Hey, you busy? Not doing much?
You feel like sobbing like a baby?
Then read the We Are The 99 Percent tumblr.
It’s just a collection of personal stories from people who have worked hard within this cruelly rigged system … people who went to school, sacrificed, did what they were supposed to do, and found that in modern America, being really smart and working really hard and making all the right choices just isn’t enough anymore.
That’s all it is.
It’s not arguing for a political party, it’s not pro- or anti- Obama, it’s just personal stories about how fucked and unsupportable our current level of inequality is.
Because, see, it’s not just that ‘this is a hard time for everyone.’ As Ezra Klein said, “There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.”
This is why Occupy Wall Street is gaining so much traction.
Just being alive shouldn’t be so fucking scary.
Selections from the tumblr and commentary beneath the cut.
I am a military brat and a veteran.
I have lost friends and family to wars fought to make other people rich.FUCK YOU 1%
I want my Uncle John back.
WE ARE THE 99%
LOL GET A JOB, HIPPIE!
There are a lot of notes from veterans, actually. It turns out that after you get back from fighting an unnecessary war, the government would kind of like it if you would fuck off, please. There’s no place for you.
Of course, there’s no place for a lot of us. Here’s a woman who tried to play by the rules:
I’m a 33 Year Old Woman.
I did EVERYTHING RIGHT:
- state college (low tuition)
- worked to pay for my double degree
- paid my credit card every month
- got a modest car and paid off early
- started a retirement account at age 26
BUT NOW
I’ve had no income for ~2 years.
I have no health insurance.
I’m watching my savings dwindle, + don’t know what I’ll do when my “retirement” is over!
The other day my car was stolen, and my first thought was relief that I might cross car insurance + gas off my expense list even though now I’ll have to walk 2 miles back and forth to the library to look for work.
I am no slacker.
I am the 99%.
occupywallstreet.org
LOL GET A JOB, HIPPIE!
See, for decades, when someone would fall through the cracks of society, we’d be told that it was their own fault … that if only they’d been smarter, more diligent, planned better, they wouldn’t be in this situation. That’s not the case any more. Not that it ever was, I guess.
A big part of what makes things scary, of course, is health care. A disproportionate number of the posts on the tumblr are about health care costs and availability. I don’t think people with good health care understand what a pipe dream it is for the rest of us. And also, I don’t think they understand how close to they edge they likely are. Here are two.
First a woman who wants to help a friend:
I am a match to donate a kidney to a friend.
I am also unemployed and have no health insurance (laid off of my job of 20 years).
Was told by the hospital, largest in MD, and friend’s health insurer, largest in the nation, that I must pay for pre-op exams.
The health of my friend should not depend on my lack of money & the greed of corporations.
I am the 99%.
occupywallstreet.org
THAT HIPPIE AND HER FRIEND SHOULD BOTH GET JOBS, LOLAMIRITE?
Next, the story of a mother’s death, accompanied by a picture of what I assume is a box containing her ashes:
My mother had no job, no home, and no healthcare to treat the mental and physical deterioration she suffered.
She committed suicide on 7/8/2010
She was the 99%.
As much as heath care, care for families plays a part. It’s tragic, really … we want so badly to take care of those we love, and often there’s just no way. I don’t know how these people handle it. Two stories of mothers on the edge.
First, a mother of five:
I am the mother of five children. I lost my job 2 years ago as the manager of a hair salon when the bad economy forced it to close. My husband left me and after a year long battle with the bank trying to get a loan modification, Citimortgage is foreclosing on my home. I live in fear everyday. No one will rent to an unemployed, single parent who survives solely on child support. I am the 99 percent. For pity’s sake, someone help us.
How can that not break your heart? “For pity’s sake, someone help us.” You can hear the desperation. Of course, as we all know, that hippie should just get a job.
Finally, the one that sent me out of the room, sobbing. The one that made me write this post:
I am 4 years old. My mom can’t afford to buy me winter clothes, even from the thrift store. She couldn’t buy me a birthday present either. I have never seen her cry so hard!
I am the 99%
occupywallst.org
I can’t even imagine. Jesus. “Get a job, hippie,” seems inappropriate here, so instead I’ll express the same sentiment in some slightly different language:
“If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I’ll end this with something I wrote a while back on Metafilter. It’s my own story.
[This] makes me think of my 23 year old girlfriend who just graduated from college.
She put herself through with zero help from her parents, the first in her family to attend college, was actually thrown out of her home junior year for no longer being a Jehovah’s Witness, graduated with a double major and a minor … all in all, she’s a fucking bad-ass.
Her bad-assery faded though when she was dumped from her office job without explanation about 6 months before graduation, though. And of course, since she was attending college full time, no unemployment for her.
Sure, she sort of managed to kinda/sorta/almost make ends meet through a string of shitty, illegally exploitative part time jobs (WHOOPS! Looks like we forgot to pay you for 2 months! Over Christmas! And didn’t answer our phones! Oh well. I guess if you want to keep working for us you’ll need to endure the ritual humiliation and debasement of us lecturing you on how unprofessional it was to get upset about that.), but mostly it was my assistance that kept the lights on and the water flowing.
And I’ll tell you, I went into debt and it wrecked my credit. She went into debt and it wrecked her credit. She had to blow off her student loan payments for months on end. Neither of us are pot-and-PBR types. We’re hard workers. we just got unlucky enough to live in the Bay Area in the late 2000’s. Of course, the crowning blow was a late-night trip to the emergency room after she passed out randomly one afternoon. No insurance + ER trip = $10,000 neither of us have.
And look … we’re going to be okay. She has a mostly decent job now. We’ve had a lot of help from my parents. Student loans are a godsend for me. She’s very talented, and we’re both smarter than most people. She’s paying off her student loans and her ER bill, and luckily her passing out wasn’t life-threatening or the sort of thing that requires long-term care. We’re putting it all back together. We were very lucky.
BUT, that’s the point.
WE WERE VERY LUCKY.
But there are a lot of people who don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend who can help carry the load.
There are a lot of people who don’t have parents who are willing or able to help.
There are a lot of people who aren’t smarter or prettier or more talented than the people around them.
There are a lot of people who to to the ER and discover that they’ve got a condition that requires daily treatment that they’ll never be able to afford.
We’re hard fucking workers, but if you think that’s enough anymore, you’re delusional.
We got lucky.
We are the 99%
And, almost certainly, you are too.
This is so accurate a manifesto that I’m left wondering, as always, why there isn’t more of a mass movement to correct this situation.
This situation isn’t right. Isn’t the right thing, morally or for our country.
I wonder that too. Maybe this is it.
—Myca
My guess is that things aren’t bad enough for enough people, yet. It’s just a matter of time until it is, though.
I survived a suicide attempt, a nervous breakdown and now trying to pick up the broken pieces while financially devasted by CitiMortgage fraud. Trying to be a good citizen by paying charges (I shouldnt of had to), holding onto the house (so it wouldnt be abandoned like all the others in the neighborhood) and having to pay 10 extra years on a mortgage (that should have been paid so I could retire) Someont needs to pay, not the taxpayers while my bank stays up and damaging more of us
For all the hipster anarchists quoting V for Vendetta like to repeat that line about ‘government should be afraid of its people’, the more serious and reality-based call to action is actually elsewhere:
EVIE: We shouldn’t have to live like this.
GORDON: No, kid, we shouldn’t. So what are you going to do about it?
Personally, I’m going to go find some sleeping bags for the protesters, and try to figure out if there’s a way I can join them.
—Myca
thanks for this great post. I support these protests but have had trouble sifting through the (often problematic) rhetoric on many progressive blogs supporting them. this did a wonderful job of highlighting and putting in context what, to me at least, is the most important part of the message of these protests.
I think that what you’re saying, nmlop, also gets at why the occupywallstreet folks haven’t been making specific demands. It’s because it’s not about the demands, and it’s not about left or right (though, of course, I think that the vast majority of the protesters and supporters are on the left), it’s about, as Ezra Klein put it,
Or Felix Salmon,
There are hundreds or thousands of ideas on how to do that. It’s social, it’s political, it’s economic. It involves everything from “let the banks fail” (which I think is probably not a great idea) to “tax the fuck out of the wealthy” (which is think is a lovely idea). These protests aren’t about one or the other. They’re about: This is a problem. it must be addressed.
—Myca
This is a very interesting movement. There are a couple cool aspects. One, a lot of these people have some pretty sad tales to tell. Two, they’re harping on the idea that someone promised them something if they did the right things, and that something is a lifestyle that takes a lot of bucks and corporate activity to sustain.
I read the Mark Ruffalo piece in the Guardian. Check it out. It’s hard to disagree with a lot of what he says. But…it will be hard to create good jobs for everyone, unless we restrict our definition of everyone. Do we want to throw the Indian VA out of work to employ someone in North America? Do we want to erect trade barriers and pay higher taxes in order to subsidize inefficient production on the other side of this country?
And yet, no access to basic health care is a failure on the part of the politicians who call themselves leaders.
More food from less space for cheaper is a good thing, right? Only maybe it isn’t.
An unsustainable lifestyle is fun for us, but unsustainable for the whole world.
This 99% thing is not yet well thought out, but it reminds me of the innocence of the 60s and the protests I witnessed then. I think (I hope) that this is the start of the change we’ve been waiting for.
I don’t know if this is going to develop into a focused-enough movement to affect elections (such as the Tea Party movement has) or not. There seem to be a lot of differing agendas. One thing the Tea Party people did was to decide that they were going to leave social issues (e.g., opposition to same-sex marriage) out of their efforts. That’s going to be hard for the left to do. but, as the Tea Party found and as some of the Republican candidates for President are finding out, it’s necessary to gain public support.
I will say that in discussions of this on the right I’ve seen plenty of people say “They’re a bunch of college kids who are wasting their parents’ money – but they’re right when they talk about those bank bailouts.” There are aspects of what they’re talking about that will strike a chord with people outside their base, if they can but focus on that.
I’m not surprised that some people on the right are saying that 99percent is a bunch of college kids, Ron. That’s how they minimize the efforts when it’s on the left. It’s like when people on the left say that the tea party is a bunch of racists.
