by EW Wilder
As I found myself thinking the other day that a lot of colleagues have to take day jobs in order to pay for their teaching habits, a very real and seemingly inexplicable phenomenon became clear: at a time when there is more and more demand for experienced, highly-educated post-secondary educators, educational institutions are increasingly reluctant to pay for them. The number of full-time teaching gigs is in serious decline while the openings for adjuncts are spiking.
Just look at the HR page for any community college and you’ll see what I mean: they’re so hard-up for part-timers that they just keep the ads for adjuncts up permanently, and only once in a while does a full-time position even appear. I’m beginning to think that the only reason they keep a few full-timers around is so they can ask people to sit on committees.
The historical argument for why this is happening is that there are simply more people with advanced degrees than there are openings, so the colleges and universities are able to get away with hiring a bunch of semi-qualified part timers to teach the entry-level classes while reserving full time and tenure track positions for the brightest and the best.
The problem is that an advanced degree generally translates into a bundle of debt; Master’s and PhD level people simply can’t afford to take part time gigs, and a lot of part time work won’t leave enough time to gather the necessary publications one needs to vie for the full time jobs. So many people with advanced degrees just find something else to do, something that pays the bills, leaving those paltry part time jobs to the hobbyists who can afford to work them for fun, the moms looking for a few extra dollars now that the kids are in school, and the truly desperate.
Now, this isn’t to say that a bunch of good teaching doesn’t get done; all those demographics, even the desperate, can be outstanding teachers, but they can’t put in the time or afford the effort that a full timer can. And it fails to answer an important economic question.
Free market theory posits that the institutions of higher learning are supposed to open more full time positions when they see their labor force moving on; they have more positions than takers, so they have to “sweeten the pot” by offering more money, benefits, real jobs. They need people—that’s demand—which is supposed to increase the value of the ready supply. But just the opposite has happened: not only has the number of part time college jobs increased, the pay for these positions has remained laughably low and hasn’t noticeably increased. It may be enough for beer money if you happen to have the time, but mostly teaching classes part time is more hassle than it’s worth.
Complicating matters are the pressures of the Great Recession: many of the laid off are heading back to school for retraining. So you’d think that colleges and universities would redouble their efforts to open up more full time positions since more people enrolled also increases demand.
But you’d be wrong.
Granted, part of what’s going on here is also recession and policy driven: budget shortfalls at the state level created by decreasing tax revenue from decreased economic activity and the attempts to stimulate growth through tax breaks has impoverished state institutions. Since these places had been created to help people move into middle class jobs, they were heavily subsidized, and increases in tuition money won’t come close to bridging that gap until it’s truly on par with private colleges. Even if a state school wanted to open up more full time positions, it probably couldn’t.
The effect of this is pernicious on the rest of the market. Since a state school is generally the biggest player in a local higher ed market, its pay scale tends to set the standard, so when the big guys can’t afford to pay people what they’re worth, the privates and for-profits think can get away with the same thing even if, as in the case of places like the University of Phoenix, they could certainly afford to hire as many full timers as they’d like (and which, as near as I can tell, have no full time teaching faculty at all).
But there’s something else going on here, too, something deeply disturbing. The past decade or so has seen colleges and universities reorganizing themselves along the lines of businesses. The reasoning is that education is a service that is paid for; in the same way that a mechanic fixes your brakes, presumably, a college is supposed to fix your mind. And because money flows through the system, and students have a choice about where to go, the analogy seems to hold.
The flaws with this idea I don’t even have time to enumerate, but the effect has been that colleges have added levels of middle management to their structures. When I started in higher education more than 20 years ago, the idea that a college would have a “marketing department” was absurd; it would even have been thought crass. At the time, you would have had a “communications” or “relations” department that took care of everything from the college view book to the alumni newsletter. And IT was generally an offshoot of the computer science department; the institution created efficiencies by turning needed innovations into learning opportunities for students and research opportunities for faculty.
Management culture cannot comprehend this, of course; it doesn’t see learning and teaching as an important part of a business’s function, so when the great reorganization took place, these departments became their own separate entities along with their own separate layers of management and supervision. And a very dangerous idea was brought into the mix, which was this: your labor force is usually your biggest expense, and at a college or a university, most of your workers are people who teach; therefore, if you want to reduce costs, you must eliminate the costs of people who teach. And so one important reason that the market for faculty in higher ed seems to move in a way that contradicts market forces is that the administration wants it that way.
That this has not also severely decreased the pay of those others at colleges—like IT people and marketing people—is also not all that surprising: business people understand what those people do and understand the need for them. They fundamentally don’t understand what faculty members do, their needs for time to plan and study and grade, not to mention publish and do research, and so it’s much easier to take an ax to what seems like a money-losing item on the spreadsheet. To the mind of one steeped in management culture, full time teachers seem a lot like other front-line workers, such as those in retail or factory work: relatively replaceable, hard to identify with, and a major cost that’s probably not worth keeping if you can help it.
