Running to Stand Still: The American Jobs Crisis

I was watching the Bill Maher show on HBO this weekend, and he posed a question that’s been on my mind for a long time now: What if there are not enough jobs for the amount of people we have in the world?

Every bastard politician running for office in this country is touting an alleged “plan” to get everyone back to work, but not a one of them—not even Ron Paul, that I know of—is talking about the jobs that are gone forever. And I’m not talking about manufacturing jobs as they are popularly understood (cars, munitions, etc.).

I’m talking specifically about jobs that have been erased from existence by the Communications Revolution.

There are entire industries being rendered obsolete. Anything that can be gotten over the web, is being gotten over the web.

I’m not just talking about my beloved newspaper industry. Writers and photographers may still be able to transition their skills into the new employment paradigm, but when are all the pressmen and production people laid off by shuttering newspapers going to find another print house at which to work?

How about never?

What about the travel agencies that don’t exist anymore? Are those jobs coming back? No.

What about CD store employees? Department store, one-hour photo and book store employees. Map, phone, Encyclopedia, dictionary and cook book printers and the lumber and delivery industries they used to support. Paper boys. Typewriter manufacturers and repair shops. Greeting card makers. The United States Postal Service. Porn cameramen and lighting guys—the actors should be able to transition smoothly to the world’s oldest profession, not yet in jeopardy of obsolescence from the technological revolution.

I could spend all day on the Internet, looking up other ways the Internet is radically reconfiguring the American jobscape, eliminating whole fields of employment.

Still our elected leaders—and lots of ‘Job Creators,’ too—continue to ignore the ugly reality we’re facing. Nobody wants to say it out loud. Nobody wants to be the Big Name who bursts America’s balloon by pointing out that the emperor is nekked; that the unemployment numbers aren’t going to improve until we start looking forward instead of backward.

Nobody holding the reins of power wants to acknowledge that whole industries—and all their lovely jobs and support industries—are going the way of horse-and-buggy makers and the milkman. Because to do that would be scary as hell, and even the GOP doesn’t want to scare America that badly, without some actual device in mind to relieve that fear, once in office.

And there currently is no device on the table.

Instead of focusing on the ‘job creators of the past’—I keep hearing Henry Ford cited, a fine example of an innovator for his time—we need to accept the new communications paradigm and prepare for it, not continue to rework outmoded business models from the last century.

In the 21^st-century paradigm, as it is unfolding, it won’t be muscle and guts and assembly-line stooges that employers are looking for, it’ll be brainiacs. If we want to rock the 21^st century the way we did the 20^th, we’re going to have to do it by being smarter than the rest of the world, not just having the biggest dick.

And we are absolutely not preparing for that.

Our kids’ readin’, writin’ and arithmatickin’ scores compare extremely unfavorably to our global competitors. Why are American jobs being outsourced to India, and our general crap manufactured in China? It’s not just the fact that most modern Asian cultures have an indomitable work ethic that’s ingrained from day one and produce workers who are renowned for being slavishly devoted to their jobs.

It’s not even just because they’ll work cheaper, too—although that is definitely part of the equation—but because the workforce in Asia has been training for the 21^st century for a while now and hit the ground running, while we’ve been admiring ourselves in the mirror, swapping tall tales with each other about how bad-ass we were when we whipped the Soviets in the Cold War back when we were kids.

Obama’s taking the same backward-looking approach to the jobs crisis, trying to recreate FDR’s WPA model, again from the previous century; build (or shore-up existing) bridges, highways and dams. Infrastructure! Which is fine for this election cycle, but all those jobs are necessarily short-term in nature. Once the bridge is built, Joe Constructionworker goes back to queuing up at the unemployment office.

We’re not fixing the problem at all, at best we’re proposing changing its bandages. We need brand new fields of endeavor, not a patchwork of one-time quick fixes. America doesn’t need new jobs anywhere near as badly as we need whole new, forward-thinking, technology-based industries.

To paraphrase a wiser man than me, give a man a job and you’ll feed him for today; give him a career and you’ll feed him for life.

All the WPA-type jobs in the world are not going to create new careers or new industries. They won’t produce the smarter, more tech-savvy workforce that will be necessary to advance this country’s interests in the 21^st century.

What America needs is a modern-day Henry Ford, someone who will help us acclimate to and succeed in the ever-changing new world order. Some gutsy, high-profile politician or Captain of Industry who will step up and start an honest conversation about the vast number of jobs that are not coming back, not ever.

And ideally, also have a revolutionary innovation in his or her pocket that will help us to begin to address the crisis-in-progress the paradigm shift has created.

But the first step has got to be to acknowledge the severity, and define the true parameters of the problem.

Otherwise, we’ll keep right on denying the scope of the problem as it exists, and running in place until we dig a hole for ourselves so deep we’ll never get out.