dagblog - Comments for "Our Crisis of Bad Jobs"

I question that as well. In

ocean-kat — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:01:42 +0000

In reply to I've represented one major

I question that as well. In Fl where I lived two years ago and in Az where I live now I don't find Walmart's food prices cheaper. I shopped at Food Lion in Gainesville. Much cheaper than Walmarts. And in AZ I shop at Safeway. While the prices are more expensive at Safeway they have a discount card. By shopping the discounts its much cheaper and I can easily get the things I want with little change. For example it matters little to me if I eat pork instead of beef this week and chicken or beef next week because that's the way the discount card gives me the best savings. The only food I buy at Walmarts is no brand whole wheat pasta. Walmarts is a bit cheaper on durable goods but since there is a K-mart right across the street from the Walmarts in Nogales I check them both and sometimes buy at K-mart.

I don't know if any of the non Walmart store are unionized, just that Walmart food prices have never seemed low to me.

Anyway the situation is much more complex then simply looking at the price of a product. There can be hidden costs. If a low paid worker gets food stamps, earned income tax credits, or other subsidies those costs to tax payers aren't factored into the cost of the product. If workers can't afford health insurance and get medicaid or free care at emergency rooms those costs aren't factored into the price of the produce. Many who save money at Walmarts are paying those hidden costs.

Sure we can lower prices. Maybe union shops get paid more than minimum wage and those products likely cost more than shops that pay only minimum wage. We could lower prices even more by lowering or eliminating the minimum wage law. In many countries the goods we buy are made by children. We could get much lower prices if we eliminated our child labor laws. Safety regulations in factories and workers comp for accidents surely push up prices. We could eliminate those too and prices would go down. One can find dozens of stories about the environment disasters, damage, and degradation in China due to lax or non-existant environmental regulation. We could get much lower prices if we eliminated all our laws protecting the environment too.

Of course legislators need to consider the costs of regulations but a focus on the price of goods isn't what I see as the main priority.

We can't have only fun jobs.

Dan Kervick — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:10:46 +0000

In reply to How can everyone have quality

We can't have only fun jobs. But we can have a society in which all people have jobs of some kind, and in which people are paid much more for doing the stinky jobs than they are now. This will require paying other people much less.

Try doing corned beef!

Bruce Levine — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:17:39 +0000

In reply to Amazing the kind of things we

Try doing corned beef!

Amazing the kind of things we

Michael Maiello — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:00:48 +0000

In reply to I've represented one major

Amazing the kind of things we call "unskilled labor." As if I could properly slice delicate meats and fishes.

I've represented one major

Bruce Levine — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:12:06 +0000

In reply to Oh my, your mom and her ilk

I've represented one major union in the supermarket industry and I question whether food is necessarily more expensive in unionized workplaces. Walmart doesn't offer cheap prices only because it pays its part-time workers less; Walmart sells everything, has unlimited leverage with its suppliers and is therefore able to deal with the fact that the profit margin in the supermarket industry is one penny on the dollar. Walmart makes it up with a higher margin on other stuff.

I am just not convinced that paying workers a decent wage and benefits is necessarily correlated to what one sees at the grocery check-out line. And, at least in a city like New York, it's often the poor folks with limited access to supermarkets, who end up paying more in smaller Green Grocers, where the Fair Labor Standards Act, etc. are ignored, and there ain't no unions.

When I lived on Long Island back in the day I became friendly with a guy who owned two chain supermarkets and whose workers were unionized wall-to-wall. He was permitted to and took advantage of his right under the contract to pay workers over and above contract scale. He did this because he couldn't, for example, get anyone who knew how to slice a piece of smoked salmon (thin, please, thinner!) and would do so for scale.

Oh my, your mom and her ilk

EmmaZahn — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 01:32:33 +0000

In reply to Oh my, your mom and her ilk

Oh my, your mom and her ilk were responsible for "killing" some "good" children's clothing manufacturing jobs, working for "free."

The flip side of that is that they kept employment up and distribution channels open for clothing and notions manufacturers. Instead of five I now have to drive 15 miles to the nearest fabric store for a much more limited selection.

For the record, being for domestic manufacturing does not mean being against global trade. Neither does welcoming the advent robotic manufacturing lessen the appreciation of fine individual or group craftsmanship. These all have a place in a vibrant economy.

Despite the hyperbole, change

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 01:12:48 +0000

In reply to deleted duplicate

Despite the hyperbole, change in the late 1800's was much more radical than in the internet age. The telegraph in the absence of any other communication aside from "travel there/travel back" was a miracle despite low bitrate. In 10 words, each way you could direct armies or boardrooms around the world, instantaneously.

