As many of us face the ominous prospect of finding real jobs come June, we have to deal with the fact that there are many criteria to consider. There are obvious ones, such as where you want to live or how much money you would like to make. But there are also more subtle distinctions that we should be looking at. For instance, does your job involve actually DOING anything? By this I mean does it actually serve an interest other than perpetuating its own existence?
I expect that most of the University’s class of 2000 graduates are not considering gas station jobs, at least not the smelly ones (jobs, not students). But if your criterion were “I need a job that keeps me in Oregon,” that would definitely be one way to go. (Since 1951, self-service gasoline stations have been illegal here.) This is an example of how a job really exists solely for its own sake, but gas jobs enjoy a security that many other jobs do not.
I admit that gas station attendants serve the public by pumping gas. So, some of them do actually DO something. From another perspective, though, many of us who have driven a fair amount in other states believe that the existence of mandatory gas station attendants simply undermines our desire to have gas pumped to our own satisfaction.
Full service gasoline does have an economic niche in other states: it’s smaller, but it’s there. Oregon’s higher number of per-capita gas station attendants simply reflects jobs that exist solely to perpetuate themselves.
Now consider the way in which we have preserved these extra jobs. Clearly the excess would be eliminated if the ban were repealed. But all in all, this is not a gigantic burden on Oregon’s economy because the full-service gas industry is not the basis for any sort of economic revolution. Unfortunately, more and more segments of our society and economy have begun to center around occupations that do not actually accomplish anything tangible.
The Internet age has revolutionized the job market and the economy. And surely the technology will continue to enable our society to conduct business more efficiently. The world of the Internet is one in which you only occasionally encounter a job that actually affects people’s lives in any manner at all.
It is when we create multiple steps between a given job and its actual, useful action that people at one end lose sight of people at the other end. This is when are livelihoods are going to be in trouble. For instance, now investors can shorten the time they invest in a company to mere hours. But is “day-trading” accomplishing anything? Not really, unless you argue that by investing in companies for several hours, the day-traders are stimulating economic development. In any case, that is certainly not a day-trader’s motivation or concern.
In 1997, Albania collapsed to near anarchy because approximately half of its Gross Domestic Product was composed of liabilities in pyramid schemes, according to the World Bank. Certainly our economy is in less danger than that. But it’s not impenetrable. Why did the stock market crash in 1929 do so much damage to the economy? Too many people relied on the stocks as a reasonable way to make money and they stopped using their time to accomplish something that affects other people.
As University students seek jobs, the appealing ones are going to be in hot new markets with hot new tasks that our parents would have never dreamed existed. But if those tasks do not have a basis in tangible service to society, the lack of job security is just the beginning of potential problems.
This is not just an issue of self-preservation for each University student. It is an issue of personal satisfaction, and ultimately it’s an issue of the quality of society. Would you rather live in a world where children aspire to become firefighters, doctors or mechanics, or in a world in which children dream of their retirement at age 24 because they fortuitously sold their dot-com stock before the crash?