Remembering the Good Job Market Of the 70s

It’s not just that there were tons of jobs, it’s that you could get hired to do things that now require a specialized degree. That photography job would now require a masters degree and an internship. I would love to work as a librarian but they won’t hire me without a library science degree. Fucking ridiculous.

I grew up in the American south in the 1960’s and was in my teens in the 1970’s. Colored folk, as they were called then (NAACP = National Association for Advancement of Colored People) had a different reality of job abundance. True, there were plentiful jobs for colored people, but only unskilled jobs which paid very poorly, especially because there were special deductions from the legal minimum wage level, and if you didn’t agree to those deductions, you didn’t get the job. And colored people could only rent in certain areas, meaning higher rents than one might expect given the housing quality. Low wages plus high rent meant 10 people per roach infested room was common. I came from the landlord class, so I know what I’m talking about. Preaching and funeral services were the most common well paid jobs for colored people. Whites couldn’t do the preaching and didn’t want to deal with embalming dead black bodies. Blacks were highly competitive in sports, music, acting, pimping, drug dealing, etc but almost no one in these fast money jobs retained any of their earnings, so effectively low wage in the long run.

Lots of people fault poor whites for enabling the Republican Southern strategy, but those poor whites had their backs against the wall. They knew the minute the artifical race barriers came down, there would be crowds of hungry blacks chasing every one of those abundant waitress, photography assistant, data inout, woodworker, etc jobs you talk about, plus more blacks eager to move out of the ghetto as soon as they got their hands on a decent pay check and thus drive up rents for whites, and more blacks pushing into the spacious classrooms of the white schools versus the jam packed classrooms of the black schools, hordes of blacks wanting to use the white only tennis courts and swimming pool and golf course in the public park, etc.

In theory, it is possible to have universal abundance by the miracles of technological innovation, mechanization, steady accumulation of physical capital by society, etc. In practice, it seems like western capitalist societies need an underclass of at least 50% to provide a firm foundation for abundance in the upper tiers (1 slave per free person). Blacks comprised about 30% of that 50% in the old south, the other 20% were the poor whites. Global south currently provides that underclass foundation for the golden billion of the developed world, except the ratio is more like 3 slaves per free person. Meaning we’re going to need a complete rethinking of economic organization of we want the entire world to enjoy the job abundance and other prosperity enjoyed by class whites in the USA in the 1970’s. More likely, middle class USA whites are going to experience another big decline as that foundation underneath of 3 slaves of the global south is removed in decades to come.

I sometimes tell the tale of having worked part-time in a grocery store to pay for all of my university, which it did. One of my peers realized he wasn’t college material and turned grocery store pro. Within a year he bought a brand new 16’ boat. Within two he’d bought a house. I left that business after completing school and lost track of that peer, back in 1985.

Out of curiosity, I’d recently looked him up. Thanks to the magic of the internet I found that he was still living in that same house he’d bought back then. That same boat was parked in his front yard, next to the same Ford Bronco he’d owned, although house, boat, and Bronco were now looking pretty shabby in that Google pic. It was obvious that at his young age of 20, 1985 had been the peak of his life.

I then found out that he was a registered Republican. He’d been raised Catholic, so maybe that was part of it. But then, he hadn’t been all that bright. It’s easy to imagine wealthy Powers That Be getting away with feeding him a bunch of prosperity gospel personal responsibility crap, to divert attentions from the fact that they were stealing up all the fertile ground away from hardworking guys like him.

I entered the part-time job market in the post-mid 70s (summer jobs; I was in college), and I recall getting that ‘first job’ wasn’t that easy. Before then, I did minimum work for minimum pay at my dad’s business during weekends and summers.

But here’s what I also noted: before Reagan, if I worked like a dog (say, two part-time jobs) I could both pay rent and utilities on my single-room boarding house apartment and be able to save up a modest amount (I was able to fix a decayed tooth with a crown out of my own pocket, $500 I recall). The minimum wage was hiked every year due to inflation increases, and on top of that small businesses sometimes offered incentives like automatic pay increases with tenure to keep employees.

Then came ‘Morning in America’, and all that ended. Moreover, rents shot up by a factor of 2.5 (the apartment I lived in cost $80 a month (utilities and phone would add maybe $15 more), and then you couldn’t find anything under $200 -250—the first apartment I found at $220, I think, I had to share with a rat (the four-legged kind, not the obnoxious two-legged kind). So you had to find a roomie to make ends meet, and even then not as well. I was continuing my education, on student loans (luckily while school tuitions had gone up, they weren’t in the stratosphere as today). But my entire loan went to both tuition and helping to pay rent, while I worked part-time to boot.

The last two-three years I did get a place by myself, a basement apartment in a ‘fixer-upper’ VA loan house that a future lifetime friend bought, and the rent was cheaper (she used it to pay the cheap mortgage) and she and her family appreciated the fact that I always paid the rent, didn’t destroy the place, and wasn’t any trouble. After I got the ‘job’ at my company, I would go down and see her and take her out to eat or look at books–her house was wall-to-wall books, she was qualified to teach like 7-8 subjects in K-12 education, she did research at the Smithsonian, she had been wiretapped by the FBI in the 1960s (she joked “you could hear them breathing over the phone line when you stopped talking”), and so much more. She could discuss anything, and had lived a fascinating life.

When I got to my company, I saw the typical Reagan voter who had voted that bastard in. Most of them had mortgages about equal to the $80 I had paid for that small apartment pre-Reagan. They applauded Reagan’s kicking the poors. They had good jobs with benefits, including retirement benefits so good that few worked past 60, let alone 65. Nearly all of them are now dead; they won the ‘death bet’, but those who followed them maybe (?) realize that kicking the poors was only the first step, and their turn too to be kicked and squeezed would follow.

I’m a Millennial and I sometimes meet older people with insane stories like starting at a company as a secretary and retiring as a director or even CEO. Some of them don’t even have advanced degrees that are required to get a job now. They also had a pension system that is virtually unheard of today. I was told by a colleague that about a decade ago, an older woman at our organization retired with a pension that practically made her a millionaire. I know another woman who started as a secretary 30 years ago and will retire with a pension that will guarantee her $55,000 a year. The Baby Boomers who played their cards right really made out like bandits.