But when comparing the them to the tea party, you say “there seem to be a lot of differing agendas” which I find interesting, sine when the TPs first showed up, one of the argument used to justify alignment with racists and inbreds was that the TP’s strength were that their members all held different agendas, coming together to affect change.
I’m not a college kid. I’m a 63 year old lawyer with a lot of experience in the banking/financial services area. I am one of the 99%. If I was within driving distance of New York, I’d be there. This economy of this country is being ruined by the concentration of wealth and power in the 5 largest banks who, by the way, are still trading derivatives like there is no tomorrow. It did not used to be this way and the answer is simple. They need to be broken up. Period. That won’t solve all the problems, but it’s a start, so if we need a concrete objective, that should be it. It’s simple and easy to understand.
Really? This is what passes for discourse on the left, Bear? The fact that you could present these two terms in the same sentence tells me a lot about your own predjudices. Characterization of people on the basis of their race and heritage is unacceptable if they sagree with you but not if they don’t, eh? Nice.
Don’t do that.
Nope,we’re not going to have this fight here.
Meet in a parking lot and beat each other up if you like, but not here.
Don’t play this bullshit gotcha game. Also, calling someone (or a movement or a political party or whatever) racist is not the same as “Characterization of people on the basis of their race.”
Both of you. Cut it out. Talk about the post.
—Myca
Did you?
Commendable. But –
And then another citation, saying
In what disciplines? Engineering? Science? Math? Or something less certain to be valued by an employer? The attainment of multiple college degrees entitles you to absolutely nothing. I've got two degrees myself, but I never figured that anyone owed me a job. No one guaranteed that getting degrees in anything that you liked would lead to gainful employment. I've seen this more than once – "I got a college degree, I should have a good job." Nope. Sorry. Not true. Colleges are churning out zillions of degreeed individuals who don't have skills that an employer needs. Here’s the poster child for that. A young woman took out $100,000 in loans to finance her college educations. The article takes the school and the bank to task for permitting her to borrow that much money, Perhaps there is some validity to that, but we don’t find out until the 30th paragraph, just before the end of the story, that her degree is “an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies.” What you get your degree in matters – common sense tells you that. Or should. Especially if (unlike the woman whose post I referenced above, and good for her) you’re going to borrow $100K to get it.
Telling me you’ve had bad luck or you’ve been screwed by others may very well be true. But don’t tell me you’ve been screwed because you got a college degree or two and now you don’t have a job. Doing that doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done the right thing. The busiest guy I know who’s making real good money is an auto mechanic who’s profiting from the circumstance that in this economy people find it makes more sense to put $1000 into a ring and valve job than to just up and buy a new car.
This crap makes no sense at all. Banks have been carrying properties at inflated values on their books for years, now, pretending that the properties retain that value. They don’t. Maybe they’re waiting for them to regain that value so they won’t have to write the losses off. That’s a pipe dream. What they’re doing is publishing lies in their balance sheets, claiming that they have assets (loans against properties) that are worth far more than they really are. They drag their feet on renegotiating or writing down the loans. By not renegotiating those loans they’re avoiding reality and lying to anyone who reads those balance sheets, especially invesors and the SEC – and the latter should call them on it.
Maybe they’re waiting until this causes another crisis so they can get us to buy the bad loans from them.
In the City of Chicago banks own thousands of properties. The previous owners are long gone in a great many of them. So they’ve been taken over by gangs, hoodlums, drug dealers and users, etc. Some of these are next door to schools. Kids are getting beat up and shot. So the City of Chicago is requiring the owners – being the banks – to hire security guards for these buildings, and is planning to fine them $1000/day until they do. My point being that these banks are refusing to face the implications of not working with property owners.
These are two different people. One is the story of me and my then girlfriend, now wife. The other is the story of someone on We Are The 99 Percent.
And it’s obvious from your post that you didn’t read either in much detail before you cut and pasted your comment.
There will always be something to nitpick. There will always be some way to armchair quarterback someone else’s life. No matter what choices someone makes, there will always be someone older and whiter and wealthier waiting in the wings to explain what they did wrong, and how it’s a great system, really.
It doesn’t matter. Your nitpicking doesn’t matter. Just trying to get by shouldn’t be so fucking scary and hard.
—Myca
In more detail:
The first woman cited, her story is:
So what do you see there?
Well, one thing I see is that, whatever her degree was in, it at least got her enough of a career that she was able to start her retirement account at 26. She’s 33, and has been out of work for 2 years, so even if we assume that she started work at 26, before getting laid off at 31, that’s still 5 years of a good paying job.
We also see that she put effort into not living beyond her means, saved money, and planned for the future.
It’s possible that, had she taken engineering courses, or whatever, this wouldn’t have happened, sure. We don’t know what her degree was in, though … and are you certain that there have been no engineering layoffs in the past 5 years? Maybe she was an engineer.
The second woman cited, my wife:
If you read that, and I’d like to ask you to, since you apparently didn’t before, what you’ll see is that her (and our) financial dire straits come from a few sources:
1) Being kicked out of her house for no longer being a Jehovah’s Witness. Man, she really should have picked better parents, huh? PLAN BETTER NEXT TIME LOL!
2) Being fired from her office job. Thought I didn’t put this in the post, she’d held the job for 4 years, and had received very positive reviews all along. They fought her on unemployment, but it didn’t really matter, because she was working again fairly soon, at one of the string of shitty, low-pay, exploitative jobs I referenced.
3) Having a medical emergency while uninsured. She was actually working full time then. She was working full time fairly soon after being laid off. The jobs were just shitty and didn’t offer insurance.
See, I know that you want to make this about how poor people are poor because they made bad (or at least financially imprudent, self-indulgent) decisions. I know that because that’s the lens through with you always post.
Read the fucking tumblr. It’s just not true.
And as for how useful my wife’s degrees are? She’s got a good job now! However useful her degrees are or aren’t, they’re working for her, and she has a good job. It’s just that our credit is trashed, we’re 10,000+ in debt, and we couldn’t have possibly made it without help from friends and family. And we’re very very very lucky. We’re the lucky ones.
That’s the point.
—Myca
“If only they would have pursued another degree, everything would be alright.”
This argument is akin to arguing that, had only asset managers known the derivatives they were buying were toxic, there wouldn’t have been a massive financial crisis.
By saying that somebody would be more fortunate had they pursued another educational field gives privilege to a deterministic viewpoint that is not at all possible. Even with aggregated data (e.g. demand for employees in a specific industry), you don’t know how you fall within a field, you don’t know the hiring habits of employers in your area. Moreover, for many, they didn’t know that a massive jobs turnover was looming.
People pursue what they want to do with the assumption that they will be good at it, and that chancing a few years looking for employment for which they are qualified is better than trying for a job in an industry they do not care for, or could not pass muster for qualification. To render this sort of thinking as delusional seems to be missing the point.
http://consumerist.com/2011/10/signs-in-chicago-board-of-trade-windows-say-we-are-the-1.html
The other side speaks.
It isn’t nitpicking to think that a double degree in (say) chemical engineering and business administration really ought to get an otherwise-reasonable person a job, but that a double degree in French poetry and Latin is pretty much the opposite of that.
Ron, I agree that it would have been better for the TP to focus purely on economic issues and avoid social conservatism, but it seems to me that the movement has begun a long slide in that direction and is losing effectiveness in proportion to its embrace of old-school social conservatism.
I have a lot of sympathy for your story, Myca. I was in similar circumstances due to major dental needs in my family. $40k debt from that. And I had a good job with decent insurance during a mostly decent economy. I came very close to bankruptcy. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for everything without a significant amount of help from my (moderately wealthy) family. Even with that help and a 75% in salary over that time, it took me 8 years to be out from under that debt. That you’ve nearly come through that mess without the resources I had to help me is admirable. Don’t forget to celebrate when you’re clear.
Unless of course, you’re going for a teaching position, which people do.
I mean, Jesus, how about the part where the particular nitpick was actually completely inaccurate for the post itself? How about the part where a predetermined narrative was being dropped onto two different stories, conflating them and actually appropriate for neither?
What I object to is dropping a pre-formed narrative onto any complaint, no matter how reasonable. If you read through the blog, you’ll see that many of the posts are from people who say specifically, “When I went to school, this was considered ‘The Major’ to get a good job, and all that’s apparently changed.”
—Myca
While Rober is correct that some degress are more marketable than others that’s not the problem
There’s been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause). Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive “fun” degrees, and so forth.
But quibbling rather misses the point. These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand. Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed.
http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/
Ron @15: Oh, Ron. You and your beloved anecdotes. Whether it’s Obama’s birth certificate or the New York Times women’s studies major, you drag up these triumphant stories no matter how many times people point out they’re full of holes. It’s like watching a little kid drag Mr. Stuffybear everywhere, and no matter how much his parents point out that Mr. Stuffybear is missing an eye and his ears are tatters and the stuffing is half gone, and also, he kinda smells funny because the dog chewed on him, you will pry Mr. Stuffybear out of his cold dead fingers.
The NYT story is not about a silly girl who should have gone to engineering school, as all sensible people do, and suddenly found herself without a job because she got an “interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies” from a prestigious college. The NYT story is about private lenders who unwisely gave money to students whose credit ratings should not have qualified them for those loans, and about financial-aid offices in colleges that were (deliberately?) blind to the amount of debt students were taking on, or, really, anything other than keeping the little money-fountains firmly enrolled. Munna has a job. Her problem is not that nobody will employ her or that she’s flipping burgers; her problem is that she overpaid for her education because she was not sophisticated enough to question whether the fancy NYU label was worth the price tag, and plenty of very sophisticated people were happy to let her stay ignorant. They made money from it.
I don’t understand this thing a lot of engineers have about assuming that if anyone in possession of a liberal-arts degree is not rich or is unemployed, the immediate cause is that it’s impossible to get a job unless you have a STEM degree.
