![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorI have to admit, I was a bit shocked when a simple observation of mine, that the GOP has a plank in its platform stating its aim to "explore a greater role for private enterprise in appropriate aspects of the mail-processing system", blew up into such a kerfuffle. The GOP, after all, has long been the party supported by anti-union forces in general and business leaders with private operations that compete with the USPS. Sometimes both.
I guess I was surprised by the anti-union rhetoric spewed in that post simply because I have long held a different mindset as to what drives union membership, one that seems to me as totally non-controversial, as natural as laws driving cloud formation. My mindset has blinded me to mindsets that lack this simple understanding about human nature, that instead rely upon a complex political and pseudo-economic rational for explaining the very phenomenon of unions. I'll address the latter later, but first I'd like to share my theory of demographics and the inflection points they cause.
Fighting for worker rights is nothing new. I won't bore you with yet another history of the labor movement here, though. I will ask a provocative question instead, focusing very narrowly on our recent history since World War II: Why did union membership in the US peak just after the war, and why is it declining to this day?
As the Wiki notes, this is a complex problem to unravel, filled with a dizzying array of factors such as ongoing mechanization (which reduces the need for human labor), to public opinion, to media portrayals that shape public opinion. No one element can be isolated completely. Still, let's start from a very simple place, and stipulate that the wage for any given job will depend largely on two dynamics: 1) The need for that job (ie. how much the employer can profit from the worker doing it); and 2) How many qualified applicants are available to do the job.
The first dynamic is really pretty simple. Someone needing a fence built will not pay hundreds of dollars per hour to have it built, simply because simple fences rarely generate thousands of dollars in benefit to the land owner. Someone operating a complex bit of machinery, though, will probably command more simply because many machines can crank out thousands of dollars worth of salable merchandise an hour. Think of a sheet metal stamp at an auto factory pressing several car body parts a minute.
The second dynamic depends largely on the population, and has shifted since WWII. Soldiers returned from combat, their numbers reduced from the pre-war workforce. That would explain both the drastic spike in union membership between 1935 and 1945, and the dip after 1945; workers fighting a war overseas are not available to build war materiel, and once they started to return after 1945 their numbers diluted the applicant pool just as the need for war materiel dropped precipitously. That spike after 1950 can be explained by the export market gearing up to refurnish Europe and Asia, places where the manufacturing infrastructure had been destroyed in the war. The steady decline since 1955 might also be explained by increased workplace mechanization, especially on farms; better tractors, introduced every year since the beginning of the century, displaced more and more horses and the laborers needed to tend to them, then replaced more and more aging smaller tractors. A single farmer could do more with this farm machinery arms race in play, work more and more land in less and less time. As the subsequent percentage of Americans living and working on farms decreased, the population needing work elsewhere increased, leading to a slow and steady dilution of applicants for every available job.
Which brings us to 1970. By then, the factories overseas were supplying more of the local manufacturing needs and starting to send surplus materiel in the other direction to the US. (An example: My neighbor, and architectural and design doctorate, took me on a very revealing informal lecture through, of all things, a second-hand store. In the cutlery section, he picked up knives, forks and spoons and noted just by looking at the items' style and stamps where and when they were built. Before 1970, most quality silverware sold in the US came from US and European makers. From 1970 on, Japanese flatware entered the market, not quite as high in quality but selling at a much lower price point. Around 1980 this shifted to Korea, and then to China in the mid-1990s. With each influx, he found yet another fork, spoon or knife, noting its distinctive patterning and stamp. A very illuminating treasure scrounge, that was.)
At the same time, workers were doing far more than just looking for jobs. They were also having babies like never before.
