.

“J.T” is a simple, hour-long story of a young boy living in a New York ghetto, but it tackles some weighty issues.

[From J.T. Reviews & Ratings – IMDb]

I saw this movie right after it came out, so around 1970. The “weighty issues” it deals with are racism and poverty in mid 20th Century America but an 8 year old English boy living in Canada didn’t get any of that. You have to read a few more of the reviews to learn what I saw. And from what I can tell, I never saw the end of the movie, as you’ll see.

I saw it with my mother, in the front room of our house, and for some reason, I remember it as a summer afternoon, with long shadows everywhere. The storyline of the movie I remember was that a poor black kid finds a cat in an abandoned building and it becomes the center of his universe, something for him to love and care for, to look forward to being with. But some older boys who have nothing to love or care about find him sneaking into this old building and they catch him in the act of caring, of loving. They take the cat from him and play “keep away,” teasing and taunting, until one of them runs out to the street and slips, sending the cat into traffic where it is killed by a car, right in front of the young hero.

At this point, I burst into tears. All I saw was a small boy — like myself — who lost something precious due to the cruelty of others, out of the simple meanness and unempathetic jealousy of those who don’t know how to love.

My mother laughed at me for crying. She laughed at a child for expressing a natural emotion. She didn’t do it to minimize the effects or soften the blow. She offered no comfort, no compassion. She was no different from the boys on the screen, who hate to see anyone or anything receive love.

And that response to my openness, my willingness to openly feel, made me close up and hide that part of myself from the world. It made me fear rejection to the point where almost every decision I have made since then has been to avoid it. And to avoid rejection is to avoid life. It means not trying things, not risking exposure to the hurt that comes from being rejected.

My mother and I, if we were ever close, weren’t after that. Soon I was on my way to a new life in a new family in a new country south of the border, but that scabbed-over hurt stayed with me for years, many, many years. I expect the other changes only made me keep that of myself wrapped up tight.

It was only in the past 2-3 years I would allow myself to openly express that kind of feeling, to let the tears flow. And only rarely and at home.

I saw my mother twice after that before she died in 2003, a span of 33 years, and neither experience was positive. No, we weren’t close. There’s more but it’s not relevant here.

I didn’t realize until today that there was more of the movie after that scene, so badly was I hurt at the time. I never saw it or remembered it, I guess. I knew there was something about that moment, frozen in my mind, but I never quite realized what it was, what it all meant.

This has been coming clearer the past few weeks, the realization that I have shut myself off from far too many experiences and opportunities but not understanding why.

People think saying “no” doesn’t cost anything. It does. It can cost you everything.

It’s been a cathartic day. Just recounting the story brings more than a tear to my eyes. When I put it all together this morning, I was in pretty bad shape. And I expect the next few days will be up and down as I come to grips with the understanding of what happened and what I can do now.

I’ve always wondered why Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” resonated with me. What he describes is not unique to my experience but now that first line is going to stay with me, at least as far as an apt description of one of my parents. It’s never been far from my mind…maybe now I understand why.

Following up here.

What I get from the recent fight to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (or, in the words of Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, “the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin”) is that the battle may have been over public sector unions but the war is over public services and the kind of society that values them.

In the New Feudalism, it will no longer be possible to work at a job where the work is its own reward, like public safety or education or wildlife management. Everything and everyone is for sale. I can’t tell if Roe v Wade or the federal minim wage will come under attack first. After all, wage regulations kill jobs: let the market decide what a job (as a proxy for an unrepresented fellow citizen) is worth. Politicians and pundits can talk all they want about the Dignity of Labor but they never talk to the laborers themselves.

In the Alastair Sim “Scrooge” of 1951 (based on Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”), a young Scrooge and Marley take over a warehouse business and one of the workers has the temerity to ask if he is to kept on. The response? Not “what’s your name” or “what do you do” but “what’s your present salary?”
“Five shillings a week, sir.”
“You can stay for four shillings a week.”
“Well, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

This foreshadows the New Feudalism: break the unions, slash the workforce, close the factories, and re-open under new rules. We’re seeing it in the new centralized shipping warehouses, where worker toil under Dickensian conditions for scarce jobs at lousy pay. We see it in WalMart’s hiring practices: keep as many as possible to part-time hours to keep them off insurance, let them go to the ER for care.

I’m recalling a conversation with some local parents, both Chinese doctors, who came to America for a better opportunity for their son. They were no longer sure that was the right bet to have made, that the future they worked for on his behalf wasn’t coming. When did America stop being the Land of Opportunity?