Why Work Isn’t Working in Trump’s America

Donald Trump’s popularity rose this spring to a new personal best—45 percent (up from a dismal 38 percent in April). The boost was because “the U.S. unemployment rate has hit lows not seen in decades,” according to a June Gallup Poll. So runs a common story in the dominant corporate news media in recent weeks.

There is likely some truth in the narrative. Americans have long tended to give presidents higher approval ratings when the jobless rate drops. Official unemployment continues to fall for reasons that have little to do with Trump (it’s really about the timeworn ebbs and flows of the capitalist business cycle), though he and his Republican Party partners are quite happy to take credit.

But Trump’s new high in approval remains quite low by historical standards. Insofar as a president’s popularity reflects labor market conditions, his persistent low approval rating may have something to do with the difference between the official U.S. unemployment rate (U3) that is typically reported in U.S. media and the “real unemployment” rate (U6) that Federal Reserve chiefs have long recognized as the more relevant measure. The U3 number defines the unemployed population narrowly as those jobless people who have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks and are currently available for work. It is currently at 3.8 percent, quite low by historical standards. It hasn’t gone below 4 percent since 2000.

The “real” U6 measure expands the definition of the unemployed to include involuntarily part-time workers and “discouraged” and other “marginally attached” workers who have been available for employment in the last year but have given up on finding work for which they are qualified. By this measure, U.S. unemployment is 7.6 percent.

Real unemployment would be over 9 percent if the 2.3 million people kept behind bars in the U.S. (more than 1 in 110 of all Americans and 6 percent of all black men in their 30s) were factored in. The United States’ globally unmatched and racist mass incarceration system artificially suppresses the U.S. unemployment rate (especially black and Latino joblessness) to a significant degree.

Meanwhile, the overall U.S. labor force is shrinking, something that also helps suppress official unemployment statistics. The civilian U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR)—the percentage of all work-eligible, nonmilitary Americans 16 years and older who are employed or actively seeking work—is currently below 63 percent, its lowest point since the late 1970s.

While Trump boasts about the recent U3 “breakthrough,” he is silent about the shrinking U.S. labor force—something he used to harp on when Barack Obama was in the White House. During the 2016 campaign, Trump ripped government reports of falling unemployment rates for falsely inflated numbers because so many Americans were not in the labor force. “Our real unemployment rate … is 42 percent,” Trump insanely told Time magazine in August 2016, “because you have 90 million people that aren’t working, 93 million to be exact.” Conflating the LFPR with U3, Trump was trying to refer to monthly data on working-age Americans who were not in the labor force. It was 94.3 million in August 2016. By April of this year, it was 95.7 million.

Of course, much of the shrinking labor force story reflects developments that should be of no concern and might even be considered positive. The aging of the baby boomer generation has combined with rising life expectancy to increase the number of Americans who are retired and living off pensions and Medicare. Young adults now spend more years in school than ever before entering the labor force.

But education and retirement don’t tell the whole story on declining labor force participation. “Prime-age” (25- to 54-year-old) U.S. males are generally past schooling but too young to retire. They are becoming less attached to the labor market over time. Fully 11 percent of them are neither employed nor seeing work today, up from 4 percent in 1950. This reflects the collapse of the job market for “unskilled workers” left behind by technological change and corporate globalization, something that millions of working-age men face: the ugly choice between work for miserable wages or life without employment. That is critical context for the surging deaths of despair—chiefly via suicide, alcoholism and opiate addiction—that have shockingly depressed white male working-class lifespans (an unprecedented development, with the anomalous exception of the U.S. Civil War period) in recent years.

Another reason to be concerned about the declining LFPR is that wage levels no longer permit most U.S. households to get by without more than one wage- or salary-earner contributing to family incomes. The nation’s LFPR was much lower in the 1950s and 1960s, but that had to do with something good: the ability of families to get by on a single full-time job. The subsequent near murder of U.S. unions and related long-term wage stagnation have made it impossible for most folks to live decently on one job per household. “Now,” the leftist economics blogger Pete Dolack writes, “everybody works and still can’t make ends meet.”

Which brings us to the unpleasant subject of wages. As Dolack reports, the percentage of total national income going to workers (as opposed to investors) has fallen significantly over the last half century (from 52 percent in 1969 to 43 percent today). If the U.S. labor market is so “tight” now, under Trump, however, then surely U.S. wages must be getting made great again, right? In theory, yes. But that’s not what’s happening.

