The Burned-Out Bulb of Bright Ideas

For the last week I have been enjoying catching up on sleep.  This has not been an entirely painless process; as my body has begun to mend itself after a year and a half of excessive work, I have at times physically felt the discomfort of the mending process.  (To use a metaphor, wait until the engine has cooled off before you try to pop the hood and refill the radiator.)  The recent experience of working like a dog has given me further insights and inspiration for the essays on precarity which I have yet to write.  However, I am not going to try to tackle that subject today, except for a few brief observations.  

First, there are a couple of interesting recent articles which describe how the rate of scientific discoveries in the industrial world has been slowing over the last several decades.  The title of one of these articles is "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time" and the other article, "Rate of scientific breakthroughs slowing over time: Study", cites the first article which I have linked.  (It's interesting that both articles have been published on websites which have chosen to support themselves partially by renting space for ads for gadgets, toys, t-shirts, and gossip.  The academic profession seems to be falling on hard times these days ...)  The chief researcher cited in these articles has suggested that a key reason for the decline of truly groundbreaking research is the fact that quantity of published research has begun to be emphasized over quality of research.  This is because funding for research has become tied to the number of papers published by research institutions as well as the number of citations of published papers by other publishing peers.

Second, my past year and a half of crazy busy work has introduced me to design automation tools which I had not had a chance to use during the past several years of my career.  I found that while I had been involved in things unrelated to the production of technical work products, the tools for producing that technical work had undergone a rapid and drastic evolution.  The software products of Autodesk are a particular example of this evolution - and of the consolidation of multiple formerly separate design functions into one software package, available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.  By the way, I am not singing the praises of Autodesk!  I think they have created a near monopoly racket.  Their subscription model for providing software services is to me like having a family of leeches stuck to one's legs.  I will be using an Autodesk package to do my part of a multidisciplinary design project during the next several months.  Thankfully, the client is paying for the software during the project.  But I have noticed all the things the software can do - things which a human being used to need to know how to do.  This has led me to ponder the de-skilling which is now taking place among many knowledge workers as a result of the automation of much of their jobs by software.

Where will this de-skilling ultimately lead?  And what will be its ultimate impact?  The answer to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask.  I will consider only one prediction, from that group of prognosticators known as "techno-optimists."  That prediction is the same prediction that has been made by such folks over much of evolution of the Industrial Age, namely, that automation of knowledge work would lead to increased leisure for knowledge workers as the tasks that would normally take such workers a day to do were sped up so that they could be accomplished in only a few hours.  After the last year and a half, I must disagree with such a prediction.  Digital task automation may speed up tasks, but what actually results is not that knowledge workers get to go home early each day, but rather, that they get more work to do.  For digital automation tools are not seen by capitalists as a means to grant more leisure to their workers, but as a means of getting more work out of them.  The deployment of such tools is usually followed by the demand that workers produce more each day.  Meanwhile, the workers (at least those whose jobs are not replaced by the automated processes) become more and more stupid as time passes and an increasing portion of their skill sets and the theoretical knowledge they learned in college is taken over by the automated processes they serve.  Thus knowledge workers of the early 21st century may well be turning into the cubicle equivalent of de-skilled industrial factory workers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In short, our society seems to be evolving into a configuration in which the ability to think deeply and outside the box is dwindling, and in which our work is to blame for this dwindling.  (To read further about this evolution, please see "The Woodcutter's Dull Ax.")  We see here a trap to be avoided by those people in search of true craft, people who truly want to learn to engage in beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful.  Learning to avoid that trap should be an interesting experience.

Clear Air At Last?

The past several months have been painfully busy.  The last month has been especially excruciating.  The experience of entrepreneurship has recently seemed to me to be like being a skipper of a fishing boat caught in a gale, or like being a bush pilot for an air freight company whose clients suffer from permanently stormy weather.  However, my client backlog may finally be easing up.  I can hardly wait until I can once again start getting to bed at decent hours, resume exercising regularly, and take time to watch the sunsets.