As you can see, the Baby Boom started in 1946, peaked in 1957, and declined sharply in 1964. (I used to be confused as to why the peak in 1957 happened, until![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rick_day noted the date of the Bikini Atoll H-bomb blast. That must have sent a doomy shock wave through the zeitgeist like, well, a nuclear bomb.) Here we find our first two inflection points; the start of the boom and its peak. Starting in about 1967, each successive generation would be necessarily larger than the preceding. This mass of teens first made its mark on popular music in 1960. Why 1960? In his autobiography, Frank Zappa once wrote a commencement address to a music school, telling the poor graduated saps that their professional lives will be spent appeasing the musical tastes of the most influential record-buying demographic, thirteen year old girls; in 1960 the first wave of boomers reached that age. By 1970, this thirteen-year demographic gap would have reached its peak. Don't believe me? Listen to the radio. The songs on heaviest rotation mostly date from within 10 years of the 1969 Summer of Love.
From the silly influences of popular music we move to the more serious impacts the young have on employment and labor's bargaining power. Count twenty years from birth as a quickie averaging of when the young enter the workforce. The first wave would have hit the job market in 1967; by 1970, their numbers would have been substantial. This alone, even without the increased market pressures from Japan and Europe, can help explain the dramatic decline in union membership from 1965 to 1970.
This first inflection point continued to reshape the country for ten years. By 1980, the dilution of the labor market had grown so severe that, along with a backlash against this new generation's more "radical" opinions started in the late '60s, those with the ability to do so started to really screw with folks through the rise of neo-conservatism. The year Ronald Reagan entered national politics in earnest marked a dramatic shift away from socially-minded philosophies and toward a more competitive, personal pursuit for wealth, one made possible largely due to this boom diluting the bargaining power of individuals.
Complexmeme incidentally hit on a few numbers that caught my attention. First, we seem to be living not just in an era with increasing income disparity, but one where that income and the power inherent in it concentrates on the older: "The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981." (Emphasis mine. It will continue.) And it gets worse.
Let's remember that these "older, tenured professors" of course were born before 1963, probably even before 1957. Hey, they would have to retire to let the younger teach, wouldn't they? Continuing:
So as our educations have decreased in efficacy, the employers who take us on after graduation have been robbing us of even paid labor. Why pay anything? The trick, I guess, is for grads to go for those professions that traditionally pay better. Right?
And just as pay decreased, we the job hopefuls hitting the working markets after 1980 or so were expected to do more than the previous year's employees. This is confirmed by Kash over at The Angry Bear. Kash notes:
"Classical economic theory." What a crock of shit. According to Steve Keen in his book Debunking Economics, that marginal productivity theory was flawed in its premises, to its very core. It is empirically invalid. It is worthless. The only factor that decides wages is the market of participants; where there are more workers, those workers will get less. They will compete against each other to drive down the compensation all will eventually scramble to grab.
Does that mean that all employers will do to their workers what their competition does? Not necessarily. Ah, but if the entire economic profession turns more conservative, it will creep into the zeitgeist that screwing your workers in order to enrich yourself is not so very bad. This was noted in a Planet Money podcast years ago in episode #129: "Adam Smith and the Not So Invisible Hand?", on the day economist Paul Samuelson died. They found some audio of Mr. Samuelson relevant here. A self-described "incurable centrist," he is asked in an interview, "Do you feel there was simply an ideological shift towards free-market fundamentalism . . . that got us inevitably onto this track?" He answers immediately, "Since 1980, yes." He goes on to note that even the economics profession took a free-market turn that year, a turn that led to our current economic catastrophe. One cannot, after all, prevent serious market manipulations that lead to serious economic crashes brought on by said manipulations if one principally believes that government oversight constitutes a weakening or corruption of the market itself.
Which brings us to the present, wondering about the future. Here's a simple observation: That Baby Boom generation is aging, and not just in the US. There are likely to be some serious repercussions from this wave of retirees exiting the workforce. Heck, as I noted earlier, this wave (combined with unprecedented mobility) has had interesting consequences. Actually, maybe this is the perfect post to elaborate on observations the author of that book made, observations not really relevant to the earlier post. I copied this disturbing section:
Yep. This man actually made the claim that younger generations should be thankful that seniors today, despite isolating themselves from the rest of society to the point where they refuse to pay taxes to fund schooling, are willing to give up their body parts to research . . . after, of course, they no longer have a use for them. And the reaction younger generations might have to their oh-so-nice elders?
