Service with Dignity

"...[I]t is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income." --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; "All Labor Has Dignity" Speech, 18 March 1968

     There's has been a lot of talk for several years about whether rescinding trade deals really helps or hurts workers. [May 2026 edit:  this post was first drafted in 2016. We have had many significant 'adjustments' to trade in recent years.  Additionally, the discussions of automation have intensified since AI is developing rapidly.]  I am offering my opinions in this regard.  But some of my life training and education add to my insights. 

     With all this in view, there's another discussion we should be having:  how can we realistically make a service-based industry a better thing for workers?  For one thing, there's no guarantee how many substantial manufacturing jobs we can bring back home.  Secondly, though outsourcing was a big part of the problem, many jobs were replaced by automation/computerization.         

     It's helpful to look at other examples.  While we cannot be exactly like other countries, we can learn from them.  In Germany, around 70-75% of the workforce is in service jobs.  Yet, having a job like this is not taken as a mark of "shame."  I have seen German wait-staff at work:  they treat it as a real profession.  (Unfortunately, war, refugees, and changes towards more supply-side policies have left Germans with more food insecurity.)

     Although politicians can't change our behavior directly, they do seem to exercise outsized influence on people.  Maybe if they came out and talked about our "nameless, faceless" service industry workers, if they reminded everyone of the respect that McDonald's and Wal-Mart workers should have, maybe that would make a difference.

     Here in America, dumping supply-side economics would be a good thing.  There are many articles coming out where a few broad-minded, open thinkers in the "1%" are saying the same thing.  They value a stable society and argue that better wages are part of this.  They admit that huge windfalls for the wealthy don't "trickle down."  They remind their audiences that the wealthy need middle-class customers to buy their stuff.  They remind others that, if the middle class isn't stretched so thin timewise, they can volunteer in ways to make the world a better place.

     Some of these thinkers admit where the windfall to the rich goes:  it goes to buying up stock in their own companies.  This artificially raises the price of stock, which gives the CEOs, who get part of their income off their stocks, more money.  One of these enlightened one-percenters pointed out that every Wal-Mart employee could have gotten a raise of over $4000 with the money Wal-Mart spent to buy up and inflate its own stock.  

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