Getting Back To Our Grassroots, What is the Measure of a Quality Job?
For those trading time for money, the quality of time spent is an elemental measure of a quality job.
The economy of Maine was centralized in 1976. Coastal Enterprises Incorporated (CEI) has been a community development corporation in Maine since 1977. Both described their purpose as bringing capital resources to the small business community but CEI started as a grassroots resource while Governor Longley’s Task Force was composed of the heads of the largest and wealthiest corporations in Maine.
The State’s centrally managed economy and the grassroots are diametrically opposing economic development concepts, one growing from local roots and the other managed from the top down.
CEI’s purpose has evolved over 44 years, as reflected in the language that it implements to communicate its purpose:
The Turn of the Century:
CED puts the values of equity, social justice, and grassroots empowerment squarely on the table as part of any sustainable development effort. Without them, there can be neither economic nor institutional sustainability to undergird initiatives which are environmentally responsible. Making Waves, Vol. 10, No. 2 2003
Today:
CEI is a 44-year-old mission-based lender that integrates financing, business and industry expertise, and policy solutions to grow good jobs, environmentally sustainable enterprises, and more broadly shared prosperity
“The terms “good jobs” or “quality jobs” were coined in state economic development policy to signify jobs of higher than average wages and benefits.
Wages, salaries, and benefits are not determined by an exchange between employer and employee, they are decided in a deal made with the State, which makes calculable revenue from the payroll taxes on a determinate number of jobs at a specified base rate. In exchange, the private corporation gets tax exemptions, refundable tax credits, free job training, corporate payroll tax exemptions, and other benefits funded by the general taxpayer.
To the economic development cognoscenti, the term “good jobs” or “quality jobs” signifies that the job meets state standards to qualify for tax exemptions, subsidies, and other benefits, but the “good jobs” term used in general implicates other jobs as bad, demoting those jobs in the eyes of society.
A commenter, going by the name of Drobnxsphd, in Jesica Wildfire’s article, Here’s Why Nobody Wants to Work Anymore (Again) describes the type of cultural environment fostered by a hierarchical centrally managed order :
I agree but I think it's worse than you describe. Not only is it the trophy wives and financial planners, but almost everyone is looking down on someone else. In most of our own minds, we ARE the privileged. Trophy wives and financial planners look down at the Jr executives who look down on the managers who look down on the professionals who look down on the restaurant managers who look down on the staff who look down on the students who look down on the unemployed who look down on the addicts. Drobnxsphd
A “good job” Is one that is good for trade-offs of tax exemptions and subsidies. It is good from the perspective of the capital investors but not necessarily from the perspective of the worker as higher monetary benefits are not a qualified stand-in for spiritual well-being. It is the worker who gives his or her time to the work experience.
Engagement in a work process is a primary quality factor of meaningful use of time. Since working people spend their lives working, the quality of the time spent matters, as much as it matters to make an equitable income. The fact that the state has been running our economy as if the only measure of value is in material rewards, while some have capital to barter for material rewards and others must barter with time, needs to be held to account as detrimental to society.
Engagement in meaningful work and human relationships enhances a feeling of self-worth, which is a measure of quality for the person whose time is spent on the job.
A dream that was common when CEI and the centralized economy were first established was to earn a living doing what one loves. This concept takes into account that the workers are giving their time in exchange for an income and they want it to be time well spent.
One of the ways to assure one’s time is spent well is to run one’s own business but the level of pay and benefits qualifying a job as a good or quality job can act as a barrier for the grassroots entrepreneur who starts on a shoestring. Using such a definition means grassroots entrepreneurialism must also be connected to generous streams of capital in the manner of today’s startups and IPO’s, promising ”high growth” to attract “angel investors” and/or shareholders and government tax incentives and subsidies.
However, angel investors often want high growth in exchange for high risk so they can sell out to make a profit and move on. Federal and state funding is intended for implementing the master plan of the State. There can be a serendipitous agreement between the grassroots and the top-down agenda but the grassroots has to fit a template designed by central management, angel investors, or shareholders in order to qualify for funding and other benefits.
It is my experience from interacting with government programs that ideas outside of specified government guidelines are supported in rhetoric but not practice. Bureaucrats have said that a qualified project has to fit into a specific government list despite what may be stated in program guidelines.