Robert @21: It’s not nitpicking, but it is kind of foolish. It assumes that everybody can see the future and correctly predict what degrees will be valuable, not only when they graduate, but forever. A chemical-engineering degree isn’t much use if it turns out that lots of other people had the same idea, so you’re competing with a ton of other chemical engineers for the same jobs. Particularly if you’re a person who doesn’t have an innate affinity or talent for the underlying skills but just took the degree because, well, it looked like a good job path, and now you’re competing for those few jobs with people who are good at this stuff.
Back when I was in college, us liberal-arts types were told that demographics proved there would be jobs in academia. And it’s true, that demographically speaking, that there was a large crop of tenured professors due to retire, and thus likely to be an opening in the pipeline, particularly if one went to a Big Name College. Choosing to get a PhD in Hanseatic Literature seemed like a reasonable career choice; it wasn’t “I dunno, I guess I’ll go to law school or something,” but “I have a career plan with a likely job, if I do well, and get the requisite credentials from a reputable college.” Oops! You failed to predict that colleges would shift to a business model where the tenured jobs stayed empty.
TL;DR – hindsight is 20/20, and defensive attribution is a shitty way to live.
I had to google hanseatic. Guess I chose the wrong major!
Really, though: so what if it’s 90% instead of 99%, after you exclude the basketweaving majors and unsympathetic follow-your-dream-even-though-you-should-know-better folks? 90% is still a lot.
I read the tumblr. Sure, some of them aren’t especially sympathetic, at least not to me. But MOST OF THEM ARE. So perhaps it makes the most sense to focus on the vast majority and ignore the few outliers.
RonF, what percentage of the 99% do you think you’d exclude? Would it end up being 90% in your view? Or 20%?
Well, it all depends on what percentage of people in the US one thinks should be left to starve in the street or die of curable diseases. So maybe we could hash that out?
“Her problem is not that nobody will employ her or that she’s flipping burgers; her problem is that she overpaid for her education because she was not sophisticated enough to question whether the fancy NYU label was worth the price tag, and plenty of very sophisticated people were happy to let her stay ignorant. They made money from it.”
This has quite a bit in common with both the mortgage crisis and the European debt crisis. In all three cases we had people buying into a meme about the future (house prices keep going up so you’d be a fool not to buy soon, college degrees are worth the investment, and the southern countries in the EU can grow their way out of debt). Some of these people were the borrowers, but some of these people were also the loan creators. It is the banks who purport to have expertise about creditworthiness and likelihood of being able to pay back the loans. It isn’t the 18 year old who purports to have that expertise. Yet when the predictions about the future turn out to be wrong, attention shifts solely to the borrower. What about the responsibility of the bank to make good loans?
I’m ok with the idea that the borrower has responsibility. I’m not ok with the idea that the banker does not have responsibility.
I’m not nitpicking. What I’m saying is that there are multiple factors involved here, some of which tie to the personal responsibility of the people involved – on all sides – and others that don’t.
Mythago, the NYT story is certainly in part about lenders who lent someone money to someone without taking due diligence as to whether the debtor could expect to pay it back. It would be well if before any educational loan is made – especially those where the public is the guarantor if it is not paid back – the prospective borrower would be examined with regards to their major and their post-graduation employment prospects. The last $60K of what she was lent was made by a private lendor, and if I was a shareholder or director of that bank I’d want to know by what rationale the lending officer thought this was a good loan. This kind of thing should minimally cost people their jobs.
But the presentation of the story – and of many advocates of the “those evil banks, how could they let people put themselves into such a situation” – minimizes or even ignores the agency of the debtor. There’s nothing wrong with getting a degree in something like religion and women’s studies. I don’t degrinate it in this situation on the basis of the subject matter. But even if she had been rich and paid for it herself she should have been asking “After I get this, then what do I do?” There’s a lot wrong with borrowing $100K to get that degree or any degree without asking that question. Nobody held a gun to her head and forced her to take out those loans – she sought them out.
To describe her behavior as “unsophisticated” or even “silly” obscures her agency. A more accurate description of her actions would be “stupid”. If you are going to sign your name to $100K of debt you need to take primary responsibility for your actions, especially since this took place over the span of 4 years, not just when she was 18 years old. And what in God’s name was her mother thinking?
The banks are responsible to their shareholders and depositors for the consequences of making such a loan, but they are NOT reponsible to the debtor. The debtor carries the responsibility of the consequences of their actions to themselves on their own – none of that belongs to the bank. To criticize the school for their part in this seems valid to a point. Too many schools are looking at students as a source of money instead of people they are supposed to help educate and prepare for the rest of their lives. But the primary responsibility here lies not with the banks and not with the schools – it lies with her. To paint her a victim – and to paint others who took out huge loans to go to college absent proper consideration of the worth of what they were buying – shifts the responsibility away from where it belongs.
There’s plenty of greed on all sides that led to our current economic situation. Wall Street has plenty to answer for. But so do home buyers who bought more home than they could afford figuring that the economy was always going to expand, home owners who treated the equity in their homes like an ATM and people who took out huge educational loans without evaluating what would happen down the line. This is not a one-sided situation, and trying to present it as such keeps us from true solutions.
Unless of course, you’re going for a teaching position, which people do.
Sure. Any degree can be a basis for teaching the subject matter. But then you get into the kind of situation where here in Illinois we had 15,000 education majors graduate last year – and 7,500 teaching positions open. And, of course, most of those graduates come from the Chicago suburbs and have no desire to move downstate into farm country or into the inner city to get a teaching job. People do a lot of things – that doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a job open for you to do it.
Robert, your comment on where the TP is headed raises a good point. People like Michelle Bachman would lead away from the focus that the TP needs to concentrate on if it is to succeed in being a factor in electing the next President. Given the current crop of candidates running for the GOP nomination I don’t know if ANY of them fit. It’s what I’ve been saying for the last year – President Obama is eminently beatable, but the GOP has to put the right person up to actually DO it. They can’t just throw the flavor of the month in there and cruise to victory.
People do a lot of things – that doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a job open for you to do it.
Unless, apparently, you major in engineering?
Seriously, for years I’ve been hearing about how teaching and nursing were where it was at – jobs that would always be in demand, jobs that couldn’t be outsourced, jobs that wouldn’t make you rich but would keep you in the middle class. Now, because of the overall state of the economy and what that’s done to the tax base, endowments and unreimbursed medical care, schools and hospitals are not hiring and even letting people go. But the people that went into those fields had every reason to think they were picking something practical with good employment prospects.
The trades?
There are tons of out-of-work people in the trades. Mechanics are surely doing much better than dry-wall hangers (and always were), but electricians and plumbers, carpenters and roofers, all have been hit really hard by the downturn in the housing market. And if everyone went into auto mechanics because Robert said that’s where it’s at, they would be struggling too.
It’s astounding arrogance to me that you can sit on high and judge people because not everyone made the same career choice as you, even as you must surely know that if they had, you’d be screwed too. Hell, where I live, there are plenty of unemployed engineers and IT types.
I want to add that being insured no longer shields one from onerous health care costs. My employer offers health insurance; once you go through all the exceptions, exclusions, copays and rules and regulations, it’s not entirely clear what benefit, if any, there is to signing up at all. Between the huge premiums, the deductables, the co-pays, etc., you’ll be out anywhere between $12,000 and $15,000 a year before the carrier will pay a dime — that is, of course, if the carrier agrees that this dime is for a “covered condition”; and most carriers will fight like hell not to pay. To even contemplate how much people pay to health insurance companies before they even ask to have something covered makes my head hurt; and if you are unfortunate enough to fall sick with an illness that’s not a “covered condition”, it is as if you’ve been burning all that money for years.
Yes. In trans circles, insurance companies are famous for denying coverage because someone is trans, even for totally unrelated problems. You’re feeling depressed about your divorce and could use some counseling to stay on your feet and in your job, but you’re trans? That’s a pre-existing condition, being trans; no coverage for you. You have an aneurysm? It’s because of the hormones. You have pneumonia? It’s because of the hormones. Got caught in the crossfire of a gang war and present at the ED with a sucking chest wound? Hormones.
You’re a trans woman? We won’t pay for your breast cancer screening – don’t be silly, your paperwork says “M”, and everyone knows that men never, ever get breast cancer. Oh, got that gender marker changed? Congratulations. You can have your breast cancer screening, but now we won’t cover your prostate exam. There’s a lump in your scrotum? It must be due to hormones. What, medical literature? We don’t need to back up our claims with medical literature. Go away; we represent a powerful organization with paid lobbyists and lawyers, and you merely gave money to us all these years in accordance with a legal contract which we can find not binding pretty much at will, and what the hell are you going to do about it? Sue us? Ahahahaha! Don’t be silly; you have no money to hire a lawyer.
If you really want to learn what you might not get for all that money, Google “rescission” and “health coverage”.
Grace
Meanwhile, I would kind of like to create a job for someone by re-opening my private practice and stepping out of my current salaried job, but I can’t afford to go without health insurance, and given that I’ve had two MRIs and three ER visits in the past two years, plus I’m fat, the idea of being able to self-insure is laughable. Pity that businesses lobbied against single-payer.
There are a few things I wanted to point out here, in regards to playing the “you shoulda jumped there to avoid those spikes” guy in regards to other people being unable to feed their kids or watching their parents die of treatable illnesses.
1) It’s an asshole thing to do. This is why there’s the popular perception of conservatives as heartless monsters. I know it bugs you guys, and to a certain degree it’s unfair, but stuff like this is why. It’s because any time someone says “Gosh, it sure does suck that I’m in constant pain from being rear-ended 5 years ago,” one of y’all is always ready to leap up and explain that if you’d just invested your paper route money 25 years ago instead of buying that Lionel Richie CD, you could get the surgery you needed, and things would be fine.
2) Sure, there are unsympathetic stories on there. But, Ron, you were literally inventing things to be unsympathetic about. Neither of the stories involved not being able to get a job post-college because of a crappy degree or a lack of work in their field. One involved losing her job about 10 years post-college and finding herself in dire financial straits despite careful financial planning. The other involved a constellation of losing her job during college, being thrown out of her house, and an unexpected medical emergency. Neither of these require further explanation. Both are perfectly plausible as-is.
