September
2007
It’s Labor Day: Strike Up the Dirge
There he was, much too pale and chubby to pass as an old salt but nonetheless perched proudly in the bow of his Newport yacht, the aptly-named Numbers: one Daniel M. Meyers, a founder of First Marblehead, one of the leading players in the $20 billion student loan industry.
And why would I begin a Labor Day rant with this image from the Sunday New York Times business section? Because the piece reports casually, in the context of charting the spectacular profits of companies like Meyers’, that the average debt level carried by newly-minted college graduates has more than doubled over the past decade.
The Times piece on the student loan business also reports casually that this little-regulated by incredibly lucrative racket could end up looking a bit like the subprime mortgage business: the sharks move in, get fat, and get out before their victims quite realize they have limbs missing and before Congressional poohbahs (happy for now to hoover in campaign money from the sharks) start clearing their throats to deplore the sorry mess.
But it’s those borrowers I am most interested in. They are the ones who, with their economically-stressed parents’ concurrence, took the big gamble and went deeply into hock in the expectation that their dearly-purchased degree would allow them not only to pay off their college debt but also achieve a comfortable middle-class life within just a few years.
I don’t want to bet against them, obviously, but on this Labor Day I have to wonder whether it’s time to replace “Pomp and Circumstance” with Chopin’s “Marche funebre” at college graduations. What real evidence is there that tomorrow’s knowledge workers–these bright college grads–will enjoy a middle-class standard of living as that standard has commonly been understood?
While many policymakers and commentators have focused on the sorry fate of workers with high school educations or less, fewer have said much about the disturbing earnings picture facing recent college grads (especially once adjustment has been made for the handful of stars who head from their ivy-draped campuses to blessed careers in investment banking and the like).
Last week’s big Census Bureau report contained the sobering but no longer surprising news that the only population group whose 2006 incomes exceeded their 2000 incomes were households in the top five percent of the earnings distribution. For everyone else, they were lower. Add to flatlining median earnings the fact that working college grads now make up a significant and growing part of the 47 million Americans lacking health insurance, and that grads paying off those crushing debts are extremely unlikely to be saving for retirement, and you get a really dismal sense of the American prospect.
Back when Labor Day would represent the start (not the halfway point!) of serious presidential campaigning, candidates would routinely exalt the dignity of work, the virtues of the workers, and the importance of honoring those whose productive labors in turn produce a general prosperity.
Production was the keynote. Today the U.S. has wandered blindly down a road where consumption is what matters and the fate of worker-producers is completely in the hands of divinized “market forces” that are never seriously challenged by the political class. Our politicians deal with issues at the margins–insuring a few more children, legislating family-friendly leave policies, raising the minimum wage so that it now can supply almost half of what it actually takes to live in most metropolitan areas–but none is willing to start a new public conversation about the kind of society we actually might want. None is willing to ask whether “market forces” is just another name for unlimited predation by the sharks or whether leaving the future of 350 million Americans to such forces is really such a good idea.
This absence of a real conversation also left a huge vacancy in the center of the late and not-so-great great immigration debate: whatever one may think of the justice of mass deportations, barrier fences, etc., why is it that none of our so-called progressive leaders called for a serious look at NAFTA’s role in immiserating so much of Mexico that its people must migrate to survive? The fact is that none of the NAFTA signatories (even, sadly, Canada) cared or cares very much about its producers–people who must work for a living, as against people who get to invest for a fabulous living. I can understand why DLC types and Clintonistas won’t challenge NAFTA’s premises. What I cannot understand is how people calling themselves politically progressive could focus only on immigrant rights without demanding the repeal of NAFTA and its replacement by serious bilateral job-creation and job-retention measures on both sides of the Rio Grande. Instead, they spent their energy excoriating anyone who might dare to suggest that the presence 13 million undocumented workers could be holding back U.S. wage growth.
I guess the real reason I am in dirge mode this weekend is that I see no hope that any of the elites–the five percenters, including the politicians they keep in their seraglios–will have any interest in starting a real conversation. The persistence of non-conversation is the main burden of Matt Bai’s The Argument; it’s also why no one takes seriously books like Robert Reich’s new one critiquing turbocharged capitalism.
That leaves it to the workers–yes, the workers!–to mount a new conversation from below. But such a hope presupposes that workers have real-time opportunities to talk to each other about what is happening in their lives, and that’s not going to happen as long as they are putting in ever-longer work hours and spending what remains of their time consuming themselves to oblivion. And don’t expect debt-ridden college grads to be the first to demand a serious rethinking of where things are headed.
As a religious leader, I still foster the hope that a radical critique of a society organized around the worship of wealth and the heedless pursuit of weath can emerge against all odds from faith communities taking seriously their own core teachings. But that is the only hope I see out there. Please someone: tell me I’m just stewing in my own cynical juice. Show me the next Sam Gompers or Mother Jones or Gene Debs who has the guts and the chops to get a conversation going. I’m waiting.
- Peter Laarman