The larger lesson here is that certain very dear free market principles simply don’t work in the real world. There are a few highly-sought-after skilled workers, such as petroleum engineers, who industry is willing to pay a lot of money and to whom the concepts of simple labor supply and demand apply. But for most workers, the pay scale is a matter not just of market conditions but of perceived value, of the desires of management, and of the traditional value we place on certain kinds of work. Retail, for example, hasn’t traditionally paid well, so retail managers can, as one recently did on The Diane Rehm Show, complain that they can’t find people who can “present themselves” in a way that comports with retail work, and not even touch on the fact that maybe these are skills for which you have to pay a premium.
In Wichita, my home town, and the ostensible “Air Capital” of the world due to so many aircraft companies having a presence there, experienced aerospace engineers are being laid off at the same time that airplane companies are complaining loudly that they can’t find good people. What they really mean, of course, is they can’t find desperate people who will work for peanuts; they have redefined “good people” as those who are young and inexperienced, the ones who can’t demand a salary that matches their depth of understanding.
If you think that I’m suggesting that airplane companies will settle for cheaper and worse even when the lives of those who fly on planes is at stake, you’re absolutely right. Retailers will settle for worse service rather than pay people with the skills they seek. Colleges and universities will settle for crammed classes, harried teachers, and lower quality instruction rather than pay for full timers. This phenomenon is an offshoot of the supply side gone mad, the failure of current market theory to explain the most basic concept of current business culture: the bottom line beats all.
by Lael Ewy
The assessment was born of mass alienation. If you know what you’re doing, if you know your craft, your art, your field of study, you know if you’re doing well or not. Assessment makes no sense outside of education or an industrial culture in which those actually invested and involved in the process of making and doing don’t “need” to have a complete understanding, or even a basic understanding, of that process or its final result.
As Matthew B. Crawford has pointed out, there is an ethic of doing that comes from an intimate knowledge of the tools and the techniques of the job. It is to this ethos that I suggest we return.
When the company owns your labor, it also owns your interest in that labor, in the quality of the work and the values invested in the process. Thus “labor” becomes a commodity outside of the actual job instead of integral to the task. Marx understood this as a foundational principle, but few collectivist schemes have been able to reinvest it in the activities of the people. That is because it is inherent not to capitalism as Marx suggested but to industrialism: large scale production separates work from product and expertise from process. It creates fictive worlds in which things are created and services delivered outside of the scale of individual agency: we can see how we fit the nut to the bolt, but we can’t see how the machine really works, where the resources are gathered, how the marketing gets made.
Those forms of collectivism that have succeeded have done so within the confines of traditional and often religiously-bound communities, such as the Hutterites, whose faith calls them to the tasks but whose understanding of the roles of each within the whole keeps them tied together and satisfied. It feels good to do good work. It feels good to see how what you do is beneficial to those you count your own.
Even quite simple assembly-line tasks can be reinfused with the notions of ownership and craft, and this is where management can play a role, but managers themselves must also become reinvested in their own roles. No matter what, the larger understanding of how one’s actions affect the overall task must not merely be allowed but encouraged. Part of the task of the company must be the continual education of its employees, much of which must happen by the employees for each other.
Because the labor of the worker is the property of the company, intellectual and ethical investment with the product or service must also be accompanied by literal investment in the company; labor must also mean an actual share in the enterprise. Too long have executives purposefully and often maliciously enhanced the alienation of the laborer by denying her her share in the overall endeavor. It is easier, after all, to get rid of a worker who has been convinced, and who has convinced herself, that her time there is worth only her time and not her hopes, much less her heart and sweat and soul.
Too many companies are like the current Hawker-Beech in Wichita, which went from a family-run airplane company to one that no one seems to really own, no matter one’s position within it or the value of one’s stock. So distanced are the principals from the task that the product line has stagnated, the traditions fallen fallow, the executives baffled when their latest ploys have failed.
When the worker is not merely entitled to stop the line when she sees a flaw float by but feels an urgent need, when she anticipates how that flaw will happen given the conditions, the resources, the processes in place, then assessments will be redundant and production again a worthwhile endeavor: an act of creation and not a mere set of actions within a set of procedures set against the stone hearts of an industry’s distant and disinterested captains.
by Lael Ewy
At some level, we all want agency and autonomy. Individuals want them; governments, NGOs, and businesses want these as well. We might call some formulation of autonomy and agency “freedom,” a word that has been abused almost to the degree that “love” has been. “Liberty” might be a better word, with its associations with throwing off tyranny and its deeper resonances with the liberal arts—the skills we need to practice agency and autonomy. But this word, too, has been stretched around specific civil liberties, “libertarianism,” and the like, and is trending toward the uselessness “freedom” has taken on.
