The New York Review of Books - September 3, 2013
In his speech commemorating the Martin Luther King March on
Washington last week, President Obama got it partly right. It’s not only
about civil rights. It’s also, crucially, about jobs. Of the marchers
back in 1963, Obama said, “They were there seeking jobs as well as
justice—not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic
opportunity. For what does it profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit
at an integrated lunch counter if he can’t afford the meal?”
The need for gainful work is desperately important now, with overall
unemployment, even after recent improvements, still stubbornly high, and
blacks, as has long been the case, around twice as likely to be
unemployed as whites. Indeed, Obama’s speech heralded the arrival of a
bleak Labor Day, at a time when so many young Americans cannot find
work.
But then Obama got it wrong. “The twin forces of technology and
global competition,” he said, “have subtracted those jobs that once
provided a foothold into the middle class, reduced the bargaining power
of American workers.” This is the centrist economist in Obama talking,
who buys into current economic orthodoxy: technological advances in many
industries, so the explanation goes, have in many cases replaced a
human labor force with an automated one; and thanks to global markets,
what human labor is needed is moving to countries where wages are low.
What about government policy? Many aspects of our current employment
crisis have less to do with technology or globalization than with the
administration’s failure to adopt policies to strengthen the labor
force, and more precisely, those parts of the labor force that are most
crucial to the nation’s long-term social and economic health.
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