Sears' catalog was an amazing new factor in rural America, where most Americans lived at the time - much more profound than Amazon, since Amazon's more about speed and price, not "lack of goods vs. goods", and also functioned as a kind of entertainment, low-grade TV in a low-tech age. I.e. Amazon's just a Sears catalog on steroids, not a new model.

Of course all the complaints about effect on labor apply here as well - how it destroyed local stores & importers, etc.*

Similarly it's worth remembering the effect of Gustavus Franklin Swift with his invention of the refrigerator car using ice. Changed Chicago. Though the railroads refused to carry refrigerated meat - competed against livestock carriage - so he had to go through Canada at first.

Martin Wolfe's "Why Globalization Works" is full of similar reminders of the late 1800's.

*To continue labor idea: we all want cheap stuff. From "The Tragedy of the Commons" we understand the abuse of shared resources, and our own labor is one of them. That's why labor conditions and health care have to be structural guarantees, and not negotiable in economic barter - as we'll bargain them into the gutter for others, and others will do the same to us - cutthroat competition that leaves all sides poorer.

I continue to think that health care should have been pitched to business first to get buy-in - worrying about employees' health benefits is a major distraction to businesses, and it interferes with rapid hiring & firing for reasons unrelated to job function. This affects employees who would prefer to quit and shift as well. And of course a company can bargain down the health benefits for employees while execs can afford Cadillac plans.

deleted duplicate

artappraiser — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:52:16 +0000

In reply to Sear, Roebuck even sold DIY

deleted duplicate

Sears Roebuck's catalogue is

artappraiser — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:40:38 +0000

In reply to Sear, Roebuck even sold DIY

Sears Roebuck's catalogue is a major influential part of late 19th and early 20th-century American history, in many ways. Henry Ford is over credited, Sear's catalogue under-credited. For one thing, it was "globalization" in a way, if you define"globe" as the continental United States. It gave people many more options on what labor they wanted to do for themselves and what they wanted to pay for to be done by others. If they didn't like making dresses, they could buy one, and use that saved time to do something they liked, perhaps tending more carefully to the chickens to get more eggs, to trade with neighbors.

Oh my, your mom and her ilk

artappraiser — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:20:24 +0000

In reply to I am the opposite. I hate

Oh my, your mom and her ilk were responsible for "killing" some "good" children's clothing manufacturing jobs, working for "free." The old ILGWU commercial had a group singing look for the union label, as I recall, not look for the label saying made by Mom with love.

Your Mom (who could actually be labeled a skilled craftsperson) and your robotics meme reminds me, of how I've come across the argument on blogs sometimes that "but Germany has good manufacturing jobs, why can't we do what they're doing?" And that Jack Ewing at New York Times Business has been doing some interesting articles on the reality of what they, Germany, have actually been doing:

The Trade-Off That Created Germany’s Job Miracle, September 24, 2012

German Small Businesses Reflect Country's Strength, August 13, 2012

The majority of those "good" manufacturing jobs over there are skilled labor and even craftsmanship in small agile businesses, not big unskilled-labor assembly-line plants. Furthermore, many of those small businesses that are most successful are benefittng from globalization, they sell all over the world using the new global ways, offering specialized products and specialized skills, something that in the "good old days" only big corporations could do. Furthermore, as I think many already know, "over there," they still put high school students who aren't judged to be college material into track that emphasizes skilled labor training, and they also learn jobs by apprenticing at lower pay Even furthermore, Germany has maintained good employment numbers after years of high unemployment by cutting lots of worker protections (around 2005 ) that made conservative small businesses reluctant to grow their number of employees. Now they can hire more and grow without fear that they will be stuck with huge expenses and headaches if they have to let an employee go should things turn bad.

Some might recognize it as the prescription that many Dem politicians have argued for years and for which some liberal bloggers bash them: the good working class jobs of the future are skilled labor in small business, and people need training now to get those good jobs. And that the government has to be careful not to drown small business with excessive regulation. What they don't say: yes, the unskilled jobs are going to go to robots or to those who can manage on very low pay. They do in Germany, they too have lots of those junky Macjobs (and they buy their plastic wastebaskets and computer chips from Asia, they don't make them.) You don't want to learn, don't want to apprentice for a skill, you get a junky, low paying job. That's they way it's going to be. And the income gap between the skillled and unskilled is growing there in Germany as well.

Edit to add: the second link might be of special interest to you in particular because it talks a bit on the conservative approach to capitalization by small business there, along the lines of it being partly cultural..