sociology 36 hours

SOC 1020 Lecture Eight

Prof. D. Fasenfest

Work and the Workplace You can’t examine the economy without also examining the workplace. The workplace in the US is in a state of flux, which some view as problematic and others view as progress. As we move into the information age, more and more jobs are high skilled. We are becoming deindustrialized. In my father’s generation, and only slightly less so in mine, you could drop out of school and get a job that paid a living wage. A high level of education was not required to work on the assembly line in one of the big three. With the recession of the late 70s, early 80s, a lot of these jobs disappeared, and it became harder to get a blue collar job that paid a living wage. The high school diploma had been the key to entry level white collar or pink-collar jobs. Your generation will have a harder time finding employment without a higher education. The BA is increasingly the requirement for entry level work. Take a secretarial job as an example. In the 1970s the skills most sought after in a secretary were fast and accurate typing, a good speaking voice, shorthand knowledge and good organizational skills. Today, along with being a good typist, the secretary must be knowledgeable with a variety of computer software packages and may be required to speak more languages than English. S/he may be responsible for managing others in the office as well. These increased responsibilities have led to a redefining of the occupation, with most secretaries now called administrative assistants, or in some cases, personal assistant. This new term better describes the variety of administrative tasks that are required for this job. Also, this job is often viewed as an entry level opening into a field. So a person graduating with a BA in business or a social science may work as an administrative assistant in an advertising agency as they work their way up the ladder to manage accounts. Notice we speak about “she” when we think about a secretary—we discussed the gendering of jobs and the allocation of women to particular types of work. But consider the secretary and the operator of a console that controls production machines. Most likely that person is a man. Each has to work with a keyboard inputting information, each has to be able to manage simple machines—a computer of one kind or another. And each need about the same level of skill. Yet secretaries tend to make less, and their job ladder is more or than not limited to one day becoming an executive secretary. The machine operator is paid more and through the workplace can keep getting higher and higher paid work—though likely that person in today’s world will not become a manager. Those people are hired right out of higher education programs like an MBA (and often relying on the operator or secretary to get them going at work!). The US has dual labor market. The primary labor market provides jobs that have a living wage and good benefits. The secondary labor market provides jobs that have low wages and few, if any, benefits. Those in the secondary labor market often work more than one job to make ends meet, have no job security and are economically insecure. In other words, the primary labor market has what used to be good blue-collar jobs and more recently the kind of information processing work like stockbrokers, insurance agents, and other “mental” jobs with upward

mobility. The secondary labor market worker remains in the low end of the service sector—at the bottom are what we call hamburger flippers, but it also includes retail clerks, low-end sales workers, janitorial and maid services, and most temporary workers to name a few. These jobs are filled by people who are easily replaced, offer little if any benefits, and do not provide a job or career ladder for future advance and salary gains. Is it problematic that the high wage/low skill jobs are leaving the U.S.? One problem with the outsourcing of our jobs is that they are leaving at a time that we still have an untrained labor force. Individuals displaced by factories closing are often not trained to take on a non- manufacturing job. Therefore, they end up either unemployed or underemployed. However, in order to be competitive in the next market, we have to make the shift to non-manufacturing jobs as the bulk of our production. Therefore, this shift will allow us to remain competitive. As Durkheim and later Ogden argued, it takes a while for a change to filter through the social structures. So, it will take a while for education and training to catch up with the technological changes that are currently affecting our economy. Another problem with the workplace is the McDonaldilization of Society. This theory suggests that jobs are created for efficiency, predictability, uniformity and automation. These characteristics limit the creativity of humans that are involved in the job, further alienating that human being by Marxian standards. Also, more and more agencies use temporary workers. These workers may be high skilled or low skilled and can go into any work setting. Temps may work fulltime for a temp agency, or they may work part time for an agency or independently. Either way the temp may have fewer chances for stability and promotion than a typical worker. Females are far more likely to be employed as temps. In fact, females are far more likely to be paid less in any occupation than men, except for one. Sex work is the only occupation where women are paid more. Male waiters make more. Male nurses make more. Male teachers make more. Men make more than women even when taking on jobs that are gendered towards females, such as nursing. Along with making less, women are more likely to hit the “glass ceiling”; the barrier that keeps women from progressing to the highest levels of responsibility in their occupation. In the US, white males still predominate in all the highest paying and highest prestige jobs with women and non-whites predominating in the lower paid, lower prestige jobs. There are two other major issues with the workplace. One is danger to the workers. Along with workplace violence, which is often highly publicized even while it is rare, there are dangers that are innate to the job that we often take for granted. Construction for example can be very dangerous. You likely all remember the equipment failure that took the lives of three workers on the I-280 overpass in Toledo a few years ago. Recently, nine firemen lost their lives fighting a warehouse fire. A female professor working with Mercury a few years ago accidentally poisoned herself. Deaths in mining are frequent…in fact mining may be the most dangerous job in the U.S. While we have many laws that have been designed to keep these dangers to a minimum, but the nature of many of these occupations means that danger is inherent and will never be fully eliminated. In 2005, 2.2 million workers were disabled in work related accidents and 6000 lost their lives.