When I approached federal rural economic development, the response I received from central management was:
”We don’t know if ceramics qualifies as a rural industry.”
Only since the beginning of human civilization!
Today CEI uses language and concepts indistinguishable from a tech startup investment sales pitch.
EDA funds will allow Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI) to scale the Catalyst Fund to provide innovative, early stage equity capital to food system businesses with the potential for high growth, job creation, and positive environmental and social impacts.
The EDA is the U.S. Economic Development Administration. Despite earlier tributes paid to local businesses by CEI, the clear and present guiding light comes from following the money that trickles down from federal central management using wealth redistribution as its instrument. Grants, tax exemptions, tax credits, and other subsidies lead the way ultimately driven by shareholder profits. The contemporary CEI sounds like an investment banker selling tech startups. The new tech industries will be so heavily financed that they can easily bulldoze over the pre-existing culture.
All for the public benefit, so say the salesmen and lords.
People are not collections of data. They are complex mysterious phenomena of the natural world. From the perspective of the individual, that which constitutes a good job is based on a concert of personal criteria that can be orchestrated for different effects at different times in the context of what is going on in the rest of life.
In the newfound public voice of the workers made possible by social media, It is becoming increasingly self-evident that a system built on a broken promise of broadly shared prosperity and a working environment based in hierarchical order is all too often counter-conducive to productivity that is the source of wealth creation or healthy social relationships that underpin well beingness.
My family’s business, Andersen Design fit perfectly with the earlier published criteria of the CEI organization’s mission that perhaps was a real policy during the time before the wealth-redistribution highways were installed in the community economic development system, but in practice, Andersen Design did not find CEI to be a source of support. At first, it seemed so but the counselor with whom we had a rapport was let go and the replacement did not engage in the same level of dialogue so we did not continue that pursuit.
However, it is important to put Andersen Design in the context of the early beginnings of Coastal Enterprises. CEI was founded on the Boothbay Peninsula in 1976 where Andersen Design was established in 1952 as the first ceramic enterprise in the region and one of the early craft enterprises. Andersen Design did not start with capital investors and is genuinely categorized as a minority at the margins of the economy. By the seventies, Andersen Design was growing but to this day as a small hand-made production, in an era when the goal of success is to become larger, larger, and larger, Andersen Design is still categorically positioned at the margins of the economy, not mainstream, and not part of the centrally-managed order.
Thus it is notable that although CEI started on the Boothbay Peninsula as did Andersen Design, CEI did not include Andersen Design in its systemic analysis of the local economy, even in the days when it was more closely aligned with a grassroots culture, perhaps because in its beginnings, CEI was working with the Governor’s office, who was Governor Longley, the same Governor who had established the centrally managed economy and the corporate state two years earlier.-aka- the grid.
When we approached CEI, we might have been caught up in a watershed moment of the changing of the guards at CEI. Once the wealth redistribution infrastructure is in place unless there are people involved with a genuine grassroots sensibility, practicing policy is driven by tax exemptions and subsidies, and the community economic development organization acts as a developer planning the economy of an entire region as an operating partner of the State, not a grassroots organization.
The reason why Andersen Design is excluded from economic central management plans is simple. Besides not being identifiable as new tech, although ceramic is used in all sorts of tech, there are hardly any slip-casting operations in the USA. Central managers deal in masses, including industrial masses.
The idea that all good jobs pay state-defined wages wipes out the possibility of starting a business on a shoestring and raising ones self up by one’s bootstraps, which was once the American dream, and is the way that Andersen Design grew in the 1950s. We taught the skills of making ceramics on the job and did not receive government subsidization, although training an employee on the job can be quite costly to an employee. Our payroll taxes were not subsidized.
The deals between private corporations and the state often include job training, subsidized payroll taxes, and 50% subsidization of capitalization costs of the business are commonplace. That makes it worthwhile to hire a predetermined number of employees at state-determined wages and benefits, giving the State’s “targeted sector” advantages over the rest of the economy, which through taxation is paying for the benefits the State grants its targeted sector.
