The millions of service members who live on military bases around the world experience a kind of economic and social security that is foreign to most of America’s middle class.
But a few jobs buck these trends by their very nature. Registered nursing is expected to experience nation-wide shortages until at least 2030, giving such workers bargaining power that helps them avoid being replaced. Police and firefighter unions are too strong (and their work too dangerously complex) to imagine a near future of part-time contract workers with no benefits responding to armed robberies or industrial fires. But perhaps the clearest example of a job that resists, at least to some degree, the vagaries of market demand is the military. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the military provides an alternative to the brutalities of modern economy. And the contrast between the animating logic of the martial life and the gig economy says a lot about humans and what they need to feel fulfilled.
One of the empty promises of the so-called “gig economy” is that workers have the freedom to work whenever they want. As Arun Sundararajan wrote in The Guardian, “You can pick up your kid from school (and then switch to being an Uber driver). In the gig economy, the lines between personal and professional become increasingly blurred.” But work hours weren’t meant to limit employees’ productivity; they were meant to protect workers from being exploited. When work life and home life blur, the effect becomes totalizing. Work life always “wins,” and the time that could be spent with family or pursuing an identity outside of your role in the corporate structure is stolen. As Leah Libresco writes inF irst Things, asking workers to devote so much to a corporate cause forces them to approach a career as oblates—secular monks—without a counterbalancing depth of meaning.
The military is tasked with something almost pre-modern in scope and seriousness: destroying the enemy. Not maximization of value for shareholders. Not the opening of new markets. The goal is simply to defend the lives and property of the United States. In other words, the focus is on people instead of profits.
Civilian employers are fundamentally different from the military because their animating goals are different. And their goals often do not prioritize their workers’ well-being. The result, for many, is economic insecurity, which is about more than stagnant wages or wealth distribution. Precarity is an all-inclusive term that describes a lack of predictability, stability, and sense of security in the workplace. It’s a word that can be used to describe the tenuous legal status of migrant laborers, the Weltschmerz of Millennials clinging to unpaid internships, or the desperation of the underemployed holding down multiple part-time jobs that offer few benefits or none at all. Precarity is at work in things like forced telecommunication, being paid per minute, and the trend towards turning employment into a quickly revolving door. As Barry Asin, chief analyst at labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts told Bloomberg Business, “When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh. The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true.”
The charge that modern capitalism fails to create meaning isn’t a new one. Since the 19th century, social thinkers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim have critiqued consumption as fundamentally nihilistic. The experiences of those who have served, who have had the opportunity to cultivate experiences outside the logic of the market, complement these critiques. Bryan Wood echoes the chorus of dissatisfied vets when he writes in his memoirUnspoken Abandonment, “I couldn’t believe the kind of silly bullshit these people thought mattered in life … I couldn’t believe I once thought these same things were important.” Most civilians I’ve talked to about military service dismiss it as a brutal and alien experience. But in many ways, the gig economy, and the contemporary economy more generally, provide the more brutal environment: People are isolated, uncared for, fungible or disposable, and without the opportunity to cultivate the higher human need to sacrifice for a noble purpose. In this sense, it’s the military—and similar occupations—that provide the more humane option.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/military-versus-private-sector/422124/
Tags: American Dream, capitalism, deployments, joblessness, life style changes, middle class, military jobs, military service, personal savings, welfare, workers in America