The economy should serve people, not the other way around. The Occupy Movement sent that message worldwide with its advocacy for “the 99%.” But the message was quickly all but forgotten. Until Covid.
People isolated by business closings in 2020 had the scales lifted from their eyes. They had time to reevaluate their lives and especially their conditions of employment.
Tiffany Chen, 30, wanted to be a clothing designer. She studied fashion at New York City’s Parsons School of Design. But after two years in the industry, the long hours and the ethics of the business made her question that career path. She now works for less as a freelance photographer.
We deserve better
“Less money does come with its own stresses, but I would rather deal with those than the stresses of the previous work environment,” she told Michael Blackmon of Buzzfeed News:
And she’s not the only person who feels this way. In a mass exit dubbed the “Great Resignation” by psychologist Anthony Klotz, nearly 4 million people left jobs this past June, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Another 4 million left in July, the fourth consecutive month of such high departure rates. In August, 4.3 million people left their jobs, a record number, according to CNBC. Labor economist Julia Pollak, who works for ZipRecruiter, told me that in normal times, “there are typically 3.5 million people quitting a job any month … That’s a substantially higher number, and employers are really feeling it.” Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, told me in a recent interview that the “social contract [of] work is being rewritten,” and the balance of power that exists between employer and employee “is shifting towards the worker.”
The horror.
“People shouldn’t be working eighty hour weeks. They shouldn’t have to beg for a single day off. This isn’t life. This isn’t even remotely okay,” tweets Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People” (2020). We deserve better.”
Opining on Sen. Joe Manchin’s fixation on “producerism,” Jamelle Bouie writes at the New York Times that Manchin’s view holds up wage slavery as some kind of Protestant state of grace (emphasis mine):
As I argued earlier this month, the West Virginia senator appears to be committed to a conservative producerism that treats the market as a crucible in which ordinary workers prove their moral worth. We are not an “entitlement society,” says Manchin; we are a “reward” society. To thrive, you must work. And if you do not work, then you forfeit whatever help the government might deign to give. To give help without work — to shield ordinary workers from the market in the name of security or dignity — is to undermine and weaken the very fiber of society.
In fairness to him, Manchin made it clear that this was his perspective at the start of the year, before Biden was even in office. “I don’t ever remember F.D.R. recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. We gave ’em a job and gave ’em a paycheck. Yeah. Jesus criminy, can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ’em back on their feet? Do we have to keep sending checks out?” as Manchin put it to The Washington Post.
There was an irony in Manchin’s decision to invoke Franklin Roosevelt, one worth examining as Manchin takes a stand against the effort to expand the social safety net without forcing ordinary Americans to “earn” the support they need to live their lives. Animating the New Deal, Mike Konczal writes in his book, “Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand,” was a “new idea of freedom that limited and constrained markets” and put limits on “market dependency.”
To be completely dependent on markets was to exist in a state of unfreedom, subject to the overbearing weight of property and capital. Konczal quotes a Roosevelt administration official, the great labor lawyer Donald Richberg, who made this point in explicit terms when he said that when workers are “compelled by necessity to live in one kind of place and to work for one kind of employer, with no choice except to pay the rent demanded and to accept the wages offered — or else to starve — then the liberty of the property owner contains the power to enslave the worker. And that sort of liberty is intolerable and cannot be preserved by a democratic government.”
A senator from West Virginia should understand that. Apparently not.
Power concedes nothing…
Bouie continues:
The market, in other words, was made for man, not man for the market, and after a generation spent running away from this insight — which also helped animate Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” — Democrats are finally coming back to the idea that people are entitled to a basic standard of living, regardless of whether they work or not.
A basic standard of living is about more than money. It is, as I’ve written, about who wields power in this supposed democracy and who refuses to share both political and economic power. Watching employers and conservative pundits freak out over the new difficulty in finding workers willing to work themselves to death for low wages while being treated as disposable “resources” is as satisfying as it is long overdue. Again, their anxiety is not just about profits, but about losing their power to dictate terms of employment and to maintain a system that makes workers slaves to the economy and employers their masters.
Blackmon profiles more workers who refuse to take it anymore.
Amber (not her real name) lives in North Carolina near the Outer Banks. She has left three restaurant jobs in the last year.
“I’m constantly having the fact that I’m replaceable just being shoved in my face,” she said. “I would love to work for a place I was loyal to, but I don’t think that that exists anymore.”
Blackmon concludes his profiles with this:
Millions of people are reevaluating what kind of life they want to have. From working-class individuals who refuse to continue letting a 9-to-5 burn them out to white-collar workers deciding it’s time to unplug for a while, people are on a journey to rediscover who they are outside of their skills as workers. As Chen, the photographer living in New York City, put it, “I think we’re kind of remixing the American Dream.”
“As I’ve gotten older, work is definitely [still] really important, but I think I’ve started to see it less as my identity,” she said. “What’s really important to me is to be able to carve out the time and the space to build important things for me outside of work.”
Hereditary royalty is not the only kind with which America has to contend. The economic kind is far more entrenched.
