That might have merit if jobs really were the issue. But do we really think the issue during the Baltimore, Ferguson and Oakland riots was centered on “jobs?” It’s no more connected to employment opportunity than the inane idea jobs would bring an end to ISIS.
But yet again, it puts Trump’s name in headlines, giving him his daily publicity fix.
I agree with your post.
I don’t think people realize that our “jobs” problem and cultural problems are deeper and broader than people understand. Jobs are going away for two reasons, one is very old and one is a bit newer.
First, the country got rich rebuilding the world after WWII, and massive consumerism kept it going. The first wound down a while ago and the second is not sustainable. It is faltering as I type this.
Second, the number of jobs necessary to support a post-industrialized world is a fraction of that needed to support all the people that live in it. Just as it doesn’t take as many people to work on the farms to get us our food, the same is true for more and more of the things that are produced by automation. What good is it if manufacturing is done in the US, but what used to take 100 employees to produce now takes 2.
And to amplify the paragraph above, it used to be that technology, though it appeared to eliminate jobs, actually increased productivity. I used to be a draftsman. Technology initially made us more productive, but how many draftsmen do you know today. In me early days in IT, our documents were produced by secretaries. MS Word and WordPerfect both made our secretaries more efficient and let us produce some of our own documents. It’s been 20 years since I had someone else create my documents. Those secretaries are replaced.
Fact is, the only way there are enough jobs is if we “make” work. And that may be a form of what is happening today. It may be why there are so many government jobs.
But the bottom line is that we may be entering a new era, as it was over a hundred years ago, where unionization is what solidified the middle class. I say that as someone that has always abhorred unions. I’ve always said that they had their time and place, but that time has passed.
It may be returning.