3) You’re making excuses for other people’s pain. When someone is hurting, your first impulse is to try to figure out reasons they deserve it. That’s not a good thing to do. I don’t think you realize that that’s what you’re doing. I don’t think you would want to do that, if you realized it’s what you’re doing. Please realize that.
4) Choices (and outcomes) are not binary. It’s not either chemical engineering or Carolingian pottery. It’s not either unemployable or wealthy. There’s plenty of middle ground, and there ought to be. It ought to be possible to follow your dreams a little and work really hard and have it be okay. Not ‘follow your dreams,’ like, “take the most impractical classes ever and hope people hand you free money,” but ‘follow your dreams,’ like, “do something you’re good at and enjoy that is of value to the people around you and be okay.” That used to be possible. More and more, it’s not.
5) There’s never a ‘best’ job. No matter what you do, if you lose your job and fall on hard times, there’s always something else you could have done in hindsight. Engineering isn’t immune to that. Nothing is.
If you lose your job, and you’re looking at foreclosure, and one of your kids has a cough that won’t go away, and you’re not eating much because you’re trying to pay the bills, and someone comes up to you and tell you that, “Gosh, I guess you should have gone to medical school like me instead of wasting your time on engineering, hyuk hyuk,” what would you do?
I’d hope you’d punch him in the fucking face.
—Myca
Exactly. How often have you heard someone say, “I’d like to do X, but I’m staying for the benefits.” If I had a dollar for each time, I could almost afford my own health insurance. (Haha! As if. Okay, that’s obviously hyperbole.)
But if we really, really wanted to see an explosion of entrepreneurial spirit, we would un-hitch medical coverage from employment. It is an ENORMOUS drag on individual initiative, to be beholden to a corporate entity for your health coverage when it’s not reasonably attainable any other way.
Mysteriously, people who claim to be pro-individual and pro-personal-initiative, lobby hard to retain a system which promotes individual dependence on corporate largesse.
Shoot, even if you don’t want the Government to do it, let’s have regulation of private industry such that we level the field and enable people without an absolutely spotless medical history to get coverage. Prohibit exclusion due to pre-existing conditions, etc.
But the bottom line is that you’d have to prohibit so many things, pinning the private insurers down to an even playing field would be so difficult that you might as well just admit that healthcare is a special case which many other countries have solved at half the cost and go with single-payer.
Grace
[edited to fix layout screwups]
I have a “useful” technical degree (Mathematical Physics, with what is effectively a double-major in Chinese) and it has been little, if any help in finding a job.
The people who say “should have studied engineering” are:
1) Wrong.
2) Deliberately misleading themselves about how bad the job situation is for my generation.
yrs–
–Ben
@RonF
Heya Ron! It is nice to meet you (not facetious!!! I am just nice…and excited to speak to a person who I have been hearing about for so long!)
I am Myca’s wife and the woman in that last story
I think Myca will object to this as a derail, BUT if you must know… I will be the first one to admit that my majors and minor were in the humanities. They did not however, hold me back from finding a job. I found employment three months after graduating, was promoted quickly, and now am one of several managers of a retirement home.
My studies in education and the diverse interests indicated by my majors actually HELPED me get my current job. My mother, on the other hand, was an out of work Database programmer when she lost her home to foreclosure (a modest home that was within her means for 20 years before she found herself out of work for two years).
Despite having a good job, I still sometimes have trouble making ends meet after paying my student loans (government loans), and that ER bill still hangs over my head.
– Emberlie
I did a cartoon sort of about that once: http://www.leftycartoons.com/health-care-and-freedom/
I didn’t major in engineering, either. When I got out of MIT with a B.S. in Biology in the recession of the ’70’s I quickly found out that while everyone was impressed with the school I graduated out of there were damn few jobs in my field. In fact, after a fruitless job search I ended up moving from Boston to Chicago, which broke my heart. I managed to get a job in Chicago as a lowly lab tech at a medical school. It paid the bills – but just barely. Then my boss talked me into going for a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. That meant that he got 2x the work out of me for about 25% of what he’d been paying me. I delivered pizzas and read my books between deliveries while my wife worked as a teacher and waitress. After about 2.5 years my wife and I decided that it was time to get back to the real world, have kids and all that, so I copped to an M.S. Then I got a job that used my technical background but only had me peripherally involved in lab work. Not particularly what I wanted to do, but it paid the bills. Being articulate and being able to write was about 50% of the reason I was a success at it – and those were not skills that were the hallmark of many of my classmates, let me tell you.
That wasn’t a job that was going very far, either. But then someone brought something called a “PC” into the building. My wife had taken a part-time job (she was also a teacher) demonstrating computers for Atari at a department store. When Atari dropped the program (and my wife lost the job) we got the equipment and I learned to use it. So when the “PC” came around I was able to do a few things with it. One thing led to another and I went over to the dark side to IT, which I’ve been doing ever since.
My point being that going to a great school and getting a technical degree turned out to be no guarantee of a comfortable middle-class life for me either. When both my first and second children were born I was living in an uninsulated home built in 1856 where I had to leave the faucet running in the winter so that the pipes didn’t freeze – and that didn’t always work. We heated the downstairs in part with gas space heaters and in part by stoking a metal fireplace we bought at Sears Surplus and installed ourselves with wood that I used to cut down by sneaking into the woods at night, and we didn’t use the upstairs because there was no heat at all. We were supposed to leave my son under UV lights because he was born with jaundice but if we left him uncovered he got too cold. I didn’t get caught in a housing boom – and there was one back then, too, and people got caught underwater in their homes in the late ’70’s and early ’80’s, too, this is nothing new – because my wife and I waited 13 years before we could afford to buy a home, and a inexpensive one with few amenities that we still live in, rather than be greedy and gamble and take out a balloon loan.
I’m not working in anything close to what I got my degrees in. But I didn’t think that anyone owed me any thing, such as a home with central heat and insulation and a roof that didn’t leak because I got two degrees. It doesn’t matter what people told me or what I did, nobody owed or owes me anything. It was up to me to keep moving, keep learning, and find a way, even if I was shivering in bed winter nights. Have I been fortunate? Sure. God gave me a brain that’s able to process math and science better than 99.9% of the population, and I am thankful. But I still had to use it, and to be willing to deliver pizzas and drive a cab and check groceries and work a few weekends as a construction laborer to get by.
Well, actually Myca, I didn’t see what those people got their degrees in. They didn’t say, which I kind of find suspicous. But …
The presumption that if you supply the proper inputs to life you will get a particular set of outputs and that if you don’t it’s someone’s fault is fallacious. Are there given circumstances where individuals have been misled or even cheated/defrauded? Sure. Those who did that should have to pay for that to the extent that the law allows, and I’m definitely willing to listen to an argument that there’s flaws in the law. Where these protests condemn certain practices in the investment world or government that I agree with I’ll go along with them. Investment houses shouldn’t have been able to package up bundles of iffy mortage loans and sell them as top-rated securities. The Feds shouldn’t have handed out money to keep banks solvent while permitting the people running and/or profiting from them to not suffer penalties, whether financial or criminal.
But I’m also hearing this huge sense of entitlement. I keep hearing “I did this, therefore I should have that, but I don’t, therefore someone’s done me wrong.” That’s just wrong. I don’t hear anyone taking any personal responsibility for anything. What I hear is that they want the government to take over the responsibility of ensuring that people have the basic needs of life.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest of the Founders, once said that “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety,
deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” If you are not free to fail, then you are in thrall to those who prevent you from failing and must obey them. If the Federal government becomes so all-encompassing as to provide healthcare and shelter and food to all that want it regardless of whatever effort they may or may not take to be productive, then we are no longer citizens, we are subjects.
RonF,
I don’t think anybody here thinks that you didn’t work hard or sacrifice to get where you are today. But you seem to think that anybody who is struggling today didn’t also work hard and sacrifice. You want to think they all made bad decisions that you would never make, so you’ll never be like them. What if, instead of jaundice, your kid had cancer? What if the company your work for folded tomorrow? Yes, even people who worked hard and sacrificed and made good decisions can end up in a really bad situation. When it happens to you, all the magical thinking in the world won’t pay your bills.
RonF: I think what you describe as “freedom to fail” should start with the biggest economic players. In Benjamin Franklin’s time, big commercial houses were classic partnerships, with no limited liability; if you played to get rich, you risked losing not just your investment, but all of your wealth. There were no bailouts, no tax breaks, no governmental safety net for “job creators”. Today, Wall Street executives have little, if any, accountability to the public for what they do despite all the lecturing we get about how much the public needs them, and they look to the taxpayers not just to keep their companies propped up, but to keep their huge salaries and obscene bonuses flowing. I think that’s what the protesters find really scandalous: that when big bankers stand to lose their luxuries, they look to the taxpayers to bail them out and to keep them rich, but when ordinary people fall on hard times and can’t afford bare necessities, they are lectured on taking responsibility; when the rich make money, they make a fuss about paying any taxes, but when they lose money, they expect the public fisc to come through to put them on an even keel again — private profits, public losses.
As to your statement about healthcare, food and shelter — sorry, but here some of us just have a difference in values. I would like to live in a society where the especially gifted or the especially lucky enjoy extra luxuries, but a society that’s also humane enough to not let the elderly, children and the sick die or suffer unnecessarily; a society that will provide those who cannot help themselves, either permanently or temporarily, with basic necessities like healthcare, food and shelter, even if it means its richest members can only afford three mansions each instead of four.
You are also mistaken in your belief that the threat of death or suffering without food, shelter or healthcare will drive progress and personal excellence as the so-called “freedom to fail”. That’s not freedom to fail — it’s actually a circumscription of one’s choices. People who risk dying of hunger, exposure and treatable disease will minimize their risks and make the safest choices — which are not necessarily the choices that maximize the utilization of their talents or benefit society and progress the most. They will strive to preserve the status quo instead of breaking the mold. Freedom to fail is exactly the opposite. Knowing you won’t perish if you fail — that’s freedom to fail.
RonF I would like to speak to the ways that the lack of universal health care stifles innovation.
