Michael Lind: What is a "Good" Job, Anyway?

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."

News that McDonald’s plans to hire 50,000 workers nationwide has prompted a predictable wave of commentary about the replacement of good jobs in America with bad "McJobs." Few, if any, would consider a poorly paid position at McDonald’s a good job for anyone but perhaps an entry-level teenage worker or the most desperate job-seeker. But it is much easier to reach a consensus on the definition of a bad job than to agree on what constitutes a good job.

Is a good job one in a particular industry or sector? Many of the jobs in manufacturing that are being lost to offshoring and automation pay higher wages and come with more benefits than many of the jobs in the growing service sector, where four out of 10 Americans already work. It is often assumed that there is something in the nature of manufacturing itself that makes manufacturing jobs good jobs. But manufacturing jobs in the automobile, steel and other industries are good jobs only because those industries were successfully unionized in the 1930s. Before the success of the unions, factory jobs were among the worst in the country. Up until the 1920s, steelworkers were frequently forced to work 12-hour shifts, six or seven days a week, for low wages, with no benefits. Factory jobs became good jobs only when the unions, backed by the U.S. government during the Depression and World War II, were able to extort contracts, benefits and decent wages from employers.

The converse is also true: Many service-sector jobs in the U.S., from restaurant work to cleaning to low-wage healthcare jobs, are bad jobs because they are not unionized. In many Western European countries with lower levels of inequality and more upward social mobility than today’s regressing United States, many service-sector workers and even white-collar professionals have been unionized. Somehow their hotels and restaurants remain in business....