After receiving one small loan from the Small Business Association, Andersen Design grew on its own, although I am not clear on what happened when there was a new production facility started in Portland, Maine. I remember my father saying that it would be easier to get a loan if he were asking for a larger amount of money. I grew up in a seasonally poor economy. In the winter it was exciting to get the mail to find out if there was a check. Money always flowed more abundantly in the warmer months. Security rested in faith in the organic rhythm of life’s eventualities.
If a good job is defined as one paying higher than average wages and benefits, and it is, then most people cannot have a good job. Today the belief that broadly shared prosperity is unattainable in the existing system has attained critical mass and calls for a different approach and recognition of how the existing system is structured to grow the top at the expense of the whole.
The concept of good jobs as defined by higher than average wages and benefits implies that there is and always will be a wealth divide. To seal the deal for benefits, each new company has to create jobs with a higher than average pay scale than its neighbors, and those jobs are usually created in small areas defined as opportunity zones, supposedly for low-income high unemployment areas, but if low-income is determined by the median income for the region and that keeps rising, contradictions emerge as the wages in opportunity zone drive the previously existing economy and culture deep into the woods. Once hooked on opportunity zone status, it is difficult for a region (or an “authority”) to let go of those benefits and as the opportunity zone becomes richer it becomes more powerful and connected in negotiating new opportunity zone deals for itself.
And so the entire culture is molded into a one-world order where all the recognized citizens work in the targeted sector capitalized by the corporate state.
Grouped according to their several interests, individuals form classes; they form trade-unions when organized according to their several economic activities; but first and foremost they form the State, which is no mere matter of numbers, the sums of the individuals forming the majority. Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self-same line of development and spiritual formation. Not a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality. Benito Mussolini- The Doctrine of Fascism (emphasis by author)
Once a low wage was associated with an entry-level position where training takes place on the job, but today the state has taken over job training for its targeted sector culminating in codifying the repurposing of Maine public education as industrial job training in the Industrial Partnerships Act of 2013. Through taxation, the untargeted sector pays for the targeted sectors’ job training and payroll taxes, as well as their own.
If the rate of pay is not based on what the employee brings to the job, and if it is simultaneously based on an arbitrary but mandated number of employees that the employer must deliver in a deal made with the State, then in some cases it does not qualify as earned income but rather as an entitlement for showing up at company headquarters for a headcount. This, in turn, can encourage a work culture where employees complain about too many middle managers, too many interferences, and expectations that they attend company parties on the job, all of which distracts from productivity, the true source of wealth.
Jobs not included in the government’s targeted sector that cannot compete with its taxpayer-subsidized wages are bad jobs, including retail jobs, which since covid are classified as “essential workers” who, unsaid, work “bad jobs”, according to propaganda. At the same time, many states jumped at the bait held out by Amazon to have the giant retailers headquarters in their state, offering the extremities of corporate welfare to a company whose retail jobs are warehouse runners and stockers and infamous for bad working conditions.
We’ve entered the era of aggressive entitlement.
The problem with Mr. Smoothie is that he’s so typical now. Americans think it’s fine to treat service workers like serfs. Here’s Why Nobody Wants to Work Anymore (Again) We’re not lazy, just demoralized. Jessica Wildfire on Medium
Systemically, a living wage entitlement causes the cost of living to rise whereas earned income is stabilizing for the value of the dollar. The “good job” or the “quality Job” are terms emergent from State corporate welfare deals involving artificial determinations of wages. It is no different in inflationary effect than artificially raising the cost of a consumer product. An equitable relationship has two sides to the equation. If the cost of labor is raised without a relationship to productivity, it is inflationary. Artificially raising wages by a third party that has no working knowledge of the elements in balance can produce inflationary effects that result in calls for increases in workforce wages.
It would make more sense to use UBIs to reset inequities in the system, using the GINI rating as the measure and median income as the line of demarcation, and get the state out of managing the economy. Maintaining a balance in the flow of currency guided by the GINI rating would be the state’s only economic management role and would theoretically eliminate the State choosing winners and losers. I know that is a radical idea but so would be the state centrally managing the economy if that were not what exists. There is an argument to be made for the UBI but that is for another day.
UPDATE on Upcoming Boothbay Green Party Caucus!
Tentatively scheduled for 4 PM on Wednesday, Feb 23 at the Town Hall. Desiree Scorcia, our Town Selectperson will be the Convener.
Also published on Data-Driven Investor (Medium)