Perhaps a better graphic will illustrate what's happening.
Actually, it's far more illustrative to demonstrate the same information spiced with a bit of animation.
NB: This Population Graph is of Canada,
a country with a similar distribution to the US.
I've tried to focus this post on the peak in both graphs and how the added numbers has shaped the society around them. It's time now to focus on the coming trough of numbers that follows the peak. This will prove the next inflection point. Once the labor market shrinks due to retirement and attrition, our society will be at the same point where it found itself after WWII, minus the booming export market, of course, but burdened with a record number of seniors. A sustained and substantial reduction in available applicants for labor will give strength—the literal strength numbers brings—to future labor activists. To bring this logic to the USPS discussion previously, consider this. Don't like the wage or working conditions FedEx offers? Fine. Don't apply. When enough people don't apply, FedEx might have to consider changing its employment strategy in ways that attracts applicants.
Rest assured, folks: This is something the GOP understands very, very well. This strategy of undermining organized labor by any means necessary is merely a pre-emptive strike at future conditions that will strongly favor future labor representatives and applicants. Let's further extrapolate this situation beyond mere worker rights and such. Money itself is a claim on future labor. With this in mind, do you have enough saved for supporting yourself through a lengthy retirement? Probably not, given that labor will inevitably cost more in the future, never mind the "official" rate of inflation.
Hey, head up to that graph at the percentage of people in countries over sixty, and then look at how the Japanese have been building robots lately. After all, someone will need to take care of the elderly there, and maybe here as well.
An "aversion to immigration;" say, would that be similar to retirement communities in Arizona where someone raised the specter of "being comfortable" by "living in, say, an all-white community?" Yes, robots could very well help that situation . . . provided the cloistered retiree could afford the unit. Or its batteries. Or its maintenance. Or. . . .
However one looks at the data, it's difficult to discount completely the positive effect a shrinking applicant base will have on future efforts to collectively organize labor. For my part, I've started to reduce debt and build household self-sufficiency simply so I can, if need be, say no to mandatory overtime. It's hard to do that with regular bills, isn't it?
The more others follow the lead of getting out of the gadget arms race, the fashion acquisition trend, the drive to get better and better cars to drive, the more power future workers will have to determine, for example, the length of their future work day. Call it a mobilization of the unmotivated.
Thanks to demographics, for the first time in many, many decades, their efforts at laziness will finally pay off.
X-Posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
talk_politics.
I guess I was surprised by the anti-union rhetoric spewed in that post simply because I have long held a different mindset as to what drives union membership, one that seems to me as totally non-controversial, as natural as laws driving cloud formation. My mindset has blinded me to mindsets that lack this simple understanding about human nature, that instead rely upon a complex political and pseudo-economic rational for explaining the very phenomenon of unions. I'll address the latter later, but first I'd like to share my theory of demographics and the inflection points they cause.
Fighting for worker rights is nothing new. I won't bore you with yet another history of the labor movement here, though. I will ask a provocative question instead, focusing very narrowly on our recent history since World War II: Why did union membership in the US peak just after the war, and why is it declining to this day?
As the Wiki notes, this is a complex problem to unravel, filled with a dizzying array of factors such as ongoing mechanization (which reduces the need for human labor), to public opinion, to media portrayals that shape public opinion. No one element can be isolated completely. Still, let's start from a very simple place, and stipulate that the wage for any given job will depend largely on two dynamics: 1) The need for that job (ie. how much the employer can profit from the worker doing it); and 2) How many qualified applicants are available to do the job.
