Last time I wrote about the problems and advantages of being generalist; i.e., someone who can work in several fields. Of course, to be brief, the problem is that when you are looking for a job, especially when it’s a tight market, you don’t usually see job listings that say, “Seeking One Generalist” or headlines like, “Google announced today that they are hiring more Generalists.” You have to find the right employer, by which I mean the right person at a company who seems to get what multifaceted people are capable of contributing. Probably the best place to look is among the startups. Unfortunately for those of us who are hurtling towards geezerdom (including your Humble Correspondent), too many startups today seem to be run by the young and the brash who tend to look for similar sorts.
But there is another aspect to the work world that has been thrust into my personal horizon by the machinations that have started to reveal themselves in the course of the heroic protests in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other places where conservative state leaders are making concerted efforts to destroy the power of unions. The gravity of this only starts to come clear when you realize that just about every truly significant progressive gain in the last century came about directly or indirectly because of unions. Quite a few have observed that the strategy of the new plutocrats is to keep people scrambling from one shitty job to the next in order to keep them from organizing and agitating for change. The more I learn about the Koch brothers and their fellow-travelers, the more I think that maybe this is not just hype.
But to get to the point I was slouching toward, given that there are deliberate efforts to further degrade the job market, and given that recessions now last a lot longer than they used to, that the GOP is working actively to defund and dismantle Social Security, and given that jobs haven’t been long-term commitments between employer and employee for decades now, it strikes one that many of us may live much of our working lives in economics of bite-sized earnings; short little jobs that constantly change or that pay so little that one must have several income streams going at once. Actually that situation describes a lot of “employed” people. My point is that it may not change for a long time, if at all. But having lots of useful skills can reduce your overhead. If you are a good gardener, you can raise a lot of food in the average yard. If you are handy at fixing cars or proofreading or teaching piano or doing taxes or whatever, you can save yourself some money by doing it yourself and exchange your skills for favors or cash. As with investing, it pays to diversify.
Skills are capital, but the market does not always recognize them as such. Indeed, the ability of the market to make use of skills found among us seems to be getting worse, not better. Even when people go back to school to learn some new subject or skill or trade, too many of them find that the market can’t find them a job as promised or, the job they do find is too little to support them.
Picking up new skills is a good way to fight this predatory economy, if they are skills that have clear, immediate use. Acquire them relentlessly. Find people who can teach you and offer to help others learn. And if those teachers and nurses and firefighters and city workers on the lines do win through in spite of all, you will still have those extra tools.