“Agency and autonomy” more clearly and completely express what I mean, and they better reflect what people desire when pursuing “freedom” however expressed. We like being able to do things and seeing that action make an impact in our world. We like to have power over our decisions, to not be coerced or forced by circumstance to do things. We like the feeling of some degree of control over our destinies.
We can align agency and autonomy along traditional notions: autonomy = “freedom from,” and agency = “freedom to.”
The problems arise when we exercise agency and autonomy in ways that negatively impact others’ lives.
The most basic cases are of the “freedom to swing my arm ending where your nose begins” types and need not be enumerated here. Things get more complicated when the damage is not quite so obvious, when the damage is collective, when the damage takes place over time, or when the dangerous behaviors are part of a system we rely on for other basic needs like shelter, safety, and food.
Pollution and environmental degradation provide ready real-world applications of these problems. Oil spills, for instance, are readily seen, but other types can be more insidious: water pollution, air pollution, contamination of food often show up first as symptoms rather than visible effects. These problems can be long-term and cumulative: carcinogens can take many years to sicken us and may not affect everyone equally. And the collective impact can be dire: by the time systemic harm is done to a population or an ecosystem, it is often too late to “fix” the problem.
Forms of accountability in these cases require regulation and monitoring, and those things impinge on the agency and autonomy of those engaged (and often enriched) by the dangerous activity. And so our notions of political liberty clash with our ability to live safe, healthy lives in a clean and productive environment.
But, of course, the polluting activities are often tied to the immediate livelihoods of those engaged in them: we rely on industry and fossil-fuels to give us remunerative work and to power our civilization. Put in terms of “liberty,” we see few options other than to continue as we are; the “freedoms” we enjoy, such as driving where we want to and being employed seem to depend on maintaining the status quo, and the “freedom” of the industry to continue as it always has therefore seems an affront to our basic rights.
If we parse things out in terms of agency and autonomy, though, we can begin to see our way to the third element, which is responsibility. If we are completely autonomous, we have no one to rely on but ourselves when the consequences are dire. But we also must acknowledge that we are fallible beings, prone to error. To assume the capability of full responsibility is also to assume either omniscience or self-destruction. One is absurd and the other untenable.
Likewise, complete agency assumes omnipotence and total unaccountability: the ability to act without restriction either physical or social. This is physically impossible, of course, but it is also limited by our social situation. We have already seen cases of reasonable social restriction: when harm is caused to one’s person. But we must also acknowledge that our actions can sometimes hamper others’ agency and autonomy. I become less able, for instance, to ply my trade as a shoe salesman when Wal-Mart moves to town and is able to undercut my prices. My autonomy of movement is restricted by others’ ability to put fences around their property.
But we are also faced with other restrictions: my ability to ply my trade of poet is restricted by the cultural reliance on the idea of market value, and so I must pursue other work to support my writing habit.
Right now, some 30 million people find their ability to act with agency within their chosen professions is hampered by our reliance on an ailing economic system.
The manner in which we formulate agency and autonomy is determined by culture; in fact, a major feature of a culture is what the people who comprise it consider necessary or worthwhile to do and what of that is up to discretion and what is a matter of compulsion.
Responsibility is only meaningful within this framework, and is renegotiated when the cultural environment, or when the environment within which a culture exists, changes. “Taking care of yourself and those you love” looks very different in a hunter-gatherer society than it does in a modern industrial society or in whatever society we’re becoming. As we become that new society, it behooves us to be intentional about how we practice agency and what autonomy we find proper. No culture can function unless the majority of people agree on that relationship.
To botch that renegotiation is to make the suffering of the last few years look like relative luxury.
by EW Wilder
You hear a lot about how America has a “jobs” problem, and sometimes hear about how it has a “competitiveness gap” with the rest of the world and occasionally about how it has an “education gap,” and far too often about how it spends more than it takes in.
None of this is terribly accurate. Here’s why:
The US economy is not exactly capitalist, and it hasn’t been for quite some time. It is an industrial economy of the supply-side type. It has used a system of capital investment combined with government incentive and government-subsidized access to resources to create and fuel the industrial base of that supply-side system.
Access to forests, coal, oil, copper, aluminum, and other natural resources has always been underwritten and incentivized by Washington because these resources were abundant in the United States and because easy and cheap access to them made the creation of products out of them cheap and therefore profitable. One ancillary effect was the creation of massive oversupply: factories made more stuff than there was a ready market for. For a long time, that was okay: the creation of millions of factory jobs was another ancillary effect of industrialized capital, and it allowed for excess wages, which the magic of marketing then turned into demand for the massive oversupply.