I know personally two hot-shot software engineers who would like to go out on their own, in their 40’s, and start new businesses. If I know two, there are probably hundreds or thousands in the Bay Area alone. Statistics tell us that small businesses and start-ups are responsible for a huge proportion of job growth, even as it is. Now of course a lot of start-ups fail, and this is healthy.
Neither of the guys I mention are going to do this, however, because one has a wife with Type I diabetes and the other has a disabled child. They could not buy health insurance for their families at a reasonable rate, nor could they afford the astronomical costs of simply paying for what they need.
This is NOT healthy for the economy. I have a son-in-law in Europe in the same position, and he has gone out on his own, because his family will be protected by his country’s universal health care.
So, you tell me which situation is more likely to foster economic growth.
Hey, Ron:
That’s a very personal story. Thanks for sharing it.
You do realize that, for the generations after yours, such a story is essentially an impossibility, right? That working your way through grad school is, at this point, laughable given the sums of money involved? That buying a house will stick someone, far, far, deeper into debt than it did for you? That the chances of finding the “crappy lab jobs” you talk about are, in fact, nearly nil?
yrs–
–Ben
Just a few quick responses:
Jake: I missed saying this before, but thanks. :)
Ben: In a just world, you would be living a life of luxury based entirely on the lavish royalties from Polaris. ;)
Ron: You fail at reading comprehension. Try again. :(
Another note about the current job market: I graduated with a Ph. D. in math in the summer of 2010. I applied to 272 jobs, followed every lead I had, went to a ton of interviews, and got a total of three offers. One was somewhere that I wouldn’t have applied if I’d looked more closely at the area first (closest synagogue was over 50 miles away, and I really didn’t feel like being the town’s only Jew), and the other two were both decent offers but not fabulous. I took one of those decent but not fabulous offers, and I enjoy my job, but I can look around and see that all the people hired for this level position in the past several years have doctorates, while the people hired for the same level position several years ago just have masters degrees. I know quite a few people who graduated the same year as me with math doctorates and still don’t have math-related jobs at all. I know one guy who, after getting his masters in math, worked for several years at a Barnes and Noble.
I’ve been thinking about what I said re. people being forced by the threat of dire poverty to make “safe” choices as opposed better, but risky choices, and especially how someone with small children may put up with a terribly underpaid, dead-end job indefinitely just to keep the mickey-mouse health insurance plan. All of a sudden, certain conservative policies which, at first glance, seem inconsistent — opposing universal healthcare or regulation of insurance companies and attacks on education on the one hand, and efforts to limit access to contraception, lying to teenagers about the safety and effectiveness of contraception and encouraging people to have as many children as possible, as early as possible — it all makes sense to me now.
@Amused, it seems to make a pattern, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist.
My years of experience in finance and law have convinced me that the government or the conservatives or whoever is supposed to be behind all this – these people are really not that well organized. It would be comforting in a crazy way to think that some person or groups of persons are in charge, but the real truth is…….there’s no one driving this train, the control booth is empty, and we’re careening along without any intelligent direction at all.
.there’s no one driving this train, the control booth is empty, and we’re careening along without any intelligent direction at all.
Nah, I got it under control. I just like making things look random.
– [You’ve joined] organized crime?
– Hah. Don’t kid yourself. It’s not that organized.
Sneakers (1992)
“What I hear is that they want the government to take over the responsibility of ensuring that people have the basic needs of life.”
What a terrible nightmare vision of awfulness.
I was going to point out how people would be a lot more free to fail if failure didn’t mean starvation! death! disaster! but Amused said it much better than I could.
Chingona:
I never said I didn’t make bad decisions. Majoring in Biology when there were few jobs in it (at a B.S. level, anyway) was not a great decision. I started out in Chemical Engineering. Had I stayed in that I’d have made good money instead of ending up delivering pizzas a few years later. I was like them.
Except – I was willing to take jobs delivering pizzas and working a grocery register. I didn’t think a living wage was my birthright. I still don’t. And I don’t think it’s anyone else’s birthright either.
True. But how does that give anyone the moral authority to compel anyone else other than themselves to contribute to my welfare?
Amused
I can’t find anything to disagree with there. Given previous statements I’ve made I’m not sure as to your point in telling me this.
I also agree with that. But the current demands that I see from the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd go well beyond that.
I’d rather someone take a safe choice and become independent of public support than have the choice of becoming dependent on public support for their necessities. Will there be people who under the former situation stick with the safe choice and not seek to optimize the use of their talents? Perhaps, although you don’t seem to thin, that people can start with the safe choice and then extend themselves once they have their feet under them. But there’s also the danger, seen quite often, that becoming dependent on public support robs people of self-respect and self-discipline – and they stay there for years, as it becomes their “safe” choice.
Ben:
I was able to work my way through grad school because I was in a discipline where tuition waivers and fellowships were available. The money didn’t mean that much; it was only $2000, and I needed to get a job or two. If someone wanted to get a masters in some other discipline then that might not be an option, but my point was to point out that you have to find your own way instead of blaming someone else. As far as buying a house goes, the main reason that buying a a home didn’t plunge me into debt was that my wife and I waited 13 years after we were married before we bought one, and when we did we didn’t buy one that was bigger than we could afford. A house doesn’t have to plunge you into unpayable debt if you are modest about your expectations of how big your house needs to be, how it’s furnished and where it is. If people getting out of college in the last 10 years had waited less time than I did to buy a house they could get bargains.
Except – I was willing to take jobs delivering pizzas and working a grocery register. I didn’t think a living wage was my birthright. I still don’t. And I don’t think it’s anyone else’s birthright either.
No, the difference is that you were willing *and able* to take those jobs and, most importantly, *they were available.*
You keep talking about other people having a sense of entitlement as though none of them have ever worked a minimum wage job and would turn their noses up at them if they were offered them, when in reality, minimum wage jobs are hard to get now too, because there are lots of desperate people.
See, you don’t get to have it both ways. You can’t fault people for, as you put it, “the presumption that if you supply the proper inputs to life you will get a particular set of outputs” and then turn around and pretend that the difference between you and them is that you were *willing* to work a low-paying job–that is, you put in the proper inputs of hard work and humility, and are therefore okay.
Perhaps, although you don’t seem to think, that people can start with the safe choice and then extend themselves once they have their feet under them.
*If* they ever get their feet under them. The problem with the “safe” choice is that it often means barely staying afloat. Staying with the dead-end job because you need the health insurance.
I’d rather someone take a safe choice and become independent of public support than have the choice of becoming dependent on public support for their necessities.
Even if their unsafe choices have the potential to create jobs and the net result of *fewer* people being dependent on public support (or just going hungry)?
A house doesn’t have to plunge you into unpayable debt if you are modest about your expectations of how big your house needs to be, how it’s furnished and where it is. If people getting out of college in the last 10 years had waited less time than I did to buy a house they could get bargains.
Maybe, maybe not. Sure, they can get bargains now, the ones who have jobs.
My husband and I bought our house about 5 years ago. We were very reasonable with our expectations–we borrowed a lot less than the bank would pre-approve us for, we wouldn’t touch an ARM mortgage with a ten-foot pole, and we looked at a lot of places that were, quite frankly, dumps, because that’s what was in our price range.
We were lucky to get this house, a relatively new, nice, one-story place that even has a yard and a little piece of woods. We’ve been overpaying on our mortgage and we had a nice little bit of equity built up. Until, that is, the housing market crashed. We’re still lucky, in that we both have jobs and the house is only worth a little less than we paid for it. We may even be able to refinance.
But if we have to move for one of our jobs and can’t sell it, the savings that we’ve carefully built up isn’t going to survive paying two mortgages for very long. Likewise, if one of us gets laid off, or very sick, or gets hit by a bus and is disabled, we’re just as screwed as the people who bought way more house than they needed.
We were lucky to get this house, a relatively new, nice, one-story place that even has a yard and a little piece of woods. We’ve been overpaying on our mortgage and we had a nice little bit of equity built up. Until, that is, the housing market crashed. We’re still lucky, in that we both have jobs and the house is only worth a little less than we paid for it. We may even be able to refinance.
But if we have to move for one of our jobs and can’t sell it, the savings that we’ve carefully built up isn’t going to survive paying two mortgages for very long.
Same here. Modest house. Kind of borderline neighborhood. We put 20 percent down. We could easily afford the payments, which were slightly less than we would have paid to rent a similar house. We weren’t greedy and we didn’t gamble and we didn’t take out a balloon loan. We thought we were being responsible.
We moved for work and family reasons. We had the house under contract, but the deal fell through. That was our last chance in at least the next 10 years, maybe more, to get out from under it. The bottom fell out. Today, it wouldn’t appraise for half of what we paid for it. We lost all our equity and then some and are deeply underwater. Refinancing is out of the question. We managed to rent it out, but we’re subsidizing the rent by about $200 bucks a month.
My husband lost his job last month. Without child care expenses and with unemployment, we can keep supporting both houses for now. We’re going to try to do a short sale, but banks don’t always go for those. If my husband doesn’t get another job before unemployment runs out, we’ll probably lose both houses.
I can think back on a dozen decisions that, if we had made a different one, things might be better today. Or at least different. But none of our decisions were rash or irresponsible or unreasonable at the time.
but my point was to point out that you have to find your own way instead of blaming someone else
They’ll pry your defensive attribution out of your cold, dead hands, eh, RonF?
Being dependent on public support robs people of their dignity because we make goddamn sure it does. Let’s shame those welfare recipients so they get off the dole ASAP and are bloody grateful to their betters in the meantime! That can’t possibly have an effect on anyone’s dignity and sense of self-worth.
Chingona, you might want to speak to an expert. Depending upon the state you may want to walk away from the house you aren’t living in if it will enable you to keep the one you are living in. (Not legal advice, but definitely saying you should seek some).
This diary pretty much says everything I would want to say: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/12/1025555/-Open-Letter-to-that-53-Guy
Is this the life we really want for ourselves and others?
This is the other thing I would want to say:
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/post/11568991387/i-worked-hard-in-school-got-scholarships-got-a
chingona, that sucks. I have no financial or legal advice, just the hope that it gets better for you, and that your husband finds work soon.