During some of the worst moments, I found myself fantasizing about what my life would have been like had I become an author of short fiction instead of a technical professional.  The fantasies were triggered one morning at 4 AM while I was finishing writing a narrative and preparing CAD drawings for a schematic design report that was due at noon of the same day.  I hadn't slept since the previous morning.  As a bit of a distraction, I had taken a quick look at an Internet article about one of the crop of new young Chinese writers whose work falls loosely into the category of "magic realism."  The article showed a picture of this writer sitting at his desk while what looked like morning sunshine streamed through the window.  He was reading what looked like a book of ancient Chinese literature while he held a cat perched on one knee.  Both he and the cat looked vastly more relaxed than I was at that moment.  That got me wishing that I could be like Chen Chuncheng, Liu Cixin, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ketty Steward, Yaa Gyasi, John Le Carre, and others like them who had actually found a way to craft an artistic career that pays the bills.  Ah well, one of these days ...

What I'd like to do all day.  In this picture, the computer actually has technical work on its screen, but let's just pretend that it really is displaying a short story or poem in progress.  The cat in this picture is mine ...

A Short Spring Break, and a Few More Observations on Precarity

I have a ton of things that need to get done in realspace, so I will need to take a break from blogging for a couple of weeks at least.  However, rest assured that there is yet much to say on the subject of precarity.  Note also that rampant inequality has led to a kind of precarity among large corporations.  In the first months of 2023, a number of high profile businesses have suffered bankruptcy, including Bed Bath & Beyond.  This year may be rather brutal for large retail chains.  

One odd thing I have noticed is that the rollout of electric cars by the major automakers has largely been aimed at the luxury market.  Most EV's are therefore priced over $30,000 - in some cases well over $30,000 - which puts them out of reach of large numbers of ordinary people.  Indeed, one such automaker's electric vehicles have a starting price of $73,000.  Most electric vehicle manufacturers (including traditional automakers who have started their own electric vehicle product lines) have thus become similar to other aspirational manufacturers and retailers who are aiming to make large profits from the market of potential luxury buyers.  However, this seems to me to be a sketchy strategy due to the fact that the pool of such buyers is shrinking, while the much larger pool of people who can't afford luxury is rapidly expanding.  The Ford Motor Company has already gotten its fingers burned by pursuing this strategy.  What we are seeing here is therefore yet another symptom of the insanity of trying to pursue infinite profit growth in a finite economy.  It will be interesting to see how things develop as time passes.

The Educated Precariat - A Preview

It is now nearly time to consider a particular subset of the precariat, namely, those people who have college degrees yet who have been forced into precarious employment - especially, those who are in low-wage jobs.  In this consideration we will move beyond the United States to look at the surplus of college graduates and the lack of appropriate employment for these graduates as a global phenomenon.  We will find that among the ranks of these are coffee shop baristas with graduate training in fields such as psychology as well as technical professionals hired by temp agencies and the legions of adjunct professors at public and private universities throughout the United States.  We will consider the underemployed college graduate in both American, European and Chinese contexts, and compare these to the ranks of underemployed graduates in the developing world.  We will also try to examine the phenomenon of college graduate precarity as it exists in Russia.  However, examining the Russian case may prove difficult if one wants a recent and accurate snapshot, due to the fact that the regime of Vladimir Putin has been trying as hard as possible over the last few years to patch up the fig leaf dress which Russia has sewn to cover up its putrid nakedness.  (In fact, it has become much easier to obtain an accurate picture of daily life for ordinary people in China than in Russia.  China is actually more open and honest!)

Today's post will ask some preliminary questions.  First, how did we get to this present place in which a four-year or advanced college degree is no longer a guarantee of stable, middle-class employment?  To answer this question, we will need to answer the following questions:

• What was the original purpose of college?  Note that the word "college" comes from the Latin word collegium, defined by Wiktionary as "colleagueship (connection of associates, colleagues, etc.", guild, corporation, company, ... (persons united by the same office or calling or living by some common set of rules), college (several senses), school ..."
• What did the world's first colleges look like?  You may not know this, but one of the world's oldest continuously operating universities is the University of Ez-Zitouna, which was founded in Tunisia on the African Continent.  What was the mission of the world's first and earliest universities, and how was that mission funded and carried out?  How did the roles of education and research interact?
• What was the origin of the system of public universities in the United States?  (For instance, what was the role of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in the birth of American public universities?)
• What are the origins of the for-profit college or university, and how did these institutions cause the purpose of college to mutate over time?
• How has the decline in public and private funding for basic research affected the employment landscape for academics?  (You may not know this, but the United States no longer has any major corporately-funded laboratories dedicated to pure research.  Bell Labs, which was responsible for the discovery of radio astronomy and many other scientific breakthroughs, is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nokia, a Finnish corporation.)
• What is the impact of declining numbers of youth and declining college enrollment on universities and colleges?
• How will the defunding of public colleges and universities affect the future of those nations such as the United States which pursue rabidly conservative "free-market" principles?  See, for instance, "Modeling research universities: Predicting probable futures of public vs. private and large vs. small research universities", 2018.
• What can college-educated members of the precariat (especially those college-educated who have been historically marginalized, such as people of color) do both individually and collectively to create a better situation for themselves?  For the present-day contraction of opportunities for the college-educated is being orchestrated by the present masters of our society in an attempt to maintain and amplify existing inequality.  What steps can we therefore take to create our own alternative spaces of collective self-reliance?

