Labor Day 2021

Whether you choose to put away the seersucker suit for the season is up to you, but Labor Day was established in 1894 to celebrate the “contributions and achievements of American workers” in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when working conditions were so dangerous and horrific as to be unfathomable to today’s worker. And thankfully, legislation changed much of that, between the Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and later the  Civil Rights Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act and Equal Pay Act, workers have enjoyed vast improvements over the past century.

But what about now? According to MIT prof David Autor, while pandemic benefits have played a role in the current labor shortage, the rules is insignificant. The lack of affordable child care has also been raised as a reason, but that, too, doesn’t empirically bear out as the cause of the problem. He posits another rationale.

Let’s entertain a third possibility. People’s valuation of their own time has changed: Americans are less eager to do low-paid, often dead-end service and hospitality work, deciding instead that more time on family, education and leisure makes for a higher standard of living, even if it means less consumption.

If the lack of enthusiasm for bad jobs lasts, does this bode ill for the U.S. economy? The answer is no — and here’s why: The U.S. doesn’t have a job quantity problem; instead, it has a job quality problem.

People no longer want to work in lousy jobs? It’s unclear that anyone ever aspired to work in a lousy job, but they did so because the failure to do so had consequences. You didn’t eat, for one. Autor contends that this is a rebalancing of priorities, from “less consumption” to a better quality of life.

For the past 40 years, our economy has generated vast numbers of low-paid, economically insecure jobs with few prospects for career advancement. On almost every measure — pay, working environment, prior notice of job termination, and access to paid vacation, sick time and family leave — non-college-educated U.S. workers fare worse than comparable workers in other wealthy industrialized nations.

And there is no question but that our economy relies on these low-paid jobs, from mowing the law to serving your burger to picking the apples from the trees. In basic compensation theory, the proper wage paid is the amount necessary to get sufficient competent labor required to perform a function. If you have a job that no one will take, you’re paying too little. If you have a job where you get ten applicants for every position, you’re paying too much. Benefits and working conditions offset to some degree wages, as do unquatifiable factors such as personal satisfactin and fulfillment, although some jobs, garbage collector for example, rarely turn out to be as personally fulfilling as one might expect.

But someone has to collect the garbage, even though it’s prospects for career advancement are limited. Other jobs which require neither education nor skills, are fungible whether we like it or not. For people who lack education and skills, it’s pretty good that these jobs exist. For young people who aren’t working part of their career path, but to make a buck for the moment, low-paying jobs are a gift, for without them there would be no opportunity.

The filling of low-paying, insecure, futureless jobs relied on people needing to survive. Autor takes for granted that people’s basic needs are already satisfied such that even the uneducated and unskilled can survive without working. While he dismisses pandemic relief, including the eviction moratorium (a penny save, you know), as the cause, he offers no explanation for how people who don’t work manage to eat or have a roof over their head. And many don’t, of course. Are they disinterested in work such that they could find a home or are they frozen out of even low-paying jobs by their circumstances?

Couldn’t raising wages spur employers to automate many low-paid service jobs? Yes — but that’s not bad. There’s no future in working the fry station at White Castle. We should welcome the robot that’s now doing that job at some locations. Automating bad jobs has positive consequences for productivity. When employers pay more for human labor, they have an incentive to use it more productively. Otherwise, workers aren’t worth paying for. And one way to use people more productively is to train them. This may be one reason that employers provide more training opportunities in a tightening labor market — something happening now.

What does Autor see them being trained to do? We can’t all have a corner office and write for Salon. In smaller numbers, training is a great incentive. But that’s only as long as there are fulfilling, well-paid jobs to be had. And marginal increases in wages, even if the minimum wage was increased to $15 per hour, wouldn’t make garbage collection more personally deeply fulfilling. But they would make things more expensive.

Don’t higher wages mean higher prices for consumers? Yes. Restaurants and hotels may get a bit pricier, and customer service agents may be more scarce at big box stores. But most of us are workers as well as consumers. Everyday low prices for consumers partly reflect subsistence wages for many workers. And that’s no bargain for the workers whose low pay keeps those prices low.

If wages go up, and prices go up, such that our net buying power remains the same, has anything been accomplished? Ironically, many of the folks who decry the lack of affordable child care so parents to go to work also demand higher wages for child care providers. Math is hard.

At the turn of the 20th Century, children worked 12 hours a day in outrageously unsafe factories or they didn’t eat the next day. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, jobs are going begging this Labor Day as they fail to provide workers with self-actualization and a sufficient wage to tithe the ACLU.

Perhaps they’ll eventually get hungry or cold, or there will be a new “must-have” iPhone with the headphone jack on the side, and they will go back to work. Perhaps they will just get bored when they run out of Netflix zombie shows to watch. Or they will sit on the couch in the basement until they find themselves unable to move, whether from atrophy or an excess of Cheetos bolstered by the body image validation crowd on Insta. Those trillion dollar coins are bound to run out eventually, and not even the sweetest praise of a waiter whose thumb is in your soup is going to keep the customers paying super-size tips.

We’ve come a long way, baby. Happy Labor Day, and there’s nothing wrong with “winter whites.”