At what point does economic recovery become simply a more gently modulated decline?

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most — that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least. — Eugene V. Debs

A heat wave grips New England, making the days downright tropical. Thunderstorms, which come daily, bring no relief, only a kind of steamy weight and closeness. Air becomes almost too heavy to breathe. Everything is obscenely green, bringing to mind those films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski in South America.

Under such estival oppression my mind drifts to — and lingers over — perverse themes. I find myself wishing for something Conradian: a glimpse into the heart of darkness; a confrontation with nature redacted to its essence, stripped of the borrowed finery of civil society.

Whither tarries, I wonder, the “Summer of Rage” predicted for this year, as it was for last? Some malcontents in France seem to have gotten their blood up in a reprise of the riots of 2005 (the 2005 uprising inspired this tract by The Invisible Committee, a collective of ultra-Left Jeremiahs intent on pricking the consciences of complacent bourgeois Ninevites), but nothing so piquant loomed for us stateside. Extreme heat dulls keener emotions and turns even the slightest action into a chore. But wilting under the sun is not just the person cursed to live in a home without air conditioning; opportunity shrivels also, the much touted “Recovery Summer” now appearing more as “Recumbency Summer” as budget crises bring rumors of rolling closures of firehouses in Philadelphia, as well as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s threat to bust state workers down several pay grades.

The menace of minimum wage is an extraordinary gambit on The Governator’s part, one which could only be hazarded in extraordinary times. Labor standards are in flux, and when they finally settle, the resulting new norms will resemble more the conditions of the labor market of the nineteenth century than those of the twentieth. Already one sees this happening. The blog Poverty in America over at Change.org featured on July 12, 2010 the article, “Want to Be Poor? Work One of These 8 Jobs.” The story’s lede puts the current labor predicament in no uncertain terms: “Post-recession job creation is coming, the experts say. Unfortunately, many of these jobs will pay less than $10 an hour. Yeah, it’s an honest day’s work, but if it’s not enough to live on, much less raise a family and maintain a home, what’s the point?”

The baleful economics of the starvation-wage economy is well-trod ground, so I won’t go into empirical particulars here. I will, however, offer some comments distilled from my own experience. These will, I hope, add some texture and vividness to what is too often treated in abstract terms. As someone who had to subsist for several years at minimum wage or just barely above, I think myself qualified to offer a sense of what low-wage work really entails.

Indeed, after working a minimum-wage job long enough, I began to consider my absurdly inadequate income the least among the various indignities visited upon me; because the fact is that, depending on the size of the reserve army of the unemployed in the area where you work, without clearly defined statutory limitations governing labor practices with the force of law behind them — such as those secured after long years of union agitation in the past century — you become as flies to your employers. They bat you about for their sport.

A minimum-wage job means anomie of a most soul-crushing sort, as you look up from your abased position in the bilge of the great ship Capital.

A minimum-wage job means a job with crazy hours and crazy shifts. A minimum-wage job means your days off can come consecutively, or fall four days apart. A minimum wage job means working until 10:00 or 11:00 PM, and then having to report to work the next morning at 6:00 AM. A minimum-wage job means having a work schedule that’s never the same one week to the next, and that’s a melange or morning, day and evening shifts calibrated for maximum exhaustion. A minimum-wage job means being hired part-time but working full time hours — without, of course, the benefits conferred upon full-timers (such as they are). A minimum-wage job means kiting rent checks to the landlord of the roach-infested studio apartment that you can’t afford. A minimum-wage job means epic commute times, because a car is out of the question, and public transit is your only option (to anyone not in New York, Boston, Chicago or Washington DC, this means a schlep on buses which seem to run with ever decreasing frequency). A minimum-wage job means anomie of a most soul-crushing sort, as you look up from your abased position in the bilge of the great ship Capital. A minimum-wage job means entertaining heterodox thoughts about honest pay for honest work that, while perhaps not the most spectacular or “creative,” in Richard Florida’s sense, is nonetheless socially necessary. (Burgers can’t flip themselves, after all.)

Gypsies, tramps and thieves: unemployed Americans "re-train" during Recovery Summer.

It’s easy to see, then, the nature of the choice Schwarzenegger is presenting to California’s state workers: Pull down a minimum wage in the relative ease and comfort of your current position, or earn it in the private sector by flipping burgers, cutting lawns or bagging groceries.

Of course, apologists for the neoliberal status quo are quick to point out that in the vast majority of cases, a minimum-wage gig is just a sort, albeit unpleasant, station on life’s way. Ceteris paribus this observation might be true, but it overlooks, I think, the fact that plentiful opportunity, an indispensable prerequisite for mobility out of this wage stratum, is not constant, but fluctuating, shrinking and contracting concomitantly with the overall economy. In an economic environment where work — any work — is difficult to come by, the suckiest jobs achieve an added luster. This July 8, 2010 story over at MoneyTalksNews seems to support this assertion. In it is quoted one Mimi Collins, a spokesperson for the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a body which recently conducted a survey that found that “average starting salary offers to [this years crop of college grads] are down 1.3 percent vs. the average of those offered to the Class of 2009.” Collins says, ““It’s just a simple supply-and-demand result of what’s going on the economy right now. You just have fewer opportunities all the way around.”

The current salary squeeze mentioned by Collins is given a bit more body in this June 25, 2010 story in The San Franscisco Chronicle, which, though it focuses on advice to current workers for their retirement, does make a salient point about current career realities. “A generation ago, students who earned a college degree had a reasonable assurance of earning a good living from that degree,” the article states.

However, a bachelor’s degree now probably carries about the same weight that a high school diploma carried in bygone days. A master’s or doctorate degree is now required for many higher-paying jobs, especially those in the corporate or academic world. Those who choose not to obtain any type of higher academic or vocational education may find themselves earning minimum wage for much of their lives.

Thus it seems that the downward adjustment is complete: College diplomas carry as much weight in the job market as high school diplomas as yesteryear. And high school diplomas? Well, if you’re over age 35, you might just want to hang on to your grammar-school certificate of completion.

Opportunity knocks — like the engine of a 1978 AMC Gremlin.

Opportunity knocks — like the engine of a 1978 AMC Gremlin. Neoclassical economists make much ado about dispelling what they call the “lump-of-labor fallacy,” the erroneous idea that there is a fixed quantity of work to be done in a given society. Though I’m inclined to agree that this notion is mistaken, I wonder if it may still be that case that there is a fixed quantity of labor opportunities to be had in a given society, particularly if that society is subject to monetarist economic policy, with its interest rate hikes and dips and debt-burdened currency whose velocity of circulation is directly determined by these hikes and dips.

Call it the lump-of-opportunity fact — or, better, Peak Opportunity. So if minimum wage is fast becoming today’s new standard, what will be tomorrow’s? As to what the future holds, let me just say, Goodbye fast-food nation, hello “ant tribe.”

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