I hope to answer these questions (maybe with a little help from some friends) during the next few posts in this series.  I'd like to end with something that's somewhat related to this series of posts and to other posts which I've written for this blog over the last four or five years, namely, another link to a short fiction story which I recently enjoyed.  The name of the story is "Tempus Fugit" and the author is Ketty Steward.

Precarity, American-Style: The American Enterprise Institute and Small Businesses

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.  Past posts explored the manifestation of precarity in Russia and China, two nations which returned to the capitalist fold at the end of the 20th century after abandoning free-market capitalism during the early and middle decades of the 20th century.  More recent posts have explored the spread of precarity in the United States, a nation which has been characterized from its birth by a cultural emphasis on laissez-faire, free-market capitalism and the defense of the "property rights" of those who are wealthy.  This post continues the exploration of precarity in the United States.

At the outset, I'd like to state my belief that the solution to the problem of economic precarity and rampant wealth inequality is to create a society in which the role of small businesses is central and in which private concentrations of wealth and power above a certain size are eliminated by a steeply progressive tax with no loopholes for the rich.  Such an arrangement would fulfill the ostensible goal of socialism without requiring the government to be the owner of the societal means of production.  For such an arrangement would place the means of production directly in the hands of even the poorest of people.

I can already hear the screams of rage which the emergence of such a society would produce among the leaders of the American right wing.  That's okay - sometimes people need to see their sacred cows turned into hamburger.  Yet one area in which we all seem to agree is the importance of small businesses in the American economy and the need to provide support to these businesses.  Presidents and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have made strong and warm statements of support for small business from the days of Reagan onward.  Indeed, the Republican Party in particular has branded itself the champion of small business.  This has been part of the Republican Party's branding of itself as the party of economic growth in general and of the promotion of economic policies which guarantee prosperity for all.  (Of course, the fact that Republican policies have created many more losers than winners is blamed on the losers, but that's a story for another post.)

Can the Republican Party truthfully say that it has been and continues to be a champion of American small business?  The answer to that question can be found in the policies and activities of some of the lobbying groups and think tanks which are part of the American right wing.  Let's look at one of those groups today, namely, the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI.  According to Wikipedia, the AEI is "...  a center-right think tank based in Washington, D.C., that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare... Founded in 1938, the organization is aligned with conservatism and neoconservatism ..."  To call them "center-right" may be quite misleading, as their membership has included several figures who are very much hard-right - figures such as Robert Bork, Newt Gingrich, John Lott, Antonin Scalia, and Dick Cheney.  In addition, the AEI is closely aligned with the Koch brothers, according to a Sourcewatch article.  Moreover, some of the recent posts and articles on the AEI website have seemed to give support to the regime of Vladimir Putin.  The AEI has become the dominant brain trust of the American right wing, "the crown jewel of the conservative policy infrastructure," according to a recent Johns Hopkins University case study.  

In 2005, the AEI published a paper titled, "Are Small Businesses the Engine of Growth?"  The abstract of that paper provides a concise summary of AEI's desired policy toward small business: 

"It is a common belief among entrepreneurs and policymakers that small businesses are

the fountainhead of job creation and the engine of economic growth. However, it has

become increasingly apparent that the conventional wisdom obscures many important

issues. It is an important consideration because many government spending programs, tax

incentives, and regulatory policies that favor the small business sector are justified by the

role of small businesses in creating jobs and is the raison d’etre of an entire government

agency: the Small Business Administration (SBA). This paper concludes that there is no

reason to base our policies on the idea that small businesses are more deserving of

government favor than big companies. And absent other inefficiencies that would hinder

small businesses performances, there is no legitimate argument for their preferential

treatment. Hence the paper suggests ending all small businesses’ subsidies." [Emphasis added.]