The first dynamic is really pretty simple. Someone needing a fence built will not pay hundreds of dollars per hour to have it built, simply because simple fences rarely generate thousands of dollars in benefit to the land owner. Someone operating a complex bit of machinery, though, will probably command more simply because many machines can crank out thousands of dollars worth of salable merchandise an hour. Think of a sheet metal stamp at an auto factory pressing several car body parts a minute.
The second dynamic depends largely on the population, and has shifted since WWII. Soldiers returned from combat, their numbers reduced from the pre-war workforce. That would explain both the drastic spike in union membership between 1935 and 1945, and the dip after 1945; workers fighting a war overseas are not available to build war materiel, and once they started to return after 1945 their numbers diluted the applicant pool just as the need for war materiel dropped precipitously. That spike after 1950 can be explained by the export market gearing up to refurnish Europe and Asia, places where the manufacturing infrastructure had been destroyed in the war. The steady decline since 1955 might also be explained by increased workplace mechanization, especially on farms; better tractors, introduced every year since the beginning of the century, displaced more and more horses and the laborers needed to tend to them, then replaced more and more aging smaller tractors. A single farmer could do more with this farm machinery arms race in play, work more and more land in less and less time. As the subsequent percentage of Americans living and working on farms decreased, the population needing work elsewhere increased, leading to a slow and steady dilution of applicants for every available job.
Which brings us to 1970. By then, the factories overseas were supplying more of the local manufacturing needs and starting to send surplus materiel in the other direction to the US. (An example: My neighbor, and architectural and design doctorate, took me on a very revealing informal lecture through, of all things, a second-hand store. In the cutlery section, he picked up knives, forks and spoons and noted just by looking at the items' style and stamps where and when they were built. Before 1970, most quality silverware sold in the US came from US and European makers. From 1970 on, Japanese flatware entered the market, not quite as high in quality but selling at a much lower price point. Around 1980 this shifted to Korea, and then to China in the mid-1990s. With each influx, he found yet another fork, spoon or knife, noting its distinctive patterning and stamp. A very illuminating treasure scrounge, that was.)
At the same time, workers were doing far more than just looking for jobs. They were also having babies like never before.
As you can see, the Baby Boom started in 1946, peaked in 1957, and declined sharply in 1964. (I used to be confused as to why the peak in 1957 happened, until
rick_day noted the date of the Bikini Atoll H-bomb blast. That must have sent a doomy shock wave through the zeitgeist like, well, a nuclear bomb.) Here we find our first two inflection points; the start of the boom and its peak. Starting in about 1967, each successive generation would be necessarily larger than the preceding. This mass of teens first made its mark on popular music in 1960. Why 1960? In his autobiography, Frank Zappa once wrote a commencement address to a music school, telling the poor graduated saps that their professional lives will be spent appeasing the musical tastes of the most influential record-buying demographic, thirteen year old girls; in 1960 the first wave of boomers reached that age. By 1970, this thirteen-year demographic gap would have reached its peak. Don't believe me? Listen to the radio. The songs on heaviest rotation mostly date from within 10 years of the 1969 Summer of Love.From the silly influences of popular music we move to the more serious impacts the young have on employment and labor's bargaining power. Count twenty years from birth as a quickie averaging of when the young enter the workforce. The first wave would have hit the job market in 1967; by 1970, their numbers would have been substantial. This alone, even without the increased market pressures from Japan and Europe, can help explain the dramatic decline in union membership from 1965 to 1970.
This first inflection point continued to reshape the country for ten years. By 1980, the dilution of the labor market had grown so severe that, along with a backlash against this new generation's more "radical" opinions started in the late '60s, those with the ability to do so started to really screw with folks through the rise of neo-conservatism. The year Ronald Reagan entered national politics in earnest marked a dramatic shift away from socially-minded philosophies and toward a more competitive, personal pursuit for wealth, one made possible largely due to this boom diluting the bargaining power of individuals.
