Full employment can’t transform society- aff authors misunderstand the economic moment

(James, History@Rutgers No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea)

These days everybody from Left to Right—from Dean Baker to Arthur C. Brooks—addresses this breakdown of the labor market by advocating full employment, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding, or demeaning it is. But “full employment” is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or playing by the rules, or whatever (note that the official unemployment rate is already below 6 percent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call full employment). Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problem we now face. Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the United States are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line—and so a fourth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labor has broken down along with most others. Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you—the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero—and if they do return from the dead they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time, or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Walmart, where food stamps are a benefit. And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, even at forty hours a week—an unlikely amount in fast-food franchises—you’re still at that official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of a (sic) earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic? But isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah—until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half century, and the plausible projections for the next half century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change—you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do. Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that fully two-thirds of existing jobs, including those involving “non-routine cognitive tasks”—you know, like thinking—are at risk of death by computerization within twenty years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in a book from 2012 called Race against the Machine. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of “surplus humans” as a result of the same process—cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, the title of a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.1 So this Great Recession of ours is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character—or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes, or dominates our daily lives. In short, it lets us say, “Enough already; fuck work.”