I remember the promises of the three or four-day work week, more leisure time for the same pay. Automation and computer power were our future friends in a society with greater humanity and time for fun and family. THEY LIED! Or more significantly, the futurists described what they wanted to happen, not what logic would dictate what would happen. Instead, American workers labor longer hours for less pay or benefits, the richest slice of society has gotten vastly richer at the expense of everybody else and the United States is facing economic and political polarization – the worst since our Civil War – that threatens to tear us apart, fractionalizing “America” into regional nations with rather divergent value systems. What happened?
First, we missed the massive explosion of global linkage – from telecommunications to transportation – that enabled just about any corner of the world to reach into the economic realities of any other corner of the world. Suddenly, that technology shift enabled subsistence-paid laborers in India and China to compete, head-to-head, with their manufacturing counterparts in well-paid Western nations. We called it “outsourcing.”
As global access to education rose, and as developing nations understood the value of upgrading their people’s skill-sets, we found ourselves competing in service and high-tech sectors with well-educated (but still substantially less-well-compensated) workers in other countries, all the time increasing the cost of access to higher education to our own people while slashing budgets (and quality) within our own primary and secondary public schools. We smiled and let developing nations create educational systems well-beyond what we were providing to our own children.
But instead of solving the obvious problems, we continued to accelerate the degradation of our educational system under the guise of fiscal responsibility, allowing the rest of the world to raise their standards as we cut ours. Student loans became crushing burdens on our graduates just as developing nations saw the wisdom of subsidizing the education of their best and brightest, even if it meant sending them to the best universities all over the world.
Stupidly, as political campaigns become more contests of spending power than political will, we allowed the uber-rich and the companies they owned to continue tax loopholes that actually encourage the export of American jobs to countries that offer tax havens that allowed major companies – facing a nominal 35% federal corporate tax rate – to pay an average tax burden of 12.6%.
For those who believed that computers, robotic manufacture and other forms of automation would lead to productivity increases and concomitant upticks in pay for American labor (and more time off), they were so far off base as to miss the most basic reality: the extra income generated by such automation did not go to the workers; rather it went to the capital investors who paid for that new equipment. All we saw was an exceptional banana-republic-like polarization splitting the “one percenters” from just about everyone else.
Elsewhere in the Western world, the determination to implement humanizing labor laws – mandating shorter hours, longer vacation time and making it more difficult to discharge incompetent employees or downsize an inefficient labor force – backfired as global competition slammed the productivity decreases that such statutes created. Recession hit Europe hard and seems to be a deep malaise that just will not go away. Many economists have blamed a litany of social benefits and uncompetitive labor regulations as having effectively rendered too many European economies as second, if not third, rate economic also-rans.
With work-rules that just kill the ability to price goods and services in line with global rates, increasingly, for example, French employers have simply had to improvise how to sidestep these restrictions (where they can). “More than a decade after it was introduced, the 35-hour workweek still projects an image of France as being one of the most laid-back places in the world to work. In most of the rest of the eurozone, the 40-hour workweek is standard.
“But in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law… All told, French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“Now, a fight has broken out within President François Hollande’s Socialist government over whether to officially end the nominal 35-hour workweek as a way to overcome France’s economic malaise… Breaking a taboo, Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron has begun to openly question whether the measure — which was passed in 2000 by a Socialist government to encourage job creation — still serves the country’s needs.
“Tensions rose sharply after Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, reported… that a German-French action plan, prepared for Mr. Macron and his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, would call for overhauling the 35-hour week. After a storm of protest, French officials… sought to calm fears that a major change was underway.
“[In mid-November], Mr. Macron, an economic centrist, told Parliament that the 35-hour rule had for too long painted France as ‘a country which no longer wanted to work,’ sending a negative signal to foreign companies wanting to invest here. Given France’s economic challenges, Mr. Macron said, the 35 hours ‘should no longer be put on a pedestal.’
“His remarks provoked an immediate backlash within his Socialist Party and among trade union officials, who accused the government of threatening to tear down a totem of the French state that many still cherish… Any effort to weaken the 35-hour standard ‘will not be implemented here in France,’ warned Bruno Le Roux, the president of the [powerful] Socialist Party.” New York Times, November 26th.
But the subtext of this story is not the battle in France (Italy is undergoing the same self-scrutiny) but the sustainability of increased productivity and enhanced technology as improvers of our quality of life. While advancements in medical and health science may increase our life expectancies, they do absolutely nothing for the quality of the longer life we now get to live. If anything, our happiness seems to decrease with such productivity growth.
We have not remotely begun to evaluate how to increase the quality of our lives, how to deal with the death and devastation of global conflict and climate change, how to make education more accessible or even how to apply technology advances to the betterment of life standards. We have not found a way to move the return of investment in productivity-enhancing machines to American workers. There is a balance between a purely market-driven economy and a society that actually cherished humanistic values. We just do not seem to care.
I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly how long can a nation-state survive as the unhappiness quotient slips, year-by-year, without addressing the underlying issues?
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