The paper sought to make a case for eliminating all government agencies and programs that support or incubate small businesses, both at the Federal and State levels.  It twisted a number of statistics in its attempt to make its case, attempting for instance to convince readers that the net gains in job creation  should be ignored in favor of gross job creation when analyzing the impact of small businesses during any time period of analysis.  This position, by the way, is proven false by the fact that reputable agencies such as the World Bank do count the impact of net job creation in evaluating economic performance.  For an example of the paper's mishandling of statistics, consider the part where the author tries to use gross job gains and gross job losses to "prove" that employment in the small business sector was much less stable than in large companies during the year 2000.  The author neglected to notice that during the time period in question, the net addition of jobs by small businesses was always positive, and for firms between 1 and 49 employees, exceeded 10 percent.  Lastly, I would point out the laughably false claim made by the paper that "... larger employers offer greater job security. For both new jobs and the typical existing job, job durability increases with employer size."  (That has definitely not been my experience as a working stiff and cubicle rat!  I guess the author of the paper never heard of the words "downsizing" or "redundancy"!)

The 2005 AEI paper cited above was part of a sustained effort on the part of American conservatives to make a case for eliminating all government support for small businesses.  One such example is the article, "Terminating the Small Business Administration" (2011), along with articles published from 2008 onward which suggested that government support of small businesses leads to negative economic growth.  I argue that the AEI paper, on closer examination, does not present a scientifically rigorous or accurate case.  However, it definitely does express what rich American conservatives want to do to American small businesses.  Consider the following quotes:

"... the real job growth comes not from people dreaming of being small business owners but from people committed to building big companies." [Emphasis added.]

"The paper will examine whether the pervasiveness of the belief that small businesses are the economy’s main source of job creation is warranted. Section 2 will show how this belief is the foundation for many government policies. Section 3 will expose the statistical fallacies that lead people to see job creation patterns where none exist. Besides it shouldn’t matter. Although job creation receives enormous attention in policy discussions, it is rather misplaced. The mere creation of jobs is not by itself an appropriate economic policy objective. Economic growth whether it takes the form of additional jobs or increase of productivity in existing jobs is all that matters. The paper concludes that there is no reason to base policies on the idea that small businesses are more deserving of government favor than big companies." [Emphasis added.]

In other words, the AEI has backed a policy which favors the continued growth of large companies, and the continued growth of American economic productivity even when that growth is not accompanied by the growth of jobs.  We have already seen the results of such a policy in action, namely, in the jobless "recoveries" from economic crises which occurred during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes.  Such "recoveries" left a lot of people out of work for a long time, while those who still had jobs were subjected to ever-increasing demands on their time from their employers in the name of increasing productivity.  To put it another way, these "jobless recoveries" resulted in ever-increasing concentrations of wealth among the richest members of society while drastically increasing economic precarity among everyone else.  It is quite telling that the AEI has pushed so hard for the elimination of all government help for small businesses even though large corporations are the biggest recipients of corporate welfare from both Federal, State and local governments.

Let us close with a couple of questions.  Does real job growth come not from people being small business owners but from people committed to building big companies?  Is it true that the only thing that matters is economic growth, regardless of whether it takes the form of additional jobs or increase in productivity in existing jobs?  I'd like to give my answer to these questions, but I don't have time today, so that will have to wait.  But as a partial answer, consider the following questions:

• How many really big companies can exist in a society whose economy is of finite size?
• Why should most people rally behind continued economic growth if the fruits of that growth are not fairly and equitably distributed?
• Who wants to volunteer to be one of the many poor, disenfranchised, and unemployed who are produced by a system in which the fruits of increased productivity are not fairly distributed?
• Who wants to volunteer to be a member of the salariat in such an economy if the only way to be a member of the salariat class is to work 80-hour weeks?

Precarity, American-Style: Causative Factors

Today's post is a continuation of my series of posts on the subject of precarity.  Today's post will be rather short, since I don't have much time.  However, when considering the state of precarity in which an increasing number of people in the United States now live, it is helpful to study the occupational and economic factors which have led to our present troubles.  As we study economic precarity in the United States, we should therefore consider the following factors:

• The decline of small businesses in the U.S.  This has been due to "the tilting of the playing field to favor massive companies over small businesses," as reported in a 2020 article by Business Insider.  (See also "Monopoly Power And The Decline of Small Business" for a 2016 snapshot of the problem.)  Note that the laws passed by the U.S. Congress and the executive orders issued under the Trump administration only made this worse.  However, the Biden administration has begun taking steps to reverse small business decline by helping small businesses compete for Federal work, as reported by the Federal News Network in a 2023 article.

