It’s not often that human service workers are suggested as potential heroes in a national economic recovery.  And, it is rarer still when their patriotic task will be to earn higher salaries. 

Yet that is exactly what Robert Kuttner is proposing in his new book, Obama’s Challenge: American’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. (Chelsea Green Publishing, $14.95).

Kuttner, founding co-editor of The American Prospect and senior fellow at the think tank Demos, argues that the new president must undertake a massive redevelopment program which simultaneously addresses both the acute symptoms of our current financial crisis as well as four chronic problems which coincide with our deeper economic malaise.  These core issues, he argues, are “a thirty-year trend of increasing inequality and insecurity,” the crisis in energy and climate change, the unreliability and cost of health care, and the decay of America’s public spaces and facilities.   

Like many progressive economists and even President-Elect Obama, Kuttner calls for significant new investments in public infrastructures, alternative energy technology, education and training for displaced workers.  Considerably less traditional is his proposal to “Professionalize Human Services.”

“Suppose the new administration announced a national policy goal of converting every human service job to a good job that pays a living wage with good benefits and includes adequate training, professional status, and the prospect of advancement – a career rather than casual labor,” writes Kuttner. “It would vastly improve the quality of care delivered to the elderly at home or in institutions; to young children in pre-kindergartens or day-care facilities; and to sick people whether in hospitals, hospices, outpatient settings or their homes.”

However, while improved services are important, the real rationale for Kuttner’s proposal is as part of a broader labor policy designed to reverse the national trend toward “bad and insecure jobs”, i.e. low-paid clerical, retail sales, fast food and low end human services jobs.  This transformation of the labor market has contributed to increased income inequality, rising real poverty levels, growth in the numbers of working people without health insurance, and a host of related social problems.  

“America needs a good jobs strategy. And, human service jobs are a fine place to begin,” Kuttner argues.

 Why?  Since most funding for human services comes through government programs, “choices about how to compensate workers are social decisions.”

“In the United States, with our meager social outlay, we define these positions as low-wage casual jobs,” writes Kuttner.  By contrast he notes that “Scandinavia has no low wage human service workers because it has made a decision that everyone who takes care of the sick, the old, or the young is a professional or at least a paraprofessional