Depending upon the state you may want to walk away from the house you aren’t living in if it will enable you to keep the one you are living in.
Among the people who advised us to just walk away is the realtor we used when it was last on the market. Her view is that everyone else is doing it (one reason we’ve lost so much value is the huge number of foreclosures in our neighborhood), it’s not our fault and the banks are screwing everyone anyway, so why make ourselves martyrs to personal responsibility?
Something that I didn’t realize until we spoke with a short-sale specialist is that if you foreclose or even do a short sale, you have tax liability for the bank’s loss. The bank’s loss is treated as your income, even though you don’t have a cent of it.
There’s a program right now that allows people to waive their tax liability, but it expires at the end of 2012. Congress could renew it, but the way things are going, they might very well not. After all, it discourages personal responsibility.
Our larger problem is we could not afford our mortgage for very long on just my income. (But gee am I sure glad I have a job. Thanks, feminism!) We probably would try to renegotiate our mortgage before we would move, but right now, he’s just trying really hard to get another job so we don’t have to go down that path.
I read the 99 percent stories, and what I get from them is not that people want a handout, but they do want some kind of break that is going to help them get back on their feet, help them contribute to the fullest of their abilities. Companies seem to get a lot of breaks and second chances, but ordinary people don’t. We have the Tea Party types screaming bloody murder about any government program that might possibly help someone get back on their feet, and these folks want to show that a lot of “real” Americans believe we should have some sort of social contract, that we don’t want a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself country.
College isn’t and shouldn’t be for everyone, but the economy as a whole isn’t helped if my husband (who worked his way through school and chose a very practical program at a state school where he qualified for grants) ends up working as a janitor. That just takes a job from someone who doesn’t have the education to do the kind of work my husband does. You see that in a lot of third world countries. People with college degrees end up working as bank tellers and the like, and the high school graduates who should be working as bank tellers can only work as laborers, so there is no incentive to finish school. Dropping out at sixth grade makes the most economic sense in these places. I’ve lived in countries like that, and I would rather the U.S. not become one of them.
Chingona,
I do a lot of work in that area. There are lots of short sale specialists and foreclosure prevention specialists who are, at heart, basically frauds. So you have to be pretty careful who you talk to.
I generally recommend using a lawyer. It’s not just that we’re more often experts (we are) but also that we tend to come with malpractice policies. An attorney’s bar admission date and presence of insurance are usually publicly available.
Not all attorneys are competent. Some of them are also arguably frauds, by which I include the “I’m really a criminal lawyer but I’ll take on a consumer case because i need quick cash” folks. I recommend looking at the NACBA website (national assn of consumer bankruptcy attorneys) and the NACA website (national assn of consumer attorneys.) Then talk to a couple of attorneys. You may be able to protect your primary residence and use a bankruptcy to avoid your second. Obviously there are some bad apples in every group, but those tend to have an extremely high percentage of people who actually know what they’re doing.
It’s been interesting in my city which has an official unemployment rate of 15% and is the epicenter of the housing bust with the second round of foreclosures to start in January. At least 16 million properties could be foreclosed on tomorrow. Not to mention that most cities in California engaged in the corrupt RDA ponzi schemes. A group of us in my city is auditing every fund and expenditure in my city and it’s very ugly. Most ever other city’s like this so it’s no wonder so many people have no jobs and are losing their homes. We are having an Occupy protest here, filled with all kinds of people and of course the conservatives are labeling them and badmouthing them not knowing how precariously they are especially while living in California’s newest “rust belt”. But most of them will know and people will try not to enjoy that too much.
The only irony in this country is that you can sleep on public streets and parks to protest but if you sleep in those places because you got no where else to go, you get arrested or forced out quickly. At least in Southern California. Just discussing that irony with some homeless in my city yesterday. But anyway I did go on Oct. 15 and marched with a couple undercover cops trying so hard to act the 99% which they are actually. We discussed human trafficking (huge in my region)and all the programs that they were putting together to help them build other lives away from prostitution. And the challenges of doing that in this type of economy. I also told them that about the city owned buildings including two fire stations that were put up as collateral on loans to give a developer a free hotel. Since the city’s probably going broke in the next 12-18 months based on its financials….well we’ll have to do without them and the two libraries put up as well. I’m glad they picked the downtown to “occupy” because that’s been a center of a lot of what people are protesting yet the small businesses are being shafted left and right. At least the protesters are shopping at them and the restaurants bringing some money downtown.
The Seventies were bad in part because of the parallels they had with today and the housing foreclosures (as also happened in the first Great Depression) but I believe back then weren’t there more manufacturing jobs? Back then the USA actually manufactured products for sale and trade? We hadn’t farmed the bulk of our manufacturing jobs out to other countries for cheap and in many cases slave labor to prevent profits of tens of billions from dropping to merely billions. Companies were rewarded for doing this or did so after getting tax breaks and bonuses. So was anyone really shocked when “bailout” money was spent on private jets and spa holidays?
Anyway listened to Cantor’s about face change last night where he talked about lifting everyone up and persuading wealthy corporations to focus more on providing jobs. Quite amusing because he’d be sending mixed messages to them. Okay, it was cool for you to take our tax breaks and bonuses to ship more jobs over seas but now you want them to “lift everyone up together.” Okay…what works but you should know, Mr. Cantor that quite a few Republicans are camped out on Main street in one of your core strongholds in Southern California.
What passes for health care accessibility in this nation is just obscene and it’s embarrassing. Blue Shield finally got shut down for increasing its premiums 30% several times a year by the state insurance commission and is now moaning about how the costs they’re paying out have dropped. Well duh dudes, it’s because no one can afford you and your f-n plot to get everyone on your stupid $5500 deductible plan by driving premiums on individual PPOs (favored by a lot of freelancers) into the four digits.
Thanks, g&w. The shortsale person we talked to was recommended by our realtor, and the shortsale person herself recommended we talk to a lawyer before we make any decisions, so I think she’s pretty up-and-up. She also hasn’t hounded us while we’ve just sat on our hands, mulling and mulling, which I appreciate. But I can see the advantage of using a lawyer. I’m not really sure if bankruptcy is appropriate for us because we don’t have significant debt outside the mortgages. But I guess that’s why I would talk to a lawyer, to understand all the options and all their implications. Thanks for the recommendations. Like I said, this is all pretty recent, and we’re hoping it will be a temporary situation, but it’s good to know the lay of the land.
I don’t know whether to post this here on the open thread (perhaps both..?) but there’s an interesting wsj article on a small poll of protestors.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576637082965745362.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The only irony in this country is that you can sleep on public streets and parks to protest but if you sleep in those places because you got no where else to go, you get arrested or forced out quickly.
It’s the opposite in SF. Homeless folks are pretty routinely allowed to sleep all kinds of places downtown, but the Occupy SF protesters keep getting rousted out by police (always in the middle of the night when the media has gone home) and told they can’t have sleeping bags in the public square.
Also, there’s evidence that at least some of the “we are the 53%” photos are astroturf. Example:
http://i.imgur.com/yarZ7.jpg
While I’m sharing links, I enjoyed Lemony Snicket’s Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance at http://occupywriters.com/
As an update to my comment at 67, here’s an article about the difference between the SF and Oakland responses to the Occupy camps.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/18/BAMU1LJ2JA.DTL
Elusis, in reading the article you linked I came to this paragraph, and it’s echoed something I’ve read about this “Occupy ” activity:
Here’s the relevant part of the First Amendment, which Ms. Boyd might well review (but which SF Mayor Lee seems to have a solid grip on):
Tell me how enforcing laws against camping out on a public park interferes with First Amendment rights. You have a right to do those things outlined in the First Amendment. You have no right to require a government to provide you with a place to do it indefinitely, or to comandeer that space and keep other people (who also paid for it) from using it for their own purposes. Certainly the fact that a public park was in fact paid for by tax money means that it’s reasonable to expect a government to permit you to use it for a space of time for this kind of thing. But “permit” is the key word here. Limiting the place, time and duration of use of public property for such a purpose is not a violation of your Constitutional rights, as established in numerous court decisions. Yet when people have been forced to leave these encampments they’ve claimed it’s a violation of their First Amendment rights. It’s not.
At least when the Tea Party folks ran rallies they got permits, did their thing and then left (and no one had to pay Streets and San $100,000’s of overtime afterwards, they cleaned up after themselves). This, I think, is part of the perception that the OWS folks are directionless. There’s no defined endpoint to what they’re doing, no concept of how what they’re doing is going to accomplish their ends. Whereas the Tea Party movement folks went back home, got involved in the primaries and put up scores of candidates for office, a great many of whom are now sitting in the House of Representatives.
The Tea Party folks understood something; too many existing politicians are too deeply integrated into the existing power procedures to extricate themselves now. They didn’t try to convince them to change their minds and votes; they sought to replace them. The OWS people seem (to me, anyway) like they’re trying to get existing politicians, either directly or by influencing their constituents, to change their spots. It’s not going to happen.
I’ve been reading a variety of the fora fir the NYC protest. (You can do so yourself at http://www.nycga.net)
Every time that i think that I’m leaning towards support of the 99%ers, I see something else that suggests that the group has an extremely radical distributive perspective.
For example, here is the unanimous consensus of the third working group regarding demands (direct link at http://www.nycga.net/groups/demands-group/forum/topic/consensus-of-third-demands-working-group-meeting-sunday-october-16-700pm-recorded-by-cecily-m/)
Is the organization “the 99%?” Maybe, in terms of how it affects finances. But what percentage of the country would demand that the government provide 25 million people with union-pay-scale jobs, without regard for their immigration status and criminal history? Hell, if you can beat 10% on that i’d be damn surprised. And while you might find somewhat more people to support free college (with smaller class sizes, of course!) and free health care… well, i suspect there are a few people who might possibly question how all of that is going to happen.
Seriously? i especially like the last sentence. then again, at least it’s more reasonable than this guy:
Suuuuure. Because prosecution of Bernanke for treason is practical, specific, and (of course!) moral.
I don’t know how knowledgeable RonF is about 1st Amendment law, but I’m loathe to challenge his knowledge of anything pertaining to camping.
