It's not about the 'Jobs', stupid!

[Vox Moi]

The issue is prosperity.
Consider that Obama could well base the campaign on his successful handling of the economy.
Corporate profits: up
Worker productivity: up
Corporate taxes: low
Wall Street: nearly recovered from the most expensive financial crisis since money was invented.
Who can argue with that kind of success?
The Republicans, of course.
Their counter to the above list would be a shortage of 'Jobs', another Republican Red Herring issue, as bogus as 'Birth Certificate'.
'Jobs' has mistakenly become synonymous with 'prosperity'.
'Jobs' is not a very good metric for quality of life. It can be said that a population of slaves enjoys full employment.
In a perfect, Republican free-market universe there would a job for every man, woman and child in this country and they would damn well need it. 'We The People' would be employees first and American Citizens as an afterthought.
Automation and robotics and industrial science and increased capability are responsible for the reduction in the amount of work needed to provide for basic needs. It means less work. It also means fewer 'Jobs'.
Isn't that the basic idea? Isn't that what we want? Are we not trying to make life easier?
Everyone does not need to have a job; it is the corporation that needs you to need one.
'Jobs' is not an answer to the creation of wealth. We create a lot a wealth already and we simply waste most of it but again, there aren't enough job holders to buy it all so it must be destroyed or left to rot. Otherwise, the unemployed will steal it.
'Jobs' is a mechanism for the distribution of wealth.
'Jobs' is a corporate solution to the social question of 'Who deserves?".
Who deserves that solution?
It is deserved by people who settle for 'Jobs' and not for a fair share of the prosperity they create.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

1. without politicizing it, I think you bring up some good points.

We don't have a scarcity problem, we have a distribution problem on this planet. The concept of job was relevant when each person had to contribute mostly physical labour to scrape from the earth a basic existence. We're 100 years past that, but are conditioned to believe that not working = laziness.

And when you stop to consider that many of our jobs are derived from immoral endeavors such as militarism, spying on one another, imprisoning others, swindling, producing junk that uses up natural resources, and trading imaginary numbers through financial markets; most of our jobs are quite unnecessary.

However, I can't imagine what it would take for people to seriously reassess their values and the system as a whole.

[MadHound]

2. Prosperity? For whom, the rich or the rest of us?

Your metrics for prosperity are metrics that measure the prosperity of the rich. Let's go through them one by one.

Corporate profits: Yes, let's measure how much money is being sucked up to the top one percent.
Worker productivity: Yes, let's measure how much extra labor our corporate masters are squeezing out of us. The more labor they get out of us, the less of a life we are allowed to live
Wall St.: Sorry, Wall St is not Main St. Eighty five percent of Wall St. investors are the rich and the corporate, not you and I, ordinary folks.

If you want to measure how well the rest of us are doing, jobs is one of the more important measurements, whether you like it or not. If you don't have a job, your life is stuck on suck. It doesn't matter that your post labor utopia is coming down the road someday, sometime in the vague future, today, and the day after, and the day after that you need money to put food on your table, a roof over your head, keep the lights and water on, and perhaps a modicum left over in order to have a bit of fun. The only way you're going to accomplish that is with a job. Furthermore, for many people, their job is part of their life, what they want to be doing, how they feel they are positively contributing to society.

If you don't think that jobs are important, here and now, start talking to people who don't have one.

[Vox Moi]

4. You are right, MadHound. I was unclear about that

I did not mean that those metrics indicated prosperity for the people, but rather they are indications that we have the wealth needed to care for one another. It is a question of distribution, which is vastly unequal.
I do think that jobs are important but if being an employee (especially an employee in the USA) is the only metric for determining individual worth, it is the corporation that is left to make the determination as to who gets what.
Increasing the quality of jobs is a big part of the solution. In Germany, for example, workers are protected by law and there is no such thing as 'employee-at-will'. It isn't the number of jobs, it is the quality. It might even be possible one day for a worker to support a family.
When I hear an unqualified call for 'Jobs' offered up as a solution, I see an appeal to the status quo, where citizens with rights become employees at the whim of a new class of uber-citizen: the corporation.
Your point about making a positive contribution is well taken. Most people are like that: they look beyond themselves and want to provide for family and neighbors. The corporate citizen is loyal only to profit.
Obama (we, the people) saved GM but that is not a direct measure of benefit to the people (it is a positive indication but no more than that). In return for saving GM and the banks, we deserve something more than a chance to fill out an application, take a drug test, and hope that they don't cut wages and benefits.

[reformist2]

3. It's not a good election argument, but we do need to start asking whether we need everyone to work,

or not. Our economic system is not equipped to handle a society where all the work is done by machines.