Living like an air fern

On May 28, having returned from a vacation, I wrote a little about "place" and included an excerpt from a letter I wrote 11 years ago about an economy that was coming more and more to demand rootlessness on the part of workers.

We dare not attach ourselves to a place, a people, a community, or even a particular sort of work because we may have to abandon it on short notice for the sake of our own and our families' survival....

(I'm not going to repost the whole thing here; if you want to read it, this is the link.)

The Village Voice for June 15 offers a less dramatic but still sobering look at that same question.

Choosing a career path is a high-stakes gamble on where the jobs are likely to be two or four years down the road. Guess wrong and you could end up at a dead-end retail or fast-food job, slowly climbing out of a deep, dank hole of debt. Guess right, and you'll enter a job market that offers less security than ever.

The issue here is not the number of jobs, which is expected to grow enough to keep pace with population growth, but the kinds of jobs and their stability. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 10-year projections for job growth,

[o]f the top 10 occupations with the rosiest projections, seven are by and large poorly paid McJobs: retail, customer service, food preparation, cashiers, janitors, waiters and waitresses, and nursing aides. And the BLS admits its numbers don't distinguish between full-time jobs with benefits and part-time or temp work. In other words, there will be plenty of jobs, but far fewer careers.

The article quotes Jessica LaPlante, of Green Bay, Wisconsin as wondering "Is there any job or any career you can rely on?" She expresses what the Voice calls a "bleak" longer-term view, noting you can get the education, get the degree, "and still have trouble finding a job."

Tell it to the kids not fortunate enough to get a degree. Aside from construction gigs, the government predicts non-service-sector jobs will continue to stagnate. That means more manufacturing workers will have to take lower-paid McJobs with few if any benefits, and often no union protection. Their best hope is training or retraining for more specialized jobs in areas like radiography.

Stability is not for you. Being able to rely on a job, a career, is not for you. You have to be ready, always ready, for the next change, the next shift, the next jump. Don't complain, it's the free market, the best of all possible worlds, unions are evil, and victory is to those who can accommodate themselves to the needs of capital. Just consider

29-year-old Jeff Olson, of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. ... He's clearly ambitious and bright, but he's also highly flexible, with no family to support. He's a labor economist's model 21st-century worker: smart, retrainable, mobile.

In other words, rootless. Nothing to tie him or his heart to a place or a people. Perfect for the new economy.

Funny how the right keeps shedding tears about how we don't have the "stable communities of the old days" when it's the economic policies they champion that are helping to undermine them.