As Bloomberg reported in early June, citing data from Trump’s Labor Department, “average hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, were unchanged in May from a year earlier, even as nominal pay accelerated to a 2.7 percent annual gain from 2.6 percent in April. For production and nonsupervisory workers, real average hourly earnings fell 0.1 percent from a year earlier.” When you also factor in the overconcentration of wage growth in the most well-paid segments of the workforce, it is clear that U.S. wages are heading nowhere near what it would take to boost many Americans out of poverty and near-poverty (“low income”), categories that currently describe a remarkable 140 million Americans, equivalent to 44 percent of the U.S. population. The ratio of CEO pay to workers’ wages now averages 339 to 1.

U.S. job growth for years has been “strong,” but for what kinds of positions? Low-wage and often temporary McJobs with no prospects for advancement and benefits. Jobs that pay so poorly that hundreds of millions of Americans have to borrow money or supplement full-time employment incomes with food stamps and visits to food pantries to survive.

The exorbitant interest rates we pay on credit cards and for other forms of modern-day debt peonage (including payday loans and “rent to purchase” contracts that amount to usury) combine with inflation to mean that our wages are not merely stagnant but actually declining in real terms. “If we earned a sustainable income,” Truthdig’s Chris Hedges notes, “we would not have to borrow money to survive.”

It is certainly no mere coincidence that the 92-month Obama-Trump job expansion has taken place alongside listless wage growth. The job creation has been predicated on low levels of compensation that reflect the persistently advantageous bargaining position of the employer class vis-à-vis workers. The bosses remain very much in the saddle thanks to the weakness and related bureaucratic conservatism of U.S. unions, the reality and threat of technical labor displacement (automation), the corporate globalization of the labor market and the ongoing neoliberal rollback of the social safety net (weaker in the U.S. than in any other rich capitalist state). U.S. employers and employees both know that workers have little welfare-state backup and that there are still plenty of members of the national and international—thanks to capitalist globalization—“reserve army of labor”: workers who are currently unemployed, under-employed or completely outside the labor force but available for employment. Within and beyond the labor market, the “balance of class forces,” to use an old Marxist phrase, is very much on the side of the capitalist and broader employer class, not the working class.

It is at this point, minus my references to class rule and power, that the standard, mainstream discussion of workers’ plight and experience in the U.S. stops. It is left to officially marginalized “radicals,” such as myself, to go beyond the standard quantitative measures (unemployment, job creation, wage rates, etc.) to mention the spiritually deadening estrangement and despotism that reigns across what Marx called the “hidden abode of capitalist production.” Much of what passes for meaningful and supposedly dignity-conferring work under capitalism consists of the performance of monotonous, narrow, highly specialized and alienating tasks conceived for workers by employers and employers’ labor experts with no higher purpose in mind than churning out profits for the nation’s obscenely wealthy investor class.

It is an accurate Marxian truism that capitalists would not hire workers without the promises of extracting a profit from employing people. But “surplus value” is not the only thing workers lose to employers under the profits system. They also commonly give away key components of their humanity. It’s not just about the indignity of the inadequate wage. It’s also about the ceaseless, soul-crushing execution of narrow and mindless tasks designed by privileged others who would never trade places with frontline workers. It’s also about the insults and abuse handed down by bosses and the pervasive danger and toxicity in the workplace, where workers’ safety and health typically takes a distant second place to employers’ cost and profits concerns. It’s also about the absence of anything remotely approximating democracy on the job, where most working-age Americans spend the lion’s share of their waking lives. With U.S. union density (the percentage of U.S. workers enrolled in unions) down to 10.7 percent, including just 6.5 percent in the private sector, few U.S. employees have a shop steward or other union official to defend them against arbitrary discipline and dismissal anymore. It doesn’t help that, as Workers Action writers Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer report, the nation’s fading labor movement is ruled by an unresponsive and authoritarian bureaucracy:

Many unions have adopted a neoliberal corporate culture: They are top-down with little information provided to their members about exactly what they are doing. They do not engage their members in any significant decision-making and treat them as customers, not comrades in struggle. They process grievances—hopefully—and negotiate contracts behind closed doors. True—unionized workers fare substantially better than non-unionized workers when it comes to wages and benefits. But doing better than Walmart employees is not an inspiring success story.

Upper-middle-class intellectuals who like to rhapsodize about the pride, purpose, self-esteem and stability supposedly conferred by contemporary “work” (employment, that is; work should no more be conflated with employment than sex should be conflated with the prostitution trade) ought to spend a few months or years putting one bottle of shampoo or mouthwash after another into rapidly moving boxes on high-speed packaging lines for eight hours or more a day and five days or more per week. Or serving food to long lines of students and faculty at a university cafeteria. Or checking out (bar-code swiping) an endless sea of grocery purchasers. Or cleaning up parking ramps or nursing home messes between midnight and 8 a.m. Or spending 10 hours a day driving a garbage truck to and from a landfill. Or commandeering an 18-wheeler across endless stretches of interstate highway. Or sitting in a call-center cubicle for hours on end.

