Jobs For Everyone!, by Paul Shirley

Published: September 7, 2011Posted in: Paul Shirley
Jobs For Everyone!, by Paul Shirley

A few days ago, while in the midst of my 137th existential crisis related to the weird transition period I’m in, something dawned on me:

Holy shit. I have an engineering degree!

It seems like I ought to be able to do something with this engineering degree. The problem is that I don’t want to be an engineer, per se; I don’t want to work for Caterpillar and develop ways to make better front-loaders so the CEO of Caterpillar can drive an extra-souped-up Range Rover. (I know, I know, my potato-famined Irish ancestors are gritting their long-decayed teeth. “Oh, he doesn’t want to be an engineer. Get out the violin, Siobhan.”)

Tossing aside my entitled annoyance at the prospect of a soul-sucking job at Caterpillar, I’m not completely opposed to working as an engineer, if that work was toward a project I believed in. In fact, if someone told me that I could work part-time on a project that benefited the proverbial “common good,” and that I could get paid a little for that work, I would be thrilled to participate

Okay, maybe I wouldn’t be thrilled; thrilled implies exclamation points and old Toyota commercials.

So “intrigued,” then, by the idea of walking into some antiseptic concrete building and saying, “Hey, I have this engineering degree and I’d like to help out.”

I would be whisked off to an anteroom, where my options were explained. I could choose how much or how little I wanted to work, and I would be offered an hourly wage based on my skills and how rare or common they were.

Seems pretty reasonable, right?

If only we had a centralized organization capable of coordinating massive projects related to infrastructure and/or public service…

Oh shit, we do. It’s called the United States government. And, contrary to popular opinion, we could use this thing called the “government” for good.

Let’s say I went to work for the government’s High Speed Rail Initiative (which I just made up). I would know that others would benefit from my efforts (the people who would ride on the trains), but because the government is a non-profit organization, I would know that they were the only beneficiaries.

In other words, I’m amenable to a contract between the final consumer and me, in which that consumer receives a good or service and I am paid a wage. I am not as amenable to a contract among a final consumer, me, and a bunch of parasitic shareholders and/or bosses who feed off the efforts put in by my colleagues and me. (Not to get all WTO Protestor on you.)

The free marketeer would say that if people need high speed rail, some company will build high speed rail. I don’t dispute that Mr. Marketeer is correct, in theory. If people need televisions and toasters and long-handled spatulas for the Weber grills on their redwood decks, some company will build and sell those products.

I won’t even dispute the idea that you might be able to privatize things like education, correction, and public transportation.

But, in the meantime, while we figure out the feasibility of public works built by the private sector, why not take advantage of the goodwill and spare cranial capacity of people like me?

The reason we don’t is that powerful people have convinced us that working toward the common good is a reprehensible pastime. Thanks in part to Republicans who are very good at selling materialism to people who don’t actually want to be materialists, we’ve been convinced that the common good is anything but. We’ve learned that the only thing worth pursuing is our collective craving for Jet-Skis.

Other powerful people – Liberals, I’m looking at you – expect people to volunteer their time. And that means no money. And no money means no Jet-Skis.

I think most of us fall in the middle. Let’s call us the Reasonables: people who would like to help, but who also know we can’t afford to help for free.

Okay, that’s fine, you’re saying. But where to come up with the money?

In a recent column for Slate, Eliot Spitzer wrote, correctly, that if we shaved $100 billion off what we’re spending on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we could create 5 million jobs that paid $20,000 each. (Jobs that weren’t devoted to, you know, killing people.)

Imagine that. Imagine what 5 million people could do. Sure, $20,000 isn’t a lot of money. But imagine that some of that money is going to highly-skilled people who are working part-time and that some of that money is going to less-skilled people who are working full-time.

A sliding-scale jobs program, then, that takes advantage not only of America’s strong backs, but also of its strong minds: people getting paid a reasonable wage, based on their abilities, to work for the improvement of their country. (And probably, in the process, stimulating the economy by spending their wages on Big Gulps, toaster ovens and, yes, Jet Skis.)

For example: while flailing through this transition in my life, I’d work two eight-hour days each week on building the high-speed railroad we should already have. I’d need $25 an hour to make it worth my while – a bargain, really; if I had gone to work as an engineer straight out of college, I’d probably be making the equivalent of sixty or seventy dollars an hour by now.

I’d be willing to work for less because of the freedom to work part-time and because I would know that I was working on something I cared about. If I worked 50 weeks out of the year, well, there’s your $20,000. Maybe not enough to live on comfortably, but enough to supplement whatever income I get for writing articles on whatever harebrained idea pops into my head.

Other people might have to work forty hours a week for their $20,000. Some of them might even get stuck picking up trash in parks, or paving roads, or installing the railroad that I helped design.

(If this inequality sounds condescending, answer this question: would you dig ditches for $20,000 a year? Probably not. But there are people who would. This – despite our potential desire for it not to be – is The Way It Is.)

And that’s just $100 billion. (Just $100 billion!) Imagine if we closed a few tax loopholes, or if we listened to Warren Buffett and taxed the rich like they should be taxed, or if we spent another $100 billion less on defense (which, in the end, is a massive, yet inefficient jobs program) or if, instead of unemployment benefits, we paid people to work on the railroads, bridges, highways and windmills we were building.

For $200 billion, we could employ 10 million at $20,000 a year. Sure, some of those people would be worthless, worthless workers – that’s how people are. But most of them would be conscientious souls interested in doing a good job for a reasonable wage – that’s also how people are.

And this, I suppose, is really the point. Contrary to what many in our government have convinced us to believe, most human beings want to help out, at least a little.

I have two brothers of working age. One is an infectious disease doctor. The other has a Master’s in Spanish education. (Send me an email if you have tuberculosis and/or a problem conjugating bailar.) I would be willing to bet that, if you told either of my brothers that he could go to work part-time for a faceless corporation, he’d wrinkle his brow and tell you to piss off.

But, if you told him that he could use any free or extra time he had to work toward the betterment of society, I’d bet he’d at least consider it. (Imagine the first brother spending six hours a week working on, say, a better flu vaccine, and the second brother working two days a week in teaching Hispanic kids English.)

I have to think that my brothers and I are not alone. Half of my friends have degrees they aren’t using. Eighty percent of those have extra time. One hundred percent of them could use a little money.

I think most people are like this. I think most people, if given the chance and with a little time to spare, would like to work toward the common good, especially if they were getting paid to do so according to their abilities.

Most people have skills or talents that could be utilized for the sake of good. Most people are hard workers who understand that the only way to improve society is to pitch in and help out.

But most people need someone or something willing to accept that help and apply it to something productive.

I’m looking at you, government.

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