But excess wages required relatively well-paid factory workers, a situation created by widespread unionization and the early model of Henry Ford, who paid his workers enough to buy his cars, thus creating a market from his very workforce.
A few generations of this and you have consumerism, the merits and demerits of which we won’t go into here, but suffice it to say, the culture of excess wage and excess production made for material comfort for the masses and massive wealth for the capitalists. Among capitalists, though, it also created the expectation of continual growth: if we know our level of success through how well we dispense with oversupply, the only way to measure our success against our competitors is in how much more profit we make from that oversupply than our competitors do. Thus mere profit is not enough; success must be measured in the continual growth of profit quarter-to-quarter, fiscal-year-to-fiscal year.
Investors’ expectations of continual growth eventually ran up against the realities of the consumer market: while there are always new things to buy, once an established pattern of buying develops, and once a population becomes saturated with consumer products—the situation of a so-called “mature” market—growth slows down to something resembling the overall growth in population. And middle-class, consumer people have few children: their futures are supplied by their own retirement benefits and government-run social security.
This was the case in the US in the 1970s, and it was exacerbated by the realization that natural resources were in fact limited, a realization brought on when the US reached peak oil production in 1970 and then our supplies from the Arab world were interrupted.
Traditional, industrial-based supply-side economics are difficult under these circumstances. How were investors’ expectations to be met? This is when American businesses became more clever than wise. They realized that their major expense was labor (remember the well-paid factory workers from above?) and so the quickest, easiest way to show growth in profitability was to get rid of the biggest-cost item, namely the workforce. And outsourcing, downsizing, “rightsizing,” and “efficiencies” through automation were rewarded not only by CEOs but by investors as well: a good way to get your stock price to rise in the ’80s and ’90s was to lay a bunch of people off.
In the ’90s this was packaged as a brave new world of being “information” workers instead of brute, blue-collar laborers. We were going to educate our way to a new era with a kinder, gentler, smarter workforce. It didn’t turn out that way, of course: first of all, automation quickly took over many information jobs industry promised, and the rest were outsourced to the increasingly well-educated populations of India and China. But there’s another, more important reason this didn’t work: having just gotten rid of an expensive industrial workforce, American companies were not going to risk the cost of hiring them all back at even more costly white-collar wages. Besides, the oversupply of goods were now even cheaper than before, flooding in from China and India and Mexico; we needed even more people to sell goods than before. Thus retail exploded, and industrial workers found their way to the sales floors of Home Depot instead of the factory floors of Ford and GM.
Sadly, these retail jobs had traditionally paid considerably less than factory work, and they continued to do so. But, by training and necessity, we were still consumers; we were making less than we used to, but we still needed to buy to live and believe ourselves successful, especially to live out that American Dream we had grown up pursuing. In order to keep that dream going, the Fed and financial institutions drastically slashed interest rates; we went from being a nation of producer-consumers to being a nation of seller-borrowers. And the last place we found to squeeze credit from was our homes.
When banks and financial institutions found this last, great well of American equity, people’s homes, they went after it with a vengeance, upselling home equity loans, pushing mortgages on people who could never afford them, and packaging these in collateralized debt obligations—all in the pursuit of that one value they still retained: the need for continual growth.
Hopefully, I need not recount how that worked out. I assume that the readers of this blog will, unlike most Americans, recall the years since 2008.
And so we’re faced with a situation in which our supply-side system is stressed on the bottom end by lack of excess wages for workers and on the top end by dwindling resources, by two political parties that fail to understand this relationship, and by investors and corporations that have managed, through bailouts and complex financial instruments, to finally fire not merely the vast majority of the workforce, but the vast majority of actual business investments: as long as they have stock to play with, they can make money. As long as they can make more money betting on the market than the next guy, they can maintain the illusion of continual growth. As long as they can obtain and market somebody’s resources, even if they have to waste the nation’s blood and treasure to do it, they can tell themselves that this is how capitalism is supposed to work and this is how markets stay “free.”
First and foremost, we need to stop thinking in terms of overproduction. Our world is finite, and we need some mechanism, market-based or governmental or cultural or some combination of these, to bring demand in line with actual supply.
Second, we need to abandon the virtue of continual growth. Metastasis will kill the host.
Last, we need to rethink the relationship between wages, human value, and a dignified life. Excess wages and consumerism make us believe that we are more successful if we can buy more stuff. But, really, in the end, do we miss our loved ones who have passed on any more for having had more things, or do we miss them more for having been better people?
There are a few ways this can happen—and it will happen; the availability of resources will dictate that. These ways all fall into two broad categories: one is relatively easy and relatively planned. It involves cooperation between The People and the employers, between the citizen and her government. The other is hard and chaotic. It involves carrying on like we have until the crash that reduces us to a world of pre-industrialism, perhaps even of pre-history.
Which would you choose?
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