Speaking about camping, I predict that the “Occupy ” groups are going to get decidedly thinner (if they don’t outright evaporate) in any city north of the Mason-Dixon line in about 8 weeks. I’ve spent quite a few nights camping in below freezing weather and some few in below zero weather and if you’re not a) equipped and b) prepared it’s not just uncomfortable it’s downright dangerous. For the non-US contingent I’m talking deg. Farenhight (agk! spelling ….). Here in the Chicago area I’ve spent nights in my tent where the temp. has hit -20 deg. C.
I think a public works program would be a hell of an idea, actually. If people were willing to work for market price instead of union wage we could get a lot of work done. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in CCC-built buildings and locations. We could get a lot of roads and bridges and sewage/storm drainage systems fixed and a lot of people would learn useful trades to boot. And those wages would percolate down through the economy.
There’s a state park called Starved Rock near Ottawa, Illinois that I like to go to. It’s right on the Illinois River. The main lodge is built out of logs and planks from trees cut on site by a few CCC groups. It’s just astonishing to look at, especially from the inside. The main ceiling has got to be 40 feet up at least and it’s all held up by supports and trusses made from trimmed logs, with a floor made of flagstones from locally quarried limestone. Just amazing. There’s usually a wedding going on every weekend from spring to fall.
And now we need a new furnace. FML.
If people aren’t willing to work for “market price,” then it isn’t really market price is it? You may as well say, “If the companies contracted by the big evile gubmint were willing to pay market price for labor instead of sub-standard wages we could get a lot of work done.”
RonF: “It’s easy to spend other people’s money” is true only when you’re not also spending your own money – which is precisely what Buffett et al are proposing. You know, leading by example. Other than a knee-jerk adoration of anything opposed to taxes on anyone, I’m baffled at your need to pretend that millionaires saying “tax me, and anyone else in my income bracket” is exactly the same as “hey, let’s tax somebody other than me”.
Jake @77: But unions are bad! QED.
Mythago @78: Ron gives a great example of the real position that he and other Free Marketeers hope is hidden when they tout the Free Market as the best thing, evah! They believe that market price is set solely by the capitalist class and that labor should be grateful for whatever the capitalists are willing to pay them. If they believed otherwise, they wouldn’t say things like Ron did in his comment.
If people aren’t willing to work for “market price,” then it isn’t really market price is it?
People are willing to work for that wage. They aren’t allowed to. Most government public works projects (which RonF was referencing) are generally required to pay “prevailing wage” by Davis/Bacon. Prevailing wage, theoretically, is the wage paid to the ordinary person doing that job in that locale, but in reality is generally significantly higher than market wage for the same work in the same locale. Getting (well, trying to get) waivers to that requirement was a political talking point during the “shovel-ready” talk phase of the bailouts, you may recall.
If market price was set “solely by the capitalist class” then why isn’t the market price for consumer goods “all your money”, or the market price for labor “one penny per century, and not a shiny penny either”? Because, of course, what makes a wage or price the MARKET price, or more accurately the market-clearing price, is the fact that there is someone willing to take the other side of the transaction. In a reasonably free labor market (which we have), it is not possible for one side or the other to set the wage without having government force; wages must be mutually agreed to, or the transaction will not take place.
Robert, certainly agribusiness is arguing that they can’t get people to work for a wage they’re allowed to accept – “Americans won’t pick strawberries for $X an hour” – and they are forced to rely on people who are not actually allowed, legally to do that work for any wage.
Yes, mythago, other groups not under discussion in a completely different sector of the economy, make an argument that is facially similar to Jake’s misunderstanding of RonF’s argument. And this is relevant in that…?
It’s a “market price” at which people are allowed to work, but not willing to work. Yet we don’t see ADM raising farmworker wages to a level at which people are in fact willing to perform the needed work (I’d pick strawberries for $1000 a day, wouldn’t you?).
I think you guys are talking past each other a little, frankly. Obviously we in the US don’t live in a pure capitalist economy untouched by the grubby hands of Big Gubmint, but it strikes me as a little odd to say that if an employer is offering $X wage and people won’t want the job at that wage, that $X is still the “market price”.
Mythago’s last is much to the point.
Farm work is hard work, but so is construction, so were factory jobs, so is collecting garbage….the list goes on and on. Legal American workers will do such jobs if they pay well enough. (Farm jobs are somewhat problematic because they tend to be seasonal, but after all, teaching is seasonal too, and we’ve made that work. Something could be arranged I’m sure if someone really wanted to.)
The formal definition of “fair market value” is, “the price at which goods (or, in this case, labor) changes hands between parties dealing at arms’ length, neither of them under any compulsion to buy or to sell, and both in reasonable possession of all the facts.” So yes, saying that a job is offered at $X but no one will take it, but nevertheless that is the “market price,” is nonsensical.
The standard objection to paying true market price for farm labor is that this would increase the price of food, and indeed it would. However, those of us who spend a lot of time in, say, Europe, can testify that food is quite cheap in the United States overall, and we could absorb some higher prices. Some kind of support, something like food stamps, might be necessary for those at the bottom of the economic scale, but the mass availability of jobs in farming which pay a living wage would work in the other direction.
One of the things we do rather well in this country is grow food; in fact, we are one of if not THE world’s major food exporter. There should be a way to turn this fact into higher employment at decent wages. This of course gets us into the whole illegal immigrant problem, to which neither I nor, apparently, anyone else, has the answer. This latter problem, however, is complicated by food producers who pay so little that only desperate people from third world countries are willing to take these jobs.
You are being intentionally or unintentionally obfuscatory and misleading.
In the realm of construction and infrastructure-type jobs, the “market wage”, a wage at which both employers and employees can reach agreement and execute transactions, is considerably lower than the “prevailing wage”. Federal infrastructure projects generally must use the prevailing wage.
RonF was noting that he was in favor of public infrastructure, PARTICULARLY if that labor could be done at market rates instead of at inflated rates. He has the accurate set of facts concerning what happens in infrastructure projects.
Robert @85: No, I think you have the obfuscatory end of things pretty well marked as your turf around here. I understand the difference between market and prevailing wage; I’m just not seeing it as a magic solution that puts a bandaid on public infrastructure. (“Yes, it’s Big Government — but we’re screwing the unions, so it doesn’t count!”)
It wasn’t proposed as a magic solution. It was mentioned, and the mentioner derided for his inadequate understanding. But the mentioner was right.
Robert:
Here’s what Ron wrote:
Maybe Ron just misworded, but what he actually wrote about is a market wage that people aren’t willing to work at, and that doesn’t make sense. By definition, a market wage is one that people are willing to work at.
Robert, what you’re defending is not the same as what Ron said. (Although it’s plausible that what you’re defending is what Ron intended to say, but no one but Ron can clarify that.) So I think you’re being unfair to say that people are misinterpreting Ron’s argument, when you seem to be, well, repairing rather than representing what he wrote.
Mythago, if you can avoid comments like “No, I think you have the obfuscatory end of things pretty well marked as your turf around here,” that would make me a happier blog-moderator.
In fact Robert has it correct. Davis-Bacon requires that all public infrastructure projects that are at least partially federally funded – which means just about all of them these days – must pay union wages, even though union workers are in a minority. The fiction is that union wages are called “prevailing wage” even though union members are a minority in the workforce. This means fewer people are employed and less necessary public infrastructure gets done. If the work could be done at market rates instead of artificially inflated rates we’d get more work done and have more people employed, rather than limiting the work and reserving it for an elite and politically connected group of workers.
I’d love to see something along the lines of the CCC revived. Young men (these days I should think young women would also be included) were set to work around the country on public infrastructure projects. They were housed in camps in barracks they built themselves and did a lot of work, learning skills that they were able to apply to careers afterwards.
Cut off ADM’s access to illegal aliens to perform the work and require them to hire people who are in the U.S. legally and you’d see wages rise. There is a class of visas that permits the hiring of foreign seasonal agricultural workers legally, but why do that when you can hire people who are here illegally and are thus easier to exploit? Enforce the existing laws and wages will rise (and working conditions improve).
I’m ashamed to admit that although I hold a graduate degree in American History I do not know right off the top of my head (and I am apparently too lazy to research on this fine Sunday afternoon) what the wage levels in the CCC and the WPA were compared to the then-“market” rate, but I’m suspecting that the young people involved were desperate enough that any wage was better than no wage, and that the wages were pretty low.
Nevertheless both programs were widely lauded and hugely popular. These wages, low as they were, enabled these kids to send some money home, money which was sorely needed. And, as RonF points out, the young people learned some skills into the bargain. Anyone who has spent any time in our national parks has seen trails and roads and other infrastructure built by these kids during these times which is still in use.
Frankly, I hoped that something of this sort would be forthcoming during the current crisis, but alas, all the money apparently went to bankers. Who are now, from what I read, sitting on it and refusing to lend it out.
If it were possible (is it?) to enforce our current immigration laws, of course again RonF is correct: a shortage of labor drives up the price, and to induce people born in this country to do farm labor ADM and its friends would have to pay more. Americans are perfectly willing and able to do hard physical labor, but they want to be paid adequately for it. Nothing wrong with that. The price of food would go up, but the price of food here is so low that there’s plenty of room for a price increase.
This might hurt our food exports? I think not. Frankly, where else can our food customers go? American wheat, especially, feeds the world (we are by far the largest wheat exporter on the planet), and the world is now living from harvest to harvest like any poor subsistence farmer. There are no reserves to speak of; in fact we cannot or at least do not adequately feed the world’s population. (This leads into deep water in quite another direction.)
Back to the original point. People right now are willing, by definition, to work for the “market price,” the market being a complex entity in which unions are not irrelevant, as RonF seems to be suggesting. If public entities could get away with paying less than that, as the CCC may have done, they could indeed hire more people. (Simple arithmetic.) Someone more diligent than I will have to look up how the CCC actually worked, what the unions of the time had to say about it, and why this program was so popular. Perhaps we’re simply not desperate enough.
Yet.
Ron:
Do you acknowledge that the argument Robert is making is not the argument you originally made?