• The shifting of tax burdens from the rich to the poor.  A striking case in point is the number of states (red states, particularly) whose legislatures and governors have turned them into tax havens for the rich.  (See also, "How the Ultrawealthy Devise Ways to Not Pay Their Share of Taxes," NPR, August 2022.)  Thus these states have come to resemble enclaves of dirty money that are found in the Cayman Islands.  Note that the U.S has recently surpassed the Caymans to become the "world's biggest enabler of financial secrecy" as reported by the international Consortium of Investigative Journalists in May 2022.  But these are merely one part of the overall shift of tax burdens away from the rich which began in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan.

• The use of monopoly and oligopoly power to create monopsony and oligopsony labor markets.  We all know that a monopoly is a state in which there is only one supplier of a particular good or service which is needed by many buyers.  The monopolist can therefore charge whatever price he wants, even if the price is horribly unfair.  Oligopoly is the condition in which there is more than one supplier, yet the total number of suppliers is very small.  Examples of oligopoly include Airbus and Boeing among aircraft manufacturers, or Microsoft and Brave and Alphabet (owner of Google) among Internet search providers, or CVS and Walgreens and Rite-Aid among drugstores and pharmacies.  A monopsony, by contrast, is a situation in which there is only one buyer of a good or service which is offered by many suppliers.  An example of this is a situation in which there is only one employer who can offer jobs to people in a large geographical area.  Thus the many people in this area become horribly dependent on the one large employer, and if that employer uses his power maliciously or suddenly goes out of business or decides suddenly to cut costs, many people will be devastated.  Oligopsony works the same way.  Monopsony and oligopsony are the natural outcome of monopoly and oligopoly.

• The shifting of regulatory burdens from large businesses to small businesses.  A prime example of this is the case of trying to use your own personal car to earn money by giving people rides.  Most cities and states have laws that prevent you from doing this as a private individual.  In this case, there are only two legal ways you can earn money by giving people rides: go to work for a taxi company, or become an "independent contractor" for a multibillion-dollar ride-hailing service such as Uber or Lyft.  The regulatory burden on these ride-hailing services is very small, as seen in the cases of ride-hailing drivers who are injured on the job, or passengers who are sometimes assaulted by the ride-hailing drivers.  Regulatory burdens are now crafted by state and local legislators for the purpose of expanding opportunities for big businesses by smothering small businesses who can't afford the costs of regulatory compliance.

• The innovation-depressing strategies of big businesses.  It can be argued that once a monopoly or oligopoly economy is established, the big players in such an economy will tend to fear innovation, since innovations can be disruptive and can even destroy the pre-existing monopoly or oligopoly arrangement.  Thus it is no surprise that large businesses (and wanna-be large business owners) have evolved egregious strategies to stifle any potential innovations that might threaten their interests.  One such strategy is the misuse of the "non-compete agreement."  These are agreements which employees force new hires to sign, in which the new hire typically agrees not to work for any other business or start their own business within a certain time frame and within a certain geographical area.  Certain versions of these non-compete agreements also force the employee to give up all rights to any invention or intellectual product which the employee may devise while employed by his employer and for a certain time period after the employee stops working for the employer.  (If you work for such an employer, I can understand why you would not be motivated to think very much while on the job!)  The abuse of non-compete clauses in employment contracts has moved the Biden administration to start taking steps to ban them (see this also), which should provide immediate relief from employers who want to try to turn their employees into personal property.

Future posts in this series will examine these factors in more detail, along with other factors such as the absence of single-payer health care coverage in the U.S.  But for now, consider these factors as the means by which the wealthy in this country seek to prevent the American precariat from building individual and collective self-reliance.

Precarity, American-Style: Introduction

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old man got

But something happened on the way to that place

They threw an American flag in our face

- Billy Joel, Allentown, 1982

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on the spread of economic precarity among the majority of the world's population.  The opening posts in this series explored precarity as a global phenomenon and characteristic of economies in both the developed world and the developing world which are dominated by rampant free-market capitalism.  Subsequent posts described how precarity came to characterize even those societies which withdrew from global capitalism for several decades in the 20th century but which returned to the capitalist fold during the last decade of the 20th century.  It is now time to consider the case of a nation which has been dominated by the "free market" arrangements created by its wealthiest citizens from its founding to the present day - namely, the United States.   It is time especially to examine the late-stage outworkings of those arrangements.  Those outworkings can be summed up as the spread of precarity throughout the United States.  We have looked at other peoples' messes.  It's time to look at our own.

