The erosion of good jobs is one of the key issues that will dominate 2012, a year that has lurched into the room in soiled pants and pushed final thoughts about 2011 aside.
Discussion about why good jobs are disappearing will, I’m sure, provide many challenges this year. Hopefully, some positive answers will be addressed.
I will say here, honestly, I have never faced the hardships workers face today in the public and private sector. As far as good, secure, well-paid jobs are concerned, I lived in or went through the best of times (interesting, entertaining, meaningful part-time or full-time work seemed available wherever I looked in the 1950s and ‘60s). So, I’m not well-practiced in facing or overcoming low or no employment.
However, I do know we don’t have to look back too many centuries, even mere decades, before my time to see that good jobs were almost non-existent for the majority of workers and that even tiny improvements in wages, benefits and working conditions were only won through blood, sweat and tears.
Long before you and I were born the dominant consideration in life for both children and adults was inescapably economic. Daily bread was hard to come by in order to simply survive and every person, almost from birth, was considered a unit of production. When John Locke (1697) suggested to England’s Board of Trade that children of the poor - about everyone in the phone book - should be sent to work from the age of three, no one thought it unrealistic or unkind.
One hundred years later, hundreds of thousands of slaves toiled in the cotton fields in the southern states (of the U.S.) and child labour filled the floors of booming cotton mills in England.
“Children were malleable, worked cheap, and were generally quicker at darting about among machinery and dealing with snags, breakages, and the like. Even the most enlightened mill owners used children freely. They couldn’t afford not to,” writes Bill Bryson.
(At Home: A short history of private life)Thank goodness for the wise intervention of far-sighted politicians and their 1844 Factory Act. It reduced the workday for children, most of whom were working 12- to 14-hour days, six days per week. Some worked even longer, particularly during busy periods to meet large orders, likely at Christmas (with no time-and-a-half).
Improvements in conditions, at least in England, came very slowly. Many children were sent onto the streets to survive on their own at age seven or eight and by the 1860s London had 100,000 “street Arabs” who had no education, no skills, no purpose, and no future. The consideration of even the most basic human rights (a very modern term, it seems) was hindered by harsh attitudes from unexpected quarters. Reverend T. R. Malthus (1766 - 1834) blamed the poor for their own hardships and opposed the idea of relief for the masses on the grounds that it simply increased their tendency to idleness.
“And there can be few more telling facts about life in nineteenth century Britain than that the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals preceded by sixty years the founding of a similar organization for the protection of children.” (pg. 415, At Home, B. Bryson)
To learn about the inexorably slow improvements to the poor wages, benefits and working conditions closer to our home and to the modern era in which we live, we need only ask our aged parents (who may recall the Dirty Thirties, Great Depression and longer work days), and grandparents and great-grandparents who worked the mines, mills, forests, farms and factories for very meager benefits in many cases - if they’re still alive.
Though many of these people and their stories are likely gone, I’m sure they would agree that boomers like myself lived during the best of times and the younger generations alive today are seeing the decline of our good, secure jobs.
More to follow.
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2012 in Review PT 3: “For jobs, I grew up in the best of times”.
