The Meaning of a Good Job

[Teamster Jeff]

http://www.employmentpolicy.org/topic/blog/meaning-good-job?utm_content=bufferf4a8c&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

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In our dual economy, we have high-paying and high-skilled jobs at the top and low-paying and low-skilled jobs at the bottom. For some reason, manufacturing has been perceived to be high skilled because it has been high paying. Relative to low-paying service jobs this may be true, but it misses historical reality. What made manufacturing high paying was the presence of unions, who were able to organize workers for the purpose of affording them dignity in their work. In the early days of the American labor movement, wage labor was looked down upon, and it did not take much by way of skills to work in a factory on an assembly line. The idea of unions was to give workers who were forced to work for wages dignity in their work. One way to achieve this dignity would be to be paid liveable wages through collective bargaining. Manufacturing, in other words, was the low-wage work of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Over time, and through collective bargaining, unions were able to afford factory workers dignity in their work and effectively create a viable middle class.

When employers decide to close plants in the U.S. and reopen them where they can pay their workers a fraction of what they were paying their American unionized workers, they are acknowledging that there was nothing in manufacturing per se that required a skilled workforce. On the contrary, it was institutions, most notably unions. Therefore, the answer for reinvigorating the middle class would appear to lie in organizing low-wage service workers; not in bringing back manufacturing. This isn’t to say that we should not bring back manufacturing, rather it is by no means magic bullet needed for solving our economic problems. If low-wage service workers could achieve liveable wages through collective bargaining, they too would have dignity in their work, and for no other reason than they would feel better about the work they are doing. Their jobs, then, would also be perceived as “good” jobs.
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