Basic Human Dignity Continued

If labor is indeed to be redemptive, both materially and ethically, it must be available, and therein lies the first rub.   There is, of course, the persistent belief that America is the land of opportunity.   I won't unpack it fully, but the basic outline is this:  the American economy may not produce equal results, but it does offer up equal opportunity to all who apply themselves, those who are able and willing to work hard in pursuit of happiness or as the contestants of American idol, one after another, put it, "in pursuit of my dream."  Anyone who spends over five minutes thinking about it realizes that the American economy produces neither equal results, nor does it offer up equal opportunity, if by opportunity we mean something less grandiose than rock stardom and more conducive to day-to-day life -- the availability of "jobs with decent wages and good benefits."  Even though employment of late has shown some signs of recovery after the great recession of 2008, there remain significant causes of concern.  The Economic Policy Institute headlined a recent report that "The US labor market starts 2012 with solid positive signs, but fewer jobs than it had in 2001."   The most discouraging sign is job growth relative to population.  As the Institute reports, "the labor force has grown by less than half a million workers since the recession started, though working age population has grown by 10 million in that time."  If the number of jobs available does not keep pace with the population, and it shows few signs of doing so, then a significant percentage of our population does not now, and may never have opportunity for legal employment of any sort, much less "jobs with decent wages and benefits."

I should point out that a significant percentage of our population has not had access to work for some time now, and the disappearance of opportunity disproportionately afflicts those who have been historically at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, particularly the African American community.  In this regard William Julius Wilson's study, When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor, is instructive.  He describes what is, in effect, a vicious cycle of despair, noting "where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs, and where there is a disruptive or degraded school life purporting to prepare youngsters for eventual participation in the workforce, many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy."  When pundits like Krugman express alarm that "long-term unemployment -- the percentage of workers who have been out of work for six months or more -- remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression," there is a clear and present danger that more and more neighborhoods will be sucked into the vortex, described by Wilson, that more and more Americans will "no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives," and that such "circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income, thereby further weakening their attachment to the legitimate labor market."  It is perhaps a mark of our clandestine racism that writers like Murry, in Coming Apart, when the blight associated with inner-city, black ghettos seems to be spreading into white neighborhoods and the increasingly meth-infested small town America.  When the blight is confined to the inner-city ghetto, it is easier to focus current policy discussions of the welfare state on "the shortcomings of individuals and families and not on the structural and social changes in the society at large that have made life so miserable for many inner-city ghetto residents,"  changes in society that have produced "certain unique responses and behavior patterns over time" of the sort reflected in hardcore hip hop.   When the blight is no longer the problem of third world America and is bleeding into the larger population, the conservatives it seems are doubling down on the "shortcomings of individuals," with Rick Santorum talking about "the narcotic of dependency" and Mitt Romney suggesting that government programs "foster passivity and sloth."  This may well be true, but the path to redemption is narrower of late, and there is little to suggest that dismantling the various safety net programs will do much to foster engagement and industry without improving opportunity.

To be Continued