Florida recently wrote in The Atlantic Cities about the geography of class. His own Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto produced a report that shows which metropolitan areas in the US have larger service industries. As we all know, service jobs are the lowest paid in the country. People who work in these industries tend to be the most economically vulnerable. According to Florida, the solution to being underpaid is to work harder and more creatively.
The service class is both the largest (60 million workers) and the least paid of America’s three major social classes. The only way to improve its members’ prospects is to upgrade the work they perform—to make it more creative and hence more productive and remunerative. As I have written, that is the key task of a jobs strategy today, as well as being required to spur the demand required for broader economic recovery.
Sigh. Deep breath.
First, service workers include everyone from home health care workers to the people who sell popcorn at the movie theater. They are the janitorial staff at my university and the person who checks me out at the grocery store. My tailor. The guy who delivers my newspaper. The wait staff at my local pub. Florida explicitly acknowledges the diversity of jobs included in this industry in the first paragraph. Does he really believe that the home health aide who cared for my father-in-law in his last days at home before his Alzheimer's made it too dangerous for him to be there was "unproductive"? Does he really believe that my friend who is a housekeeper at a 5-star hotel here in Boston does not have to come up creative solutions for some of the bizarre requests that people of the apparently creative class impose on them?
Second, Florida's "solution" completely ignores the race and gender context of remuneraton. Service jobs have historically been filled by women and ethnic non-whites. Both of these have historically been paid less for their work (and continue to be paid less than men or whites). These two realities are related. You cannot ignore the history of systemic oppression of entire groups of people when talking about that oppression.
Which gets to the final point. If you are going to offer a simple solution to being underpaid, by what logic to you go straight to "let's change the work" rather than "let's change the pay"? Service industry jobs are low wage jobs because employers pay them low wages. It has nothing to do with how difficult or creative the work is. It has everything to do with how we, as a society, treat those "others" who just happen to make our lives easier. If we want to ensure the economic stability and resilience of my neighbors who clean the airplanes and push the wheelchairs at Logan Airport, then perhaps we should insist that they be paid something close to a living wage and be treated like human beings.
With this article, Florida missed out on an opportunity to discuss the root of economic vulnerability. The jobs themselves are not the problem. The problem is that society, or at least the part of society that has money and power, does not value certain kinds of workers. I'm not sure how much more creative the job of security guard at my dentist's office building needs to be. But I do believe that Florida could have done more to engage his own creative faculties when he was thinking through the problem of concentrated vulnerability.
