The employment shift from manufacturing jobs to services jobs has been underway since the 1970s. In many areas services employment has replaced American manufacturing, the sector with the largest number of “good jobs” during the Golden Age. Rather than working on an assembly-line, services work ranges from retail and fast-food to finance, insurance, and real estate to computer oriented work. Some of these service jobs produce good jobs. But, the range of jobs in this still-growing sector has a kind of built-in inequality, because wages are, of course, quite different between fast food and finance.
The retail and restaurant services jobs that have replaced manufacturing as the key site of working-class employment are not good jobs. And raising wages to $15 per hour will increase pay but the other attributes of good jobs are not included in the overall wage package. Good pay, stability, promotional opportunities, and protection for the most part do not characterize service-sector jobs.
Good jobs don’t exist in the so-called “sharing economy” or “gig economy.” An endless stream of commentary has praised the sharing economy as a revolutionary harbinger of a new era of convenience and efficiency. These innovative services do have world-shattering implications, but not in the way most commentators think. The way these firms use labor preclude from the outset some of the features of a good job.
If an Uber driver, for example, must be classified as an independent contractor, the kind of life-with-one-firm stability that characterized postwar good jobs cannot exist. The same is true for opportunities for advancement within the firm, given that the company technically doesn’t consider its drivers to be employees. Also, good pay, perhaps the most important feature of a good job, could be hard to come by in the case of Uber, for example, which puts on the driver the costs of car-ownership, gas, and insurance – in a sense shifting traditional business risk from owner to worker.
Stability and protection against arbitrary dismissal might be most at risk in the “gig economy.” As Neil Irwin recently reported in the New York Times, contractors and temporary workers accounted for all the growth in employment in the last decade because there actually was a small net decline in the number of workers with conventional jobs over the same period. Temporary workers implicitly are not protected by the kind of social contract between workers and employers that protected Golden Age jobs which often served to avoid layoffs during business slumps.
In short, our political and economic lives are much different than those in the 1950s and 1960s when many enjoyed a rising standard of living. From behind the cash register at a fast food restaurant to behind the wheel of a ride-sharing car, the world of work is much different today than in the postwar Golden Age when good jobs built the American middle class.
The retail and restaurant services jobs that have replaced manufacturing as the key site of working-class employment are not good jobs. And raising wages to $15 per hour will increase pay but the other attributes of good jobs are not included in the overall wage package. Good pay, stability, promotional opportunities, and protection for the most part do not characterize service-sector jobs.
Good jobs don’t exist in the so-called “sharing economy” or “gig economy.” An endless stream of commentary has praised the sharing economy as a revolutionary harbinger of a new era of convenience and efficiency. These innovative services do have world-shattering implications, but not in the way most commentators think. The way these firms use labor preclude from the outset some of the features of a good job.
If an Uber driver, for example, must be classified as an independent contractor, the kind of life-with-one-firm stability that characterized postwar good jobs cannot exist. The same is true for opportunities for advancement within the firm, given that the company technically doesn’t consider its drivers to be employees. Also, good pay, perhaps the most important feature of a good job, could be hard to come by in the case of Uber, for example, which puts on the driver the costs of car-ownership, gas, and insurance – in a sense shifting traditional business risk from owner to worker.
Stability and protection against arbitrary dismissal might be most at risk in the “gig economy.” As Neil Irwin recently reported in the New York Times, contractors and temporary workers accounted for all the growth in employment in the last decade because there actually was a small net decline in the number of workers with conventional jobs over the same period. Temporary workers implicitly are not protected by the kind of social contract between workers and employers that protected Golden Age jobs which often served to avoid layoffs during business slumps.
In short, our political and economic lives are much different than those in the 1950s and 1960s when many enjoyed a rising standard of living. From behind the cash register at a fast food restaurant to behind the wheel of a ride-sharing car, the world of work is much different today than in the postwar Golden Age when good jobs built the American middle class.