Another major issue with the workplace is the growing isolation of the worker. Think about this class. I sit here at my home computer, no company but my dog, writing these notes. You will read them under similar conditions and submit your work. We have no interpersonal interaction. More and more jobs require us to be plugged into a computer screen for 8 or more hours a day. When we do our job through telecommuting, we don’t even have someone in the office next door to drop in on to add a social element to our day. And we love jobs that allow us the freedom of telecommuting. I can guarantee you, on any given day, walk into your local Panera bread and count the number of folks sitting alone, working on a laptop or talking on a cell phone. Panera is a good example due to the free wireless access it provides. Another downside is that we are never away from work as our laptops, cell phones and wireless internet allow us to take the office with us virtually everywhere we go. In the US, the growth in compensation is lagging far behind that of the productivity of the American employee. Between 1948-1979, the growth in productivity vs wages were relatively similar, with an increase of 108% and 93%, respectively. But between 1979-2019, whilst net productivity has continued to increase by an expected 70%, hourly compensation in the country is less than a fifth of that at just 12%. That is, the growth in productivity has more than doubled that of hourly compensation for U.S. workers since 1948. With net productivity in the country growing by roughly 253 percent in the last seven decades, hourly compensation has increased by just 116 percent. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a surge in economic inequality in the U.S., as millions of workers remain permanently unemployed from the job they had before the virus reached the country. However, COVID-19 and subsequent economic hardships are only exacerbating an already serious decline in worker prosperity, and data shows how worker productivity has increased at a much faster rate than hourly compensation over the last decades.

Let’s consider the minimum wage versus what most economists consider to be a “living wage” that allows a family of four to have a reasonable existence (housing, food, clothing, etc.). In the US, living wage statistics show that the 2019 living wage was $16.54 per hour or $68,808 per year before taxes for a family of four. That is just about what the highest minimum wage is in

the US, at about $15/hr…though it is only a minimum for Federal workers. States get to set their own minimum wages. So, only NYC and Washington DC have a minimum that high. By contrast, Georgia and Wyoming have state minimum wages of only $5.15 per hour. Clearly, how one can live depends on the local economy, and in some states with low costs low wages are less of a problem. Nevertheless, there is not enough variation in things like food, energy and clothing costs to make that much of a difference—the main variant in family budgets is the cost of housing, and even that is rising faster than wages. In the end, about 44% of all jobs in the US are categorized as receiving low or minimum wages; that translates to about 55 million Americans. At that level, families are “one paycheck” away from homelessness, hunger and the breakup of families. Some facts:

• In 2020, 8% of all hourly-paid workers earning wages at or below the federal minimum were in the leisure and hospitality industry.

• Females represented 37.9% of all part-time hourly-paid workers with wages at or below the federal minimum in 2020.

• In 2020, about 50,000 African Americans were federal minimum wage workers. • 247,000 workers earned the actual federal minimum wage in 2020. • The percent of the workers in the US earning minimum wage or less declined from 1.9%

in 2019 to 1.5% in 2020. • Raising the federal minimum wage could cut 1.4 million jobs in the US by 2025. • 1% of the hourly-paid workers had a bachelor’s degree and higher.

A look at other industrial countries is instructive:

• While minimum wages increased substantially between 1 January 2021 and 1 January 2022 in nominal terms, the real-life impact does not signify a boost to living standards when rising inflation is taken into account. During the same period, minimum wage workers in 15 out of the 21 Member States with a statutory minimum wage saw a decline in their wages in real terms.

• If present inflation trends continue, minimum wages will barely grow in real terms in any country in 2022, and significant losses in the purchasing capacity of minimum wage earners will become a dominant theme unless the issue is addressed by additional uprates or other support measures for low-paid employees during the year. Countries with automatic indexation mechanisms, such as Belgium, France and Luxembourg, were quicker in uprating wages in line with inflation; but additional increases can be also introduced ad hoc, as in Greece.

• The proposed EU directive on adequate minimum wages is already prompting a few Member States to refocus debates on the topic and prepare for change in areas such as setting the criteria for wage setting or raising wages in line with the ‘international reference values’ mentioned in the proposal. Germany, for example, has decided to uprate its minimum wage to €12 per hour, or about 60% of median wages, in October 2022.

• New findings indicate that substantial debates among national actors on how to promote collective bargaining and increase bargaining coverage are taking place in only Denmark,

Latvia and Norway. Establishing action plans to promote collective bargaining is an important element of the new EU directive on adequate minimum wages and will be a key requirement for Member States.

• Minimum wages can play a critical role in reducing wage inequality. For example, findings relating to Spain demonstrate that the impact of the 22% increase in the minimum wage in 2019 led to the greatest reduction in wage inequality in the EU27 Member States in the same year. This is likely to have been a result of the minimum wage increase, which counteracted the high level of wage inequality in Spain, a gap that had grown in the year before the hike.Share