A quick review: the first post in this series defined precarity as "the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse," and, "a situation in which someone's job or career is always in danger of being lost."  That first post also said,

The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death."  The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck?  Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"

The University of Georgia webpage cited above describes how precarity was not always a feature of modern American life.  That page describes how under President Lyndon Johnson, the United States began to construct a social safety net that actually worked to bring economic advancement to all Americans and not just the rich.  The page also describes how wealthy business interests organized from the 1970's onward to begin to unravel that safety net in order to protect and expand their dominance over the American economy.  Today's post will explore how the resulting increase in precarity spread throughout the United States.  We will see that, to use a word picture, many of those who thought that they would make out all right by being friends of wolves wound up becoming lamb chops themselves.

Let's consider first a paper titled, "Changes in Precarious Employment in the United States: A Longitudinal Analysis" (Oddo, et al, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, December 2020).  This paper introduces the term "precarious employment" (or PE, as the authors abbreviate it) and describes it as "the accumulation of multiple unfavorable facets of employment quality."   In plain words, PE is the accumulation of those factors in a person's job which make the job more like Hell than Heaven.  The paper measured PE in terms of the following seven variables:

1. Material rewards - that is, the relative adequacy or inadequacy of wages
2. Work time arrangements - that is, how long a person has to work as well as how much control the worker has over his or her own schedule
3. Stability - that is, whether the job has a stable employment contract or whether it is unstable (as in temporary, seasonal, contracted limited-time, etc.)
4. Workers' rights - that is, whether the employer offers benefits such as health insurance or retirement, as well as protection of workers from exploitation
5. Collective organization or empowerment - that is, whether employees are helped or hindered in their attempts to organize themselves for collective bargaining power
6. Interpersonal relations - that is, whether workers have to deal with toxic bosses or bosses who don't allow the workers to control how they do their jobs
7. Training and employability opportunities - that is, whether there is room for growth and advancement in the job

A high score in each of these variables indicated a workplace that provided healthy, long-term employment.  A low score in these variables indicated a workplace of precarious employment.  The authors of the paper measured changes in these variables over time for various populations and geographic regions in the United States from 1988 to 2016.  They then used this data to construct a precarious employment score (PES) for each group and region.  The authors found, unsurprisingly, that the overall PES for the United States increased during that period, rising from 2.96 in 1988 to 3.43 in 2016.  They also found, unsurprisingly, that the PES increased among historically oppressed groups in the United States, such as African-Americans, Latinos, women, and people without advanced education.  However, there were some rather surprising findings as well.  Men showed an 11 percent increase in precarious employment during this time, as compared to a 6 percent increase for women.  Precarious employment also increased significantly among those Americans with bachelors or advanced degrees.  Most surprising of all was the large increase in precarious employment among workers with higher wages.  

As far as regional variations, the American South showed the highest percentage of precarious employment and highest increase in PES.  This is significant because of the way in which state governments in the South have turned their states into attractive places for foreign manufacturers to set up plants - particularly automotive plants.  Yet this strategy has not translated to increased prosperity for the majority of people living in these states.  This may have to do especially with the fact that, starting from the 1970's onward, automotive plants in the United States have increasingly relied on the use of temporary staff to meet just-in-time production targets, as noted in an interview given by Professor Timothy Minchin of La Trobe University in 2021.  Professor Minchin has also written a book about the activities of foreign-owned automakers in the United States.

It is interesting that the beginning and growth of widespread precarity in the United States coincided with the terms of Republican presidents from Nixon onward.  This is especially significant when we examine the presidency of Donald Trump.  The Trump administration used to boast that it had achieved nearly full employment for Americans.  However, what actually happened was that there was a huge expansion of precarious, low-wage work under Trump, whose labor policies classified huge numbers of gig and temporary workers as "independent contractors" without rights to health or retirement benefits or other job protections.  Note that the term "gig worker" includes not only those highly-skilled, college-educated people who can craft a somewhat sustainable life out of present-day flexible, short-term economic arrangements.  It also includes the many, many people who were tricked into working low-skilled menial jobs without benefits for chump change wages, first by FedEx in the 1970's and 1980's, then by Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Door Dash, among others in more recent years.  As a result of the expansion of such arrangements, the United States has the highest percentage of low-paid, precarious workers among any OECD economy, as noted by Kathleen Thelen in her paper titled, "The American Precariat: U.S. Capitalism in Comparative Perspective."  At present, around 25 percent of the American workforce falls into the category of low-paid precarious workers.