It wasn’t for nothing that the 19th century American working class and the pioneers of the U.S. labor movement referred to wage labor as “wage slavery.” Now as in the past, working people short on resources (nearly 6 in 10 Americans lack $500 in savings) are compelled to sell and degrade their species-defining human capacity for engaged and creative labor for the basic “instrumental” purpose of obtaining enough money to buy necessities for themselves and their families. Their own senses of how and why humanity should interchange with itself and nature through the collective labor process are coldly irrelevant under capitalism. The nature and purpose of the tasks workers perform is, in Marx’s words, “external to the worker” and is therefore “forced labor.” Such work, Marx observed, “is not the gratification of a need”—of the natural human drive to produce or provide something useful and/or beautiful—but “merely the means of satisfying needs external to it.”

“External labor, labor in which man alienates himself,” Marx wrote, “is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification.” Such “estranged labor,” as he called it, lurks at the hidden and dark heart of modern dehumanization.

To make matters worse, the long hours of voiceless and alienating “mortification” required to get by in a low-wage economy leaves workers with too little time and energy for meaningful participation in what’s left of U.S. democracy beyond the workplace. (The United States has the longest working hours among the world’s rich nations.) This relates back to their workplace experience, where the despotism of the bosses is empowered by corporate-captive government policies that favor employers over employees within and beyond the jobs. Time, as is too rarely noted (but as the pioneers of the U.S. labor movement knew quite well), is a democracy issue.

Even the instrumental goal of getting wages through employment is hostage to the timeworn vagaries of capitalist accumulation and business cycles. Nobody should be so dull and historically blind as to believe that the Obama-Trump job expansion isn’t headed for a major reversal. That’s not how capitalism rolls. Nobody knows exactly when the next “correction” or, as seems distinctly possible, collapse will occur, but the fact that it is coming and will be traumatic should not be in doubt. All the standard signs are there—extreme levels of inequality, massive debt, outlandish price-earnings ratios, massive profits based largely on speculative and parasitic nonproductive investment and over-easy credit. Millions of Americans will lose their jobs and be plunged into despair when the Trump recession hits. As Hedges recently reflected:

[The currently reigning] circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called ‘fictitious capital.’ The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as [the Wall Street veteran and financial expert] Nomi Prins writes, to ‘a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds’ … [and] the next financial crash … won’t be like the last one. This is because, as [Prins] says, ‘there is no Plan B.’ Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out.

When the crash hits, Hedges writes, rage will “explode … into a firestorm” and “the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.”

On the positive side, the breakdown will slow the pace of capitalogenic carbon emissions that are destroying livable ecology before our very eyes. Americans will have more time on their hands—time to organize for the nationalization of the reckless and parasitic big banks, which are widely and justly hated across the land (see Glen Ford’s recent Left Forum talk on this topic here). With the banks stripped of their parasitic lords and function and brought under popular control, we can use the nation’s worker-generated economic surplus to move the nation off of profit, war, empire, inequality and ecocide and on to the paths of democracy, social justice, peace and environmental sustainability within and beyond the workplace.

An essential part of this “radical restructuring of society itself” (what Martin Luther King called in his final essay “the real issue to be faced” and the real challenge posed by “the black revolution”) will be the widespread creation of what the clever Marxist economist Richard Wolff calls worker self-directed enterprises: firms organized “such that workers become their own bosses.”

Wolff explains:

Specifically, that means placing the workers in the position of their own collective board of directors, rather than having directors be non-workers selected by major shareholders … the development of a major—and, if possible, prevailing—sector of the economy that is comprised of enterprises (offices, factories, farms, and stores) in which the employees democratically perform the following key enterprise activities: (a) divide all the labors to be performed, (b) determine what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and where it is to be produced, and (c) decide on the use and distribution of the output or revenues (if output is monetized) therefrom.

Ordinary workers and citizens deserve the basic human right to be in charge of their own work lives—of how their core human labor powers interact with nature and society. This is democracy and dis-alienation 101. It is also survival and sustainability 101. We have endured a half-millennium of capitalism, of societies and nations ruled (whatever their varying and changing outward political forms, including “parliamentary democracy”) by unelected and overlapping dictatorships of money, class and empire.

This profit-, accumulation- and growth-addicted regime has brought us to previously unimaginable levels of social disparity—three absurdly rich people now have as much wealth between them as the bottom half of the U.S. population—paired with a pace of environmental destruction that poses the near-term risk of human extinction. It’s long past time to, in Marx’s words, “expropriate the expropriators.”