Complexmeme incidentally hit on a few numbers that caught my attention. First, we seem to be living not just in an era with increasing income disparity, but one where that income and the power inherent in it concentrates on the older: "The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981." (Emphasis mine. It will continue.) And it gets worse.
From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing" after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That's no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts.
Let's remember that these "older, tenured professors" of course were born before 1963, probably even before 1957. Hey, they would have to retire to let the younger teach, wouldn't they? Continuing:
Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.
So as our educations have decreased in efficacy, the employers who take us on after graduation have been robbing us of even paid labor. Why pay anything? The trick, I guess, is for grads to go for those professions that traditionally pay better. Right?
But maybe you're an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master's or a professional degree. . . . The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily.
And just as pay decreased, we the job hopefuls hitting the working markets after 1980 or so were expected to do more than the previous year's employees. This is confirmed by Kash over at The Angry Bear. Kash notes:
Two things strike me particularly about this graph. The first is how closely the two series track each other between 1950 and 1980. During those 30 years labor productivity in the nonfarm business sector of the US economy rose by 92%; real hourly compensation paid to workers rose by a nearly identical 87%. Classical economic theory says that is exactly what we would expect – as workers become more valuable to firms by producing more output with every hour of labor, firms should compete with each other to employ them, driving up wages by an equal amount.
The second striking feature of this picture is, of course, how much the two series have diverged since the early 1980s. Output per hour of work in 2010 was 87% higher than in 1980, while real hourly compensation was only 38% higher.
"Classical economic theory." What a crock of shit. According to Steve Keen in his book Debunking Economics, that marginal productivity theory was flawed in its premises, to its very core. It is empirically invalid. It is worthless. The only factor that decides wages is the market of participants; where there are more workers, those workers will get less. They will compete against each other to drive down the compensation all will eventually scramble to grab.
Does that mean that all employers will do to their workers what their competition does? Not necessarily. Ah, but if the entire economic profession turns more conservative, it will creep into the zeitgeist that screwing your workers in order to enrich yourself is not so very bad. This was noted in a Planet Money podcast years ago in episode #129: "Adam Smith and the Not So Invisible Hand?", on the day economist Paul Samuelson died. They found some audio of Mr. Samuelson relevant here. A self-described "incurable centrist," he is asked in an interview, "Do you feel there was simply an ideological shift towards free-market fundamentalism . . . that got us inevitably onto this track?" He answers immediately, "Since 1980, yes." He goes on to note that even the economics profession took a free-market turn that year, a turn that led to our current economic catastrophe. One cannot, after all, prevent serious market manipulations that lead to serious economic crashes brought on by said manipulations if one principally believes that government oversight constitutes a weakening or corruption of the market itself.
Which brings us to the present, wondering about the future. Here's a simple observation: That Baby Boom generation is aging, and not just in the US. There are likely to be some serious repercussions from this wave of retirees exiting the workforce. Heck, as I noted earlier, this wave (combined with unprecedented mobility) has had interesting consequences. Actually, maybe this is the perfect post to elaborate on observations the author of that book made, observations not really relevant to the earlier post. I copied this disturbing section:[The author asks Doug Kelsey, president of the Sun City Home Owners Association near Phoenix, Arizona] "Why live without kids?". . . .
"Why not?" Kelsey responds. "kids can be rude and noisy. What's so wrong with being in your sixties, having raised your kids, worked hard, and now wanting to live without children? It's a lifestyle choice. So what if we live in a bubble?. . ."
. . . . "Look, I understand diversity. But I don't want it shoved down my throat. Why can't someone be allowed to be comfortable when being comfortable to them means living in, say, an all-white community?. . .
"You know, people say we're selfish. Well, let me tell you something. Down the street there's a medical research facility. They have one of the largest brain tissue banks in the world. One day they'll discover a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Where do you think they get all that brain tissue? Sun City residents donated it. That's right—we volunteer our bodies and our brains. If you die, they can have your brain out within two hours. Ask those people what they think of us."
