Where Have the Workers Gone?
Where are they when we need them?
“Upper Italy” has for some time suspected that nearly no-one still actually “works”. Just about everybody we know is really in the business of supplying unnecessary – or at least highly optional – services to other persons and entities engaged in doing precisely the same thing.
We are reminded of an old and mildly anti-semitic joke – for which we beg forgiveness – about two Jews who stagger ashore, the only survivors of a shipwreck, on a desert island. When they are finally rescued, many years later, both have become immensely wealthy selling their hats back and forth to one another.
What is odd about this hypothetical mechanism is not that it might be true, but rather that it appears not to be, at least in Italy. We still can see almost nobody truly producing anything, but according to a recent survey by an organization called the Osservatorio sul capitale sociale – that would be “Social Capital Observatory,” an evident political lobby – between 2006, when about 40% of the Italians were prepared to identify themselves as belonging to the “working class,” and now, the percentage of the population who perceive that they are producing something as “workers” has risen to 46%.
At the same time, and this is probably mathematically necessary, those who think they belong to the middle class has dropped from 54 to 49%. About 5% believe they belong instead to an upper class, a figure that appears to be substantially stable, at least in terms of statistical significance.
What all this probably means in fact is that the Italians are coming, and not so slowly either, to accept the American kind of idea that “class” is mostly determined by the amount of money you have and not much else. You belong, by definition, to the “lower” class if you do not think you have enough income to get by – and there is quite a lot of that going around at the moment.
This piece of research research was commissioned by Italy’s powerful “red” Coop movement – descended from the economic arm of the old Communist and Socialist Parties – and is no doubt meant to show that its level of support is somehow growing even as the traditional industrial working class has pretty much vanished in Italy, as it has in most of the West.
There is an expression in Italian, “non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco” – “not every doughnut turns out with a hole” – which refers in a weary and resigned way to things that do not go as intended, or at least as expected.
We mention this because the other element that emerges from the survey is that, while the Left’s traditional electorate would appear to be again on the rise after years of fading slowly from sight, the bastards are also passing to the enemy… The leftist Rome daily, La Repubblica, in referring this aspect of the news, tucks the datum down in the paragraph with the unreadable numbers, but discovers to its horror that the “majority of the workers” now expect to vote for the Center-Right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi – as do the “self-employed and entrepreneurs” (58%), professionals (54%) and housewives (53%).
The Left instead holds on among public employees, where it enjoys a majority, and among pensioners (46%) and students (44%). Though statisticians are kind enough to include public employees among the productive part of the population, that is not the popular view. Pensioners may once have worked and students, at least in good part, may one day be expected to. That’s something.
What emerges from this picture though is painfully and unhappily obvious, a clear political distinction between those who produce something or other and those who instead live off the work of others without generating any “concrete” wealth at all themselves.
We don’t mean to express a moral judgement in that. What the hell are college students supposed to do, after all? And pensioners on the whole are hardly rolling in cash.
Much has been made everywhere in the West of the upcoming crunch as aging populations cause the numbers behind pension systems to collapse. We have all seen estimates of how, in, oh, fifty year or so, every person with a job will be supporting “X” number of retirees.
Unfortunately, this is wrong. The future is already here and it is messy. Old folks no long able to work are not the only ones the active population carries on its economic back. The age trick, with its increased life expectancy plus the baby boom-generated population bulge, would already be quite enough in itself. Throw in though scarcely productive government employees – largely engaged in “administering” one another – and we are already in deep shit. Especially since, frankly, quite a few private employees aren’t really producing much of anything either.
These numbers are changing, rapidly, but they don’t look good, especially for the future. The productive side of the population, holding its nose probably, is throwing itself behind Silvio Berlusconi and his lot for the moment. But the Italians still have a good deal of aging to do and, as dropping economic growth kicks in, young people are waiting longer than ever to concretely take a useful part in society.
The upshot is that in the reasonably near future – in Italy at least, and you can ask yourself about your own country – politics are going to come down to a struggle by a straight-forward and fully “democratic,” if unproductive, majority attempting to express its will that the productive minority support it as generously as electoral calculations will allow.
This will probably not lead to widespread social and political happiness.