These facts and considerations are quite naturally a big concern to me, because I am an African-American, and I have had to live my life watching many of my people suffer the malignancy and oppression of American society.  I have also experienced some of that malignancy and oppression myself.  This experience has taught me that the oppression of even one person threatens the peace of everyone who is not yet oppressed, or, to put it another way, allowing injustice against one leads eventually to injustice against all.  This is why I can't look the other way when I see others being oppressed, even when they are not of my "tribe".  But I think that what has blinded the eyes of many white Americans (especially among the privileged) over the last few decades has been the appeals to naked self-interest which have been pitched to them by the masters of the American economy.  So I'd like to return to a theme set forth in the opening paragraphs of this post, namely a description of how precarity has begun to bite even the members of the formerly "middle-class" or "upper middle-class" in recent years.  

Consider therefore a 2019 book by Alyssa Quart titled, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America.  I am in the middle of this book right now, and have learned some surprising things, as well as being reminded of things I already knew.  One of the surprising things is how many degreed working female professionals suffer discrimination and career damage simply from the act of having a baby.  Another thing is the link between increasing overall precarity and the increase in costs of child care for working parents.  (Child care and other forms of paid personal care represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. economy, by the way, although personal care workers receive the lowest wages.)  Yet another thing is how people who once considered themselves well-off find their neighborhoods becoming hostile to them as those neighborhoods are taken over by the super-wealthy - a surprising case of how gentrification hurts even those who thought they were insulated from its effects by being part of the dominant culture.  Case in point: a game between two high school varsity baseball teams.  One was "decently middle-class" while the other consisted of kids from a wealthier nearby suburb.  Each group was cheering their own team, but the wealthier kids - and their parents - began to taunt the kids from the other team by chanting "Lower Average Income! Lower Average Income!" and "Can't your parents afford to feed you?  Can we call Child Protective Services?"  Quart's book also describes the shock and surprise which many formerly smug professionals are experiencing as they witness the dwindling of the value of a college degree in the United States.  We will consider these things in a future post, by the way, as this phenomenon is not just limited to the United States.  As noted in a previous post, Chinese degree-holders are finding out that there are fewer jobs than graduates in the Chinese economy.

As we explore the theme of precarity in the United States, we will consider the mechanisms by which precarity began to appear from the 1970's onward.  We will see, rather surprisingly, the link between these mechanisms and the increasing difficulties faced by small businesses and would-be entrepreneurs over the last four decades.  We will also ask what is to be done about the precarious situation many of us now face.  Here's a hint: I don't believe the answer lies solely in electoral politics or issuing policy recommendations.  While these things can be important, they are not enough by themselves, since they leave the locus of power outside of those communities which are suffering the most from precarity.

Here I speak as a Black man who has studied strategic nonviolent resistance and who has experienced cognitive liberation of the kind which moves me to challenge existing situations of oppression.  My study of precarity in the United States has shown me just how dire the African-American situation is.  But my attempts over the last six or seven years to organize my brothers and sisters for collective action have left me rather frustrated.  So I'd like to ask, How will we begin to change our situation?

First, let's say straight up that passivity and magical thinking will not help at all.  I am thinking of some of the people I have tried to organize and how they have told me that I should join an organization that helps people instead of bothering them.  But my answer to that is to quote from The Little Red Hen.  Others have seen what I was asking them to do and have said in essence, "Well, I don't have the time or resources to help organize my people where I live.  But I know that there are places where we do see Black doctors and lawyers and bankers - I think I'll move there!"  My answer (especially to those who tell me that such a magical place exists in the American South) is to say that there is no "Big Rock Candy Mountain" that they can run away to, and that they are lying to themselves in order to avoid the sacrifices, hard work and potential risks of collective action.

The inescapable reality is that the only thing that will reliably alter our situation is our choice to begin to organize ourselves for collective action.  As Maciej Bartkowski said in his book Recovering Nonviolent History, 

"The guilt of falling into . . . predatory hands . . . [lies] in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."

Or, to quote from Alex Soojung Kim-Pang,

"Collective action is the most powerful form of self-care."  (Emphasis added.)