I don’t think anything in Davis-Bacon requires employing union workers. (It’s not like non-union workers refuse to work if you offer them higher wages. They’re non-union, not stupid.)
You’re also misstating what Davis-Bacon is in some technical ways. Nothing about Davis-Bacon says “union wages” — but because union workers are much more reliable when it comes to reporting wages in the way Davis-Bacon measures, the effect is a measure of wages that oversamples union workers.
In general, the desire of Conservatives to lower wages is part of their whole “austerity” kick, and extends the current economic crisis. Rather than accepting that the choice is more lousy-paying jobs (usually done by less skilled and productive workers) versus jobs with decent pay, we should borrow more money while borrowing is incredibly cheap (and while the economy needs stimulus), and we should pay decent wages. (Also, because higher-paid workers are more productive, the difference lower wages would make to number of jobs may be less than conservatives claim.)
However, if Conservatives put a genuine compromise on the table — genuinely major infrastructure spending in exchange for using market instead of prevailing wages — I might favor that, and I suspect that many Democrats in Congress would favor that as well.
* * *
Regarding raising the wages of farm laborers, I think it’s a good idea to the extent that the market will bear. But beyond that limit, you won’t be creating high-paying jobs in the US; you’ll be exporting low-paying jobs to other countries, leading to fewer jobs within the US.
This isn’t quite true. As it now stands, as a species, we are pretty much farming all the land on earth which is reasonably arable (and a lot of land which is pretty marginal). There really is no untapped land to “export” agricultural jobs to.
The big wheat farming areas, to wit, much of southern Canada, most of the middle of the US, and parts of Russia, are already being heavily farmed. The world-wide price of food is already going to go up, whether we pay farm laborers more or not, because there are more and more people but there is not more and more land to be exploited (and in fact we are degrading the fertility of the land we do have).
All this raises questions which are more than a little off topic, for which I apologize.
Amp, they’re responding to my recent post@ 72, in which one of the quoted goals was
“We demand a massive public works and public service program with direct government employment at a prevailing (union) wage ”
Their comments make more sense if you understand that context.
You also said:
“Rather than accepting that the choice is more lousy-paying jobs (usually done by less skilled and productive workers) versus jobs with decent pay,”
And I don’t think that’s an accurate dichotomy. Some union jobs are “decent” pay, and the non-union ones are objectively underpaid for what the job is worth. Other non-union jobs give reasonable pay, while the union versions may even be objectively overpaid. And of course there are plenty of non-union jobs for which conditions are fine.
“However, those of us who spend a lot of time in, say, Europe, can testify that food is quite cheap in the United States overall, and we could absorb some higher prices. Some kind of support, something like food stamps, might be necessary for those at the bottom of the economic scale, but the mass availability of jobs in farming which pay a living wage would work in the other direction.”
Ignoring the fact that “public works jobs” are a completely different thing, you’re completely wrong about farm jobs. Even if you were to replace every single illegal immigrant with a $20 per hour job and send the food prices skyrocketing, that wouldn’t be offset by “the mass availability of jobs in farming which pay a living wage” working in the other direction. You aren’t properly thinking of the scale. The time when agri-jobs were that large a portion of the economy is gone and in fact never existed in your lifetime. You’re buying into a myth or a very big misunderstanding about scale.
And I say this not as an anti-OWS person. I’m pretty much with them in both general aim and tone. But we can’t be delusional about things if we are going to turn it into something more than a general expression of dissatisfaction. We simply cannot be deluding ourselves with fantasies about the importance of the agricultural sector to the jobs economy.
““Rather than accepting that the choice is more lousy-paying jobs (usually done by less skilled and productive workers) versus jobs with decent pay,””
This is the left-wing lionization, the flip side of right-wing union demonization. There is nothing magical about generic unions with respect to skilled and productive workers. General Motors are not magically more skilled and productive workers than Toyota workers. In fact the evidence very much suggests that the Toyota workers are at the least every bit as skilled and productive. An enormous portion of the difference which exists between less skilled non-union workers and skilled union workers is selective discrimination (in the non-racial sense). Like any good company (when they are functioning well), they select the good workers and exclude the bad ones. Like any bad company (when they are not functioning well), they end up keeping bad workers for various other reasons (nepotism, non-work schmoozing, and all sorts of other things). Like any good company (when they are functioning well) they train employees and help them become really good at their jobs. Like any bad company (when they are not functioning well) they keep people out of inertia or begin to put non-productive things ahead of productive things (see for example the NYC police union’s recent crap on wanting to protect the authoritarian discretion of fix-it tickets, on duty rape and in-police-car heroin smuggling).
Being in a union doesn’t magically make you skilled at your job. Being outside a union doesn’t make you unskilled. The correlation between union and skill is not tight at all.
As someone who’s been working in manufacturing for nearly 10 years. I’d say that if there is correlation between skill and union membership, I have not seen in. But there is a definite, and inverse correlation between discipline and union membership. I have seen union workers drink and smoke on the job, be late coming back from breaks, waste resources, etc… a lot more than non-union ones.
There is another big difference between the two kinds of shops, and it’s one which can be seen as positive by many, although from my point of view, and the point of the employer, it’s a damn negative one. Union workers take a lot less shit, but they also leave at the wail of the siren no matter what is going on, they will stand by as a pipe breaks and coolant start spraying around, they will not lend a help with something as trivial as as screwdriver rolling away from a guy who needs a good minute to get out of the CNC machine he’s working in. When I am fixing something in a non-union plant, I usually need one person to assist me. Obscure regulations have required FOUR union workers to sit and wait until they are needed to perform a specific array of tasks. That one happened only once, but it was ridiculous. No skin off my nose, but it could not have been good for the bottom line of their company.
By the way, I am speaking only from personal experience, and mine is in a very, very narrow area – casting, plating, or machining plants with a lot of CNCs and sub-par maintenance departments. But among these shops, the last four years have seen the failure of a good third of my customers. Of the six non-union shops, only one has closed completely (another has stopped casting, but is still machining and plating for others) Neither of these is one where the owners work in the building. The shops that allow unions are doing much more poorly. At least four moved all production to China, and laid off everyone. A few closed. The rest call me a lot less often, as they inflated their maintenance departments with people freed as production shrank. When they do call me, it’s usually for a costly disaster.
In any case, anyone who thinks that union workers are more skilled, even on average, is wrong. I would say that the very best workers are non-union, that unions are very good for the average worker, and that the worst workers love unions, but should be kept out of them.
But then, I work very hard at being a capitalist pig, now a days.
(How do you know how long my lifetime has been?? I could be 120 for all you know!)
The US government Board of Labor Statistics tells us that there are about 820,000 agricultural jobs in this country. This is probably a serious under-estimation, since very many undocumented workers do this work, and these people would not be reported to the government. Let us call it, for a rough estimate, 1,200,000 workers.
While not overwhelming, this is not a trivial number. No one would be happier than the current administration if they could report adding 1,200,000 well-paying jobs to our lists in a month. Or in a year.
You’re contradicting yourself. If there are so few laborers per ton of food, paying them decently should not “send food prices skyrocketing.” According to your own position, that should be a relatively trivial expense if there are so few of them, so no problem, right?
I go to the market in the Netherlands not infrequently (I do try to make myself useful), and I see what food costs there for my daughter’s family. I observe how much meat they eat. They are well-paid professionals. I also go to the market in California, and I see what food costs here. We’re well-paid professionals too.
The cheapness of food here makes me uneasy, because I know that one reason for it is that the workers are paid shamefully little.
We could do better.
“If there are so few laborers per ton of food, paying them decently should not “send food prices skyrocketing.” According to your own position, that should be a relatively trivial expense if there are so few of them, so no problem, right?”
No, you’re aren’t right. The marginal effect of doubling the labor input would not be offset by the improved position of the very few workers in question. Look at it this way, at the very best it would be an extremely regressive tax on food being applied to no more than a million workers.
“The US government Board of Labor Statistics tells us that there are about 820,000 agricultural jobs in this country. This is probably a serious under-estimation, since very many undocumented workers do this work, and these people would not be reported to the government. Let us call it, for a rough estimate, 1,200,000 workers.”
Even if I grant you that, surely you don’t contend that all of the 820,000 already existing workers get paid poorly? Lots of them make quite a bit of money being farmers. So…..
“No one would be happier than the current administration if they could report adding 1,200,000 well-paying jobs to our lists in a month. Or in a year.”
But they couldn’t. Most of them already exist. And of those that exist many of them are already well-paying. And of the ones we bring in, they wouldn’t be year-round jobs. And there are 300 million people in the US. Focusing on the agricultural sector is just a losing focus.
Huh?
If it takes the labor of .1 farmworkers to produce a ton of food, and the worker is being paid $5 an hour, paying him or her $15 an hour will only raise the price of that ton by $10. If the ton of food is worth $1000 on the market, that’s a 1% raise in the price, or from $1000 to $1010. Hard for me to see this as “extreme” in any market.
Your position seems to be that paying agricultural laborers so little that the only people who will take these jobs are third world illegals who have nothing. This would be OK why?
G&W, thanks for clarifying the context.
Sebastian:
To believe this, you’d have to believe either that a) Unions do not successfully improve pay or working conditions, or b) more skilled workers do not gravitate towards better pay or working conditions. I don’t think either of those ideas are plausible.
On the other hand, the idea that 1) Sebastian’s personal experience doesn’t represent an objective, representative sample, is pretty plausible. :-)
I was just browsing through the economics literature on this question, and the truth is, there’s a big controversy. Some studies find that unions increase productivity; some find that they reduce productivity; and (predictably enough) some find that they have little measurable effect.
A lot of the differences seem to be industry-specific and probably path-dependent; so it might be true that in industry X, unions increase productivity (by creating higher wages which attract better workers, and by reducing turnover), while in industry Y, unions decrease productivity (by increasing nepotism, or by institutionalizing inefficient workplace practices).
I have no doubt that in some industries — the US auto industry is the obvious example — unions have decreased productivity. But there are also cases where unions increase productivity.
The question is partly, which category does government contracting fall into? (And then there are measurement issues: if a union electrician is slower but also does more meticulous work, is that more or less productive?)