There were several parts to it:
• I kept reading and hearing (20-30 years ago) that the future of employment in the US was going to be in the service industries -- lots and lots of jobs in the service industries. The economists made it sound inevitable and pretty much something to be celebrated. But parse that sentence for yourself. "Future of employment" and "service industries." "That's where all the new jobs will be" and "the lowest wages/skills around" i.e. hotel maids, fast food workers, and my favorite: caretakers in nursing homes. The economists and their ilk actually delineated these as jobs of the future.
As an adult at the time my course in life was already set. But my kids were very young. I looked at that prognostication through a parent's eyes and saw that it sucked the big one as a future for my kids and anyone else's kids. Because that was the future of employment in the US.
• The US began to outsource skilled jobs in manufacturing. Sometimes entire plants were disassembled and shipped away to foreign lands, sometimes new plants were built in said foreign lands and the old ones in the US were left to rot in place.
My Dad was a skilled blue collar worker his entire life, and a member of his union. Jobs like that are gone, and the unions too.
The economists and CEOs saw this and said it was good, and talked about retraining workers for the new high-tech world. But I wondered how that meshed with the future of employment being in the service industries.
• The US began to outsource high-tech jobs. My sister, a computer engineer and tech writer, remotely trained her own replacement overseas more than once before being laid off, also more than once. At one of the plants early on they had some kind of thing where they were supposed to assess your skills and retrain you. They tried to train the engineer to be a word processor -- you know, a typist. For this she went to UC Berkeley as one of the first women in Engineering?
The economists and CEOs looked on this and said it was fantastic for the bottom line, given what they could pay equivalent workers in India, but they stopped talking about retraining redundant workers for The Future.
• And now here we are, pretty much where it was foretold we would be. The present prospects of employment in the US are in the service industries. The CEOs and shareholders make obscene amounts of money. Workers can't even support themselves, much less a family.
• I've seen this before, in a couple of iterations: one, the farm workers' strikes led by Cesar Chavez in California, and two, hotel and restaurant workers in Hawai'i.
The owners/employers in both cases were making obscene amounts of money. But what to do with those oh-so-disposable workers?
Chavez certainly tried to unionize, and poured his heart and soul into it. I remember the 1960s grape boycott well, as I was in college in California at the time. The analyses that appeared in the LA Times and elsewhere (probably PBS) indicated that if all the workers were to receive living wages and decent working conditions (water to wash with, port-a-potties at the fields instead of nothing, not getting sprayed with insecticides, all that kind of stuff) the aggregate costs that would be passed along to consumers would be.... pennies. As an exceedingly poor college student myself I remember thinking, "I could afford that, so that human beings could live like human beings."
In California today farm workers still live like peons. Agri-business is still filthy rich.
In Hawai'i the unions had an established place in the tourist industry, which was and is the major form of employment in that state. You want service industries? Look for cocktail waitresses who make an entire career of serving drinks with a smile while wearing a sarong. Maybe they wanted to do something else, but there wasn't anything else.
I don't know how the unions are doing today, as I left in 1978, but here is how it was when I was there: My first husband arrived and looked for work compatible with his new B.A., but ended up bar tending at the Ilikai Hotel for 10 years. It was a union job, and it was the union that kept us and people like us from being nothing but peons. We got married, had two babies. The babies were both born in the Kaiser Hospital, and cost us $70 for the hospital stay and postpartum checkups. His job included a retirement pension plan as well as health care coverage for the family. We bought a little condo. We were middle class mostly by aspiration, but were not by any means poor.
The tourist industry, meanwhile, boomed. Whatever costs there were for treating workers like human beings, the tourists obviously did not feel ripped off when they came to visit, and they kept coming.
• All of my life-experience leads me to conclude the following: If the only jobs available are low-skill and low-pay, people will take them because they must work to eat. But if the employer is making money beyond the dreams of avarice, then it is only decent for the employer to pay a living wage and provide a safe work environment and benefits.
Very few employers do this voluntarily -- only Costco, Trader Joe's, and Starbucks come to mind. That's what unions are for -- to negotiate with employers to do the right thing, to strike if necessary.
Believe me when I say: McDonald's shareholders won't be injured if the burger-flippers can afford to rent an apartment and buy groceries and put gas in the tank.
And the cost to the consumer? Pennies.
Hekate
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