Notes: Oct 6 conversation - What counts as valuable work?

The first Penny U conversation, October 2014

A group of about 20 people gathered in Town Hall’s downstairs cafe on Monday, October 6, for the kick-off for Penny U. We took up the general theme, “What counts as valuable work? How can we do more work that matters and less work that doesn’t?”

QUESTIONS

The ideas of three recent Town Hall speakers provided fodder for the conversations – Andy Stern, Robert Reich, and Naomi Klein. Questions were posed to Penny U participants that began with excerpts from their talks.

“The nature of work is changing radically. No job is safe.”

Andy Stern, former President of SEIU, January 2014

We need to do something fundamentally different… How do we get there? We need to separate jobs, work, and income. Early in the last century there were debates about whether a woman who stays home to care for a child is working or not. We need to answer that question again. Certain things are valuable in society. Are we going to allow people to gain income – maybe not a ‘job,’ but income – for doing things that we think are valuable to society, like caring for our children or reducing our carbon footprint?

Stern made a distinction between work that generates income – a “job” – and work that is valuable to society but does not gain income. He made a case for providing income for that work and had a few ideas for how it might be done.

PENNY U asked:

•   Where in your own life do you find that distinction?

•   Outside a paying job, what work do you do that is valuable in society?

“What can we do to counteract discouragement and act on our own collective behalf? 

Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, September 2014

Buried in the statement – “People are paid what they’re worth” – is a moral claim that is hidden, but it is heard by people all over the country: if you are not paid very much, you are not worth very much; if you are paid huge amounts, you must be worth huge amounts in terms of society…  In fact, though, if you’re holding down three jobs, it’s not your fault. You have nothing to be ashamed of. If you are losing ground, it’s not because you’re blameworthy. There is something called an economic system. It’s organized in a certain way. Right now it’s not organized in a way that rewards most people for the work they do.

Reich argues that Americans mythologize the relationship between wages and the moral value of work, and that the increasing strain of inequality in the country creates a moral crisis for people struggling to get by.

PENNY U asked:

•   How do you see the relationship between the value of work and the wages paid for it?

•   How has this manifested in your own life? When you’re looking for jobs, when you hire?

•   How could or should the economy be organized differently in terms of compensating valuable work?

“It’s certainly easier to talk about changing light bulbs than changing the economy.”  

Naomi Klein, journalist and activist, September 2014

If we are going to respond to climate change, we need to invest seriously and on a large scale in not just protecting the public sphere but reinventing it… By responding robustly in line with what scientists are telling us, we have a once in a century opportunity to solve some of our biggest and most intractable social and economic problems. We can create countless good unionized jobs in the next economy. Every dollar invested in renewable energy, efficiency, public transit, creates 6-8 times as many jobs as that dollar would create if it went into oil and gas infrastructure. Those jobs can rebuild our ailing public infrastructure and that infrastructure will give us more livable cities, stronger communities, healthier bodies. We all know this.

Naomi Klein believes that climate change has progressed to the point where only the most radical solutions can mitigate its disastrous effects. One of these radical solutions, she believes, is a positive one: the radical reorganization of the global economy around green principles. Such an economy would transform our relationship to our jobs: foregrounding the carbon footprint of work as well as consumption, and making us rethink our communities.

PENNY U asked:

•    Is the work you do “green”? What makes it so, or not?

•    What does a green economy mean to you? What type of work might you do in this economy? Does it excite you as an idea?

CONVERSATION

New questions & memorable comments

After brief discussion of the three questions, Penny U participants divided into smaller groups, and each used one of the questions to kick off a conversation. Everyone got involved, both listening and talking, and the volume level in the room increased. Volunteer note takers and a wrap-up conversation of the whole group at the end gave us all a flavor of some of the points discussed and raised many new questions.

Why do the hardest jobs pay the least?

•    I’ve been an employee, an owner, and a volunteer. Some of the hardest work I did was as a volunteer, and I got very little respect for it. Why do you get more respect when money changes hands? 

