By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
In recent weeks in the First Teachers column in The Wanderer, there has been on ongoing discussion of the difficulties faced by families with school-aged children due to the loss of blue-collar jobs, specifically of how this new state of affairs has made it impossible for many women to be full-time, stay-at-home moms.
T.F.B., a reader from California, has written to expand that discussion beyond the topic of parents and schools. He raises a question that well may become the major societal problem our country will face in the coming decades.
Trying to solve it could prove to be what people mean by “opening Pandora’s box.” You will remember the story of Pandora, the first woman on Earth, according to Greek mythology. Zeus gave her a jar with the instruction that she was to leave it unopened. She disobeyed, releasing strife, hatred, and death upon the world. Since then, the term has come to mean in everyday speech an apparently insignificant act that results in dire consequences.
T.F.B. writes, “One of the reasons for the disappearance of blue-collar jobs is the way technology has so rapidly advanced. Many people do not realize how extensively this has affected manufacturing processes. A great many jobs that were once performed by people on a production line are now performed by machines, and this trend is accelerating. This is one of the reasons for the increasing income disparity that we are witnessing.
“The solution,” T.F.B. continues, “is not to ban machines Luddite fashion, but rather to figure out how to distribute this increased wealth without destroying incentive in the fashion of socialism. I personally do not have any idea how to do this.”
I would wager that T.F.B.’s concern has struck many readers of this column. It is not just that so many of the blue-collar jobs that once permitted unskilled workers to live decent lives have left our shores, but that the blue-collar jobs that remain now require technical know-how that vast numbers of our young people do not possess, or show any likelihood of acquiring. I have in mind the body-pierced, tattooed, drug-using slackers we see in the malls and on our neighborhood streets.
This is not a racial question, even though many minority youths are part of the unemployable masses we are talking about. Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart documents that the pathology is pronounced among the modern white working class, as well, using as an example Fishtown, a blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia where women now routinely give birth out of wedlock, where less than a third of the children grow up in a household with both biological parents, where large numbers of the men are either unemployed or on disability, where drug use is rampant.
In my area of Connecticut the local newspapers frequently describe the high-paying jobs that are available to high school graduates of the state’s technical schools — machinists, lathe operators, tool and die makers, electricians. Factory owners talk openly about not being able to find enough qualified workers to fill the jobs they have available. The blue-collar youth in America’s Fishtowns are not qualified for those positions. Perhaps they would have been able to find work in the simple, repetitive assembly lines of the past. Those low-tech assembly lines have moved overseas.
Which brings us to T.F.B.’s question: What are we going to do with this increasingly large portion of our population? We can’t let them freeze and starve to death. Only the most callous Social Darwinist would say that. But neither is it reasonable or fair-minded to expect that taxpayers will keep them housed, clothed, and fed for their entire unemployed lives. It would also not be beneficial for those receiving the assistance. As T.F.B. writes, “redistributing wealth” to them in that manner would destroy their incentive and character.
Politicians and members of the clergy will tell us that “no child is uneducable” and that it is deplorable for us to “give up on our young people.” But these platitudes ignore the reality that Charles Murray describes. We now have a society with vast numbers of unemployable men and women. Even fast food employers offering a minimum wage will not hire workers with bizarre tattoos, body-piercings, drug habits, and undisciplined lifestyles.
But if we think it inadvisable to provide the basics of life to these unfortunate individuals in the form of lifelong welfare, food stamps and government housing, how will they be kept alive? T.F.B has no answer. Nor do I. But it a question that must be pondered.
Some would suggest that we establish something like the make-work programs of the New Deal, some modern form of the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration. I suspect that Bernie Sanders has in mind such a scenario. The problem is that the jobs that are offered in such programs will likely end up as little more than unproductive make-work positions. It is true that our infrastructure is in need of repair and improvement. But working on our bridges, roads, and tunnels requires skilled and disciplined workers. The people from Fishtown can’t fill that bill. Skilled union workers currently do this work.
Perhaps government bureaucrats can come up with something for them to do. But what kind of country will we be if we create a vast number of government workers without marketable skills, doing work that is extraneous to the system of economic needs? It is hard to picture one that will be happy, healthy, prosperous — or long-lived. One need not be an imaginative science fiction writer to predict the tensions that will arise in that scenario.
Just one example: Discipline will be necessary to make the new version of the CCC work. The newly hired workers are not likely to respond well to demands that they report to work on time, and not under the influence of alcohol and drugs. I heard stories when I was a young man from former CCC members who said their supervisors were demanding and uncompromising. They “took no nonsense,” I was told. Will modern society accept such a scenario, especially if there is a racial imbalance between these workers and the general citizenry?
It is also likely that the workers in these make-work jobs will grow to resent their status as government employees required to work at salaries beneath those in private enterprise; that they will organize to protest the indignity of doing work that the rest of society finds of questionable value. This is one of the reasons why Marxist countries that guarantee employment for all their people inevitably resort to harsh dictatorial measures to make the scheme work.
Winston Churchill once described Russia as a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The words fit the problem we are discussing.
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