(Andrew D. Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008, pp. 136-137.)
Yep. This man actually made the claim that younger generations should be thankful that seniors today, despite isolating themselves from the rest of society to the point where they refuse to pay taxes to fund schooling, are willing to give up their body parts to research . . . after, of course, they no longer have a use for them. And the reaction younger generations might have to their oh-so-nice elders?
It remains to be seen how generous this excluded generation will be after a lifetime of peering through the gates at sybaritic seniors. How eager will the new generation be to throw its elders a financial life preserver after being treated as a nuisance and thought of as little more than an expensive "invoice" burdening local taxes? Will it pull the plug on Social Security, pensions, Medicare, and Medicaid when funding for these programs requires too much sacrifice? Who wants to foot the bill for millions of hedonistic young seniors living in gated geritopias? And with an estimated 72 million Americans over sixty-five by 2030, younger Americans will be asked to pay for a whopper of a tab. The Boomers lived large and subsequent generations inherited nearly ten trillion dollars in national debt as well as entitlement programs on the verge of bankruptcy.
Social Security calls itself a compact between generations; but can you maintain such a compact without continued contact?
(Ibid, pp. 225-226.)
Perhaps a better graphic will illustrate what's happening.
Actually, it's far more illustrative to demonstrate the same information spiced with a bit of animation.
NB: This Population Graph is of Canada,
a country with a similar distribution to the US.
I've tried to focus this post on the peak in both graphs and how the added numbers has shaped the society around them. It's time now to focus on the coming trough of numbers that follows the peak. This will prove the next inflection point. Once the labor market shrinks due to retirement and attrition, our society will be at the same point where it found itself after WWII, minus the booming export market, of course, but burdened with a record number of seniors. A sustained and substantial reduction in available applicants for labor will give strength—the literal strength numbers brings—to future labor activists. To bring this logic to the USPS discussion previously, consider this. Don't like the wage or working conditions FedEx offers? Fine. Don't apply. When enough people don't apply, FedEx might have to consider changing its employment strategy in ways that attracts applicants.
Rest assured, folks: This is something the GOP understands very, very well. This strategy of undermining organized labor by any means necessary is merely a pre-emptive strike at future conditions that will strongly favor future labor representatives and applicants. Let's further extrapolate this situation beyond mere worker rights and such. Money itself is a claim on future labor. With this in mind, do you have enough saved for supporting yourself through a lengthy retirement? Probably not, given that labor will inevitably cost more in the future, never mind the "official" rate of inflation.
Hey, head up to that graph at the percentage of people in countries over sixty, and then look at how the Japanese have been building robots lately. After all, someone will need to take care of the elderly there, and maybe here as well.
Skeptics equate the robot cure with high-tech quackery, arguing the country should instead face difficult social issues that include Japan's aversion to immigration. "The government would do much better spending its money to recruit, educate and nurture immigrants," Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, a Tokyo research group, told the Post.
An "aversion to immigration;" say, would that be similar to retirement communities in Arizona where someone raised the specter of "being comfortable" by "living in, say, an all-white community?" Yes, robots could very well help that situation . . . provided the cloistered retiree could afford the unit. Or its batteries. Or its maintenance. Or. . . .
However one looks at the data, it's difficult to discount completely the positive effect a shrinking applicant base will have on future efforts to collectively organize labor. For my part, I've started to reduce debt and build household self-sufficiency simply so I can, if need be, say no to mandatory overtime. It's hard to do that with regular bills, isn't it?
The more others follow the lead of getting out of the gadget arms race, the fashion acquisition trend, the drive to get better and better cars to drive, the more power future workers will have to determine, for example, the length of their future work day. Call it a mobilization of the unmotivated.
Thanks to demographics, for the first time in many, many decades, their efforts at laziness will finally pay off.
X-Posted to
talk_politics.