Living Wages

Robert Kuttner argues that publicly subsidized human-services jobs should be good-paying jobs with benefits:

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Here is a very straightforward proposal. Let's have a national policy to make every human-service job a good job -- one that pays a living wage with good benefits, and includes adequate training, professional status, and the prospect of advancement -- a career rather than casual labor.

These, after all, are jobs caring for our parents, our children, and ourselves. Transforming all human-service work into good jobs would not merely replenish the supply of decent work. It would vastly improve the quality of care delivered to the elderly at home or in institutions; to young children in pre-kindergartens or day-care facilities; and to sick people whether in hospitals, hospices, outpatient settings, or their homes.

These are also the jobs that cannot be outsourced. Even if we succeed in reviving American manufacturing, the process of automation means that America is almost certain to become even more of a service economy over time. Good service-sector jobs can help replace for good factory jobs.

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This effort would be part of two broader labor-policy shifts that America sorely needs. First, we need to reverse the trend toward casualization of labor that has been occurring for three decades. One of the great advances of the 20th century was regularization of the employment relationship. Through successful social struggle, growth of unions, and enactment of legislation, most jobs came to provide decent wages and fringe benefits. Workers could not be fired without cause. Loyalty to the firm was reciprocated. Grievance systems were created and respected. Economists termed these jobs primary labor-market jobs. Casual, secondary labor-market jobs, which paid less and offered no such guarantees, continued to exist, but they were the exception. In recent years, however, the shift to casual jobs has become the norm, and in low-paid human-service work, casual, high-turnover jobs are the industry standard.

Second, the upgrading of human-service work would reverse another insidious trend -- the employer's habit of trying to increase the efficiency of labor by fragmenting jobs into separate tasks and paying the lowest possible wage for each task -- a strategy known as Taylorism, after the early 20th-century "efficiency expert," Fredrick Winslow Taylor, who first recommended it.

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