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<\/a>Livingston, J. (2016). No more work: Why full employment is a bad idea. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.<\/p><\/div>\n
James Livingston is one of those. Livingston\u2019s short book No More Work<\/em> and the irreverent essay he derived from it \u201cF\u2014k Work!\u201d, examine historical trends of the past 400 years in our economy, work and ethics, and draws conclusions about where we are soon headed as a society of workers looking for work. His writing is simultaneously blunt, rude, irreverent and kind as he advises us to \u201cF\u2014k work\u201d, calls out Wall Street investment bankers and gangsters, and urges us to find economic and employment solutions via the golden rule – \u201cif we want to survive, we have to love each other, as ourselves \u2013 we have to be our brother\u2019s keeper.\u201d<\/p>\n His writing style is witty \u2013 if you like to find that multi-tool of the English language, the F word, scattered among economics, history, and intellectual prose then you\u2019ll love it. He returns repeatedly to the refrain \u201cF\u2014k work.\u201d\u00a0 It must be fun to be a student in his classes at Rutgers. \u00a0But along with enjoying his style, I was disappointed at the lack of references and citations for some of his claims.\u00a0 I turned to the US Census Bureau, The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (lots of useful data there), US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and The UC Davis Center for Poverty Research to fact check some of his claims. They checked out, but I would have preferred Livingston save me the effort.<\/p>\n Over the course of 60 or so pages, Livingston reviews a brief history of western civilization\u2019s attitudes towards work and the economic and cultural forces that have informed those attitudes.\u00a0 He starts with pre-reformation attitudes held by serfs, servants, slaves, and the rational elites that gave way to the Protestant work ethic: work re-envisioned as a pursuit that serves God\u2019s purpose.\u00a0 The Christian faithful, earning God\u2019s grace through engagement with the world via work. \u00a0Livingston sweeps through attitudes toward work during the various industrial revolutions and soon arrives at our modern era.<\/p>\n Today most of us want to count on our work as a means of building character, engaging our freedom, finding meaning and of course, to earn enough money to live well.\u00a0 Livingston points out how all of this has been impacted over the course of the last hundred years as a result of mechanization and the declining rate of capital investment – \u201cnet private investment\u201d in economist\u2019s terms. \u00a0\u00a0Livingston examines the effect that the accumulation of excess profits has had in creating the \u201cone percent\u201d, and the effect that the changing nature of available work has had on meaning, freedom, and character building at work.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where I found Livingston\u2019s analysis most useful in understanding 2016 \u2013 he examines the deeper and more universal human needs that we seek to fulfill by going to work, along with earning enough. \u00a0We count on work for character building: it\u2019s a place to learn about self-discipline, initiative, honesty, punctuality and team work.\u00a0 Livingston reminds us that we tell our kids that even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives.\u00a0 Or at a minimum it gets them out of bed, makes them feel responsible, and keeps them away from daytime TV.<\/p>\n Livingston points out that when we can see that we impact the world around us in our work, that we\u2019re exercising our freedom.\u00a0 We turn toward our work to exercise this particular freedom \u2013 experiencing our potency in the world by impacting the world. Those are central ideals in our social and personal experience \u2013 freedom, meaning, potency and character, and people will work hard to protect those ideals and potentials.<\/p>\n So, what happens when there\u2019s not enough meaningful work to go around? Or, perhaps worse, when what work that can be found doesn\u2019t adequately pay the bills for a large swath of the workforce?\u00a0 Livingstone asks us to consider how it feels for the millions who work at \u201cshitty jobs\u201d when they think about Wall Street investment bankers who take home tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.\u00a0 What kind of character are they building in those shitty jobs when they see the excesses of the elites who do what, exactly? Wreck the economy by selling bad collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps? Destroy small towns and communities with unemployment and downsizing? Rain down economic terror? How do you not feel like a chump, toiling away at a meaningless job that doesn\u2019t even pay the bills?<\/p>\n Shuttered steel mill – Johnstown, PA<\/p><\/div>\n We have a problem on our hands.\u00a0 According to the US Census Bureau, in 2015 the poverty rate was 13.5%. An estimated 43.1\u00a0million Americans lived in poverty according to the official measure, and about 9.5 million of the people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force were poor. In 2014, 3 million of them were paid at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.\u00a0 Try being them, eh? According to Columbia University\u2019s National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), in 2014, 44 percent of children under age 18 (31.4 million) lived in low-income households and 21 percent lived in poor families (15.4 million). \u00a049.5 percent of Americans currently receives some form of government transfer payments in order to live. Staying alive? That\u2019s it? Livingston points out that millions of Americans can\u2019t count on work as a place to find meaning, purpose, freedom, and build character.\u00a0 They can\u2019t find work or they piece together multiple minimum wage jobs hoping to get by. As Livingston puts it, \u201cWelcome to Wallmart, where food stamps are a benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n Livingston\u2019s analysis of job scarcity and meaning rings true to me.\u00a0 I was born in the 1950s and I grew up in a small town that lost its manufacturing base in the 70s and 80s.\u00a0 My father and his brother worked in a steel mill; my grandfather and his brothers worked in coal mines.\u00a0 Most of my friend\u2019s fathers were similarly employed. When their work abruptly disappeared, the unemployment rate remained ridiculously high\u00a0for years. The downtown area came to resemble a ghost town. Men who had done skilled labor in jobs like say, welding, couldn\u2019t find skilled work and eventually settled for what they could find – unskilled work and service industry jobs. It was a painful transition.<\/p>\n Empty downtown, an April Saturday in Johnstown, 2004<\/p><\/div>\n An identity crisis has been brewing for decades among workers like these, for whom the phrase \u201cidentity crisis\u201d sounds like a foreign language.\u00a0 Think about the complexities of your identity for a moment. The values and ideals that constitute character, a sense of meaning and purpose, even gender identity through work \u2013 all are constituents of identity. Which means that communities and regions where the nature of work has dramatically changed are overripe for the instabilities that come from a crisis in personal identity, regional identity, and racial identity.<\/p>\n Which brings me back to my initial question \u2013 \u201cDude! Where\u2019s my America?\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s been there all along, in plain sight. But I wasn\u2019t seeing it from my west coast, comfortable bubble. Livingston spells out the changes that have been underway for the past one hundred years that have culminated in frustration and dispiritedness for millions of American workers \u2013 many of them middle aged white men. I recognize them now, and they\u2019re actually my people, my hometown.\u00a0People who are frustrated and dispirited for long enough have few choices for recourse when they\u2019re ignored.\u00a0 Anger and the extreme \u201cwhat have I got to lose?\u201d approaches start to make more sense when the alternative is disempowerment and giving up. It\u2019s almost enough to turn a longtime democratic voter into, well, an angry populist\/nationalist voter.<\/p>\n Liberals (like me) were rightfully paying attention to the under-served, the marginalized, and minority groups that could be forgotten in \u201cthe tyranny of the majority.\u201d (Yes, that\u2019s a thing. Check the history books.)\u00a0 We saw marginalized groups suffering and their suffering engaged our compassion. But we ignored the pain of those who in the past were doing OK. \u00a0A lot of liberals saw them as having dominated the show, although they never actually ran the show. Therein lays an irony \u2013 the privilege of running the show fell to a different social strata, the ones who benefited from the decline in net private investment. Middle-aged white men and women who were in the pain of identity crisis were easy to ignore. Or even, sadly, to sneer at.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>