•    What is work? Is it trading physical strength or a skill?  How do we place value on work – time, experience, knowledge, strength? What’s the relative value of a plumber, electrician, truck driver? “A judgment of me is made because I drive a truck.”

•    There’s a perception that care work is not valuable – child care, caring for aging parents, teaching.  Teachers were paid very little until they were unionized, and their pay is still terrible.  Caring for the young and the old requires being inside the family, and domestic workers have no rights to unionize.

•    Why do the hardest jobs pay the least?  This question came up in more than one group. 

•    Where would money come from to pay for work that doesn’t pay now, or doesn’t pay well?  Ideas might come from examples like the Alaska oil dividend, or Jaron Lanier’s idea of a system of micropayments that would require large companies like Amazon and Google to pay you for the use of your data, or giving ordinary people tax breaks for reducing our carbon footprint rather than giving the breaks to corporations.

•    Can we find other ways to generate income?  How about crowdsourcing like Kickstarter?

•    Whatever happened to the progressive income tax? When both the middle class and the economy were stronger, people in the highest income brackets paid as much as 90% on income over a certain, high amount.

•    Rather than try to change policy at the top, like trying to make major changes to the tax structure (which would be near impossible), we should make change at a scale we can handle – like setting up and using time banks.

Why doesn’t the value of work correspond with the wages paid?

•    Another group began by talking about value. In a city, what work has value?  The work of developers clearly does, and it’s reflected in the money they make and their role at the top, initiating the plan. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of community involvement in work to improve their own place, their neighborhood. People play clean-up for no pay. There’s no pay for community involvement. 

•    Who are the prime movers? What are the rings of influence? Usually the first person at the table sets the agenda, and after that people are reactive. And how does the “true cost” get factored in? 

•    Job “takers” are not seen to be as valuable as job “creators.”  In fact, consumers are the real job creators. And consuming is understood to be all about stuff, when actually building things is also consuming something. Consumption includes things like building and using public works projects, and “consumers” are not always consulted. 

•    Entrepreneurship doesn’t require being really rich. 

•    People/workers should be assets on balance sheets, in addition to representing a cost. 

•    The level of resource use is driven by consumers and public policy. 

•    The value of work doesn’t correspond with wages paid. Do moral issues help or hinder? 

•    The economy should be reorganized from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Collective behavior may be the key, collective action.

Can “green” become a rallying cry to change the structure of the economy?

•    The group discussing climate change and a green economy started by talking about what change does not look like: greenwashing. Similar to whitewashing, greenwashing is making an unsubstantiated or misleading claim about the environmental benefits of a product, service, or technology. 

•    Then they asked, “what would radical transformation look like?” Some movements toward change include assigning a value to carbon pollution. Another approach is the possibility of worker’s co-ops and other alternative systems vs. staying the course. The “divest-invest” movement (“divest from fossil fuels, invest in climate solutions”) is also part of the green picture.

•    Will change be pretty? What will people give up? 

•    What’s our emotional relationship to work? There’s an emotional dimension to work. What is motivating?  Many jobs are meaningless.  

•    Can we change the definition of profit or the definition of capitalism? 

•    At some point, cheap labor will be the only resource. As incomes rise around the world, there won’t be any cheap labor and capitalism will fail. 

•    Once change starts rolling, it grows exponentially, and ideas can move change faster. Can “green” change the structure of the economy? Can it be a rallying cry?  Critical mass is a factor in change. Social movements can lead to change, a change in the law, for one. But how quickly can change happen, especially when economics are involved? 

•    What’s the role of hopefulness vs. hopelessness in the ability of a culture to change?

When the whole group came back together, we heard quick highlights from each discussion and a few comments about the whole program. One sentiment that came up was the sense that the ideas and questions were almost too big for the time we had. We didn’t attempt a grand summary or set of conclusions and wrapped up fairly quickly in order to make way for the evening’s speaker, Nicholas Carr, on “Human Consequences of Technology.”