As we get closer to having the students return I am thinking of the theme of this book more as it relates to them and less to the US in general. I often think how well the skills I teach in my classroom prepare students for next year, for college and for life outside of education.
One part that I find interesting, important and concerning is the section when the authors talk about the future of jobs. In short it seems they see jobs in the future becoming secure for those who add value and unstable for those who can be replaced due to technology, globalization or downward economic trends. In the years my brothers and I spent working in retail (late 60’s to mid 2000’s) I saw this happening all the time. If you worked in a union supermarket in this area full time you could easily make forty to forty-five thousand dollars a year as a general clerk (cashier, stocking shelves, etc.) with full health benefits for you and your family. They gave you an extra thousand dollars to attend college. No real skills were needed, just be reasonably friendly and work reasonably hard. The companies at this time had solid profits and for about 20 or 30 years things were pretty good. People started out in the lower socioeconomic levels and moved into middle class. I know hundreds of kids who went to college on supermarket salaries. Looking back from today’s point of view it seems almost ridiculous. How could shareholders allow a company to pay that much more than they had to? They eventually wised up.
As time went on I saw many changes that allowed much more work to be done by fewer and fewer people. The one most easily recognized is the replacing of cashiers with the kiosks where customers check out their own groceries. I worked in stores that had these for about 5 years and they never really caught on. They were confusing, they were prone to malfunctioning and they allowed for easy shoplifting. I don’t think the companies saw the return they were expecting and now I know that some stores are replacing these machines with human cashiers. A happy ending? Not quite. These cashiers have nothing like the salary or benefits their predecessors had. Today you start at a lower rate, top out at a lower rate and pay for whatever benefits you want. Almost evry new hire is part time to help company flexibility. No hours are guaranteed. If business falls off, you get hours cut back, sometimes to 8 hours a week. Nobody is sending his or her kids to college on a “new” supermarket salary.
They discuss this polarization between those at the top and the rest of us in part II section 4 on creators and servers. If anyone has heard the NPR interviews with Bartett and Steele, the investigative reporters who used to write for the Inquirer, whose book I hope to read soon, they paint a very scary story in which the US middle class isn’t just shrinking, it’s being purposely destroyed by those who no longer see a need for it. In 1914 Henry Ford doubled the salary of his workers to 5 dollars a day, which went a long way in securing an American middle class. He stopped the turnover in his company and he enabled his own employees to be able to purchase his products. It was a win-win.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen today. The creators, those near the top with a seat on the board, no longer need a strong American middle class to buy their products. The middle classes in China, India and Brazil are a much more tempting and lucrative market. The potential profits in these countries far surpass that of our own. We are all servers who will mind the machine and be replaced by others who will work cheaper and expect less. As long as we have working class people who obsessively think that lower taxes are the key to their prosperity, those at the top will win.
So, do I try to get my students to be creative creators and not be merely routine servers or do I try to get them to rise up and overthrow the system? I think I know what choice the school board wants me to choose, and I doubt sticking it to the man will help us raise our PSSA scores. So, how to get them to be more innovative, more entrepreneurial, to add value to whatever they do, even if they do end up being a server? To be honest, I’m not sure, but I think there will be opportunities, in their research papers, our class discussions and the literature we analyze. Perhaps all that will be needed is for me to recognize the opportunities as they present themselves, and then to impress upon the students how critical this is to their future.
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