“On August 18, for the
first time since 1999, the three stock market indices set record highs on the
same day. If your retirement account is growing, elect Hillary to continue
Obama’s legacy”
“For many people, America has never been better”, says
Hillary Clinton. Society has never been more racially integrated. The Old Boy’s
Club is losing power. More women than ever are in traditionally-male
professions and occupations. Inner cities have never been cleaner or more
prosperous. For those left out, it’s because you turned your back on higher
education. It’s not Darwinism! Cheering on big business is a winner with the
New Yorker-reading set (last check, the cover price is $8.99. Hardly radical).
For fair-weather liberals seeking social approval with click-bait, big
companies’ public relation moves on social issues is true progress. The
nefarious element of overseas sweatshops and domestic stagnant wages, a
centuries-old mainstay of big business, has fallen off the public
consciousness. In any case, they’re making progress on social issues, so it’s okay.
And what happened to the “Shop Local” campaign? Well, there are a few bigoted
photographers and bakers out there who claim first-amendment protection for
their bigotry. Better not risk supporting one.
“On August 18, for the
first time since 1999, the three stock market indices set record highs on the
same day. If your retirement account is growing, elect Hillary to continue
Obama’s legacy”.
What difference does it make? My country is being humiliated overseas, and my income is
declining. “Make America great again”. Restoring working-class prosperity is
Donald Trump’s announced intention; Bernie Sanders hinted at this as well when
he called for in-sourcing jobs from overseas. Trump’s America is a dark world
of shortening life expectancy and increasing suicides. The working-class man,
driven out to exurban and rural ghettos, is ashamed that he cannot provide for
his family without community assistance. Bernie’s America is college educated
and well-versed in the language of multiculturalism. They live at home, or
receive parental subsistence for rent. There may be a faded Obama poster in the
bedroom. They’re in dead-end jobs not related to their college major or career
of choice. They’re living the nightmare of soul-crushing jobs the Port Huron
Accords predicted half a century ago. They wonder when they can move on into the
post-collegiate life they’ve seen on TV; the lifestyle their teachers promised.
Big business seems to be a force for social justice; and
drive profits as scientifically-driven organizations with streamlined
procedures and efficient logistics. But I don’t like the idea of treating
people like numbers on a spreadsheet. I’m uncomfortable with companies that
protect the bottom-line by using their staff as an on-call labor force with
unpredictable schedules. I’m suspect of the intelligence of companies disposing
their most senior employees, who happen to be the greatest repositories of
knowledge, because they’re paid “too much”. They’ve scorched too much earth. In
the last recession, forward-thinking employees who were laid off decided to go
it alone- or work it out together. After the parent company of the Washington
Blade paper collapsed, one employee reported in a news article, along the lines
that “we were only unemployed a few hours that day, from the time we got the
news until we realized that we’d continue the paper ourselves”. Others adapted to the new economy by
embracing the You Economy.
Nearing retirement, one of my professors said that the
Future of Work, the You Economy, is a big deal. He sent us an article by email
and asked us about it in class. The
topic passed over our heads as we were headed into a domestic maritime industry
of strong unions, protected trade, and significant regulatory barriers to entry
for both labor and owners. Many would also get good union-sponsored pensions
and health benefits strong enough that Richard Trumka, leader of the AFL-CIO,
came out against the “Cadillac” Health Plan tax. “Sail Union, get married,
retire at 50” appeared more than once in USMMA yearbooks- a middle-class dream
right there.
But what if the You Economy could resurrect the middle
class? Entrepreneurs are building from the scrap heap of big business; use
their techniques, such as outsourcing tasks to contractors, on a smaller scale
to create new products and services. Just-in-time production allows innovators
to order prototypes, using their own modest bank accounts as seed money without
calling on angel investors. With hipster intrigue into the Maker movement, more
leaders than ever are discovering the capabilities of American craftsmanship
and manufacturing; knowledge and technical talent working tirelessly in nondescript
companies with names like Ball Bearing and Rubber Products. The
multigenerational creative class would likely not know that people other than
gardeners and elevator mechanics still work with their hands. A few colleges,
though, are known for their interface with industry. Stanford University, for
example, is the brain of Silicon Valley. It caters to the tech industry, which
is hip; and is nearby San Francisco, which is totally hip. I knew someone who
won a Gates Scholarship and chose to attend Stanford instead of Harvard. But
isn’t Harvard better ranked? Lehigh and Harvey Mudd, longtime interfaces of
industrial-collegiate collaboration, aren’t located in the hippest cities;
steel and oil are so old-school. Ideas
are created on paper- hence, creative class, and rendered into products by
machinists, technicians, and operators utilizing workshops and factories in as
much as the tech sector has coders. The same talent that creates the products
can engineer their processes based on a living wage for workers. “For many
people, America has never been better” for the creative class, those who’ve
mastered the You Economy. “Make America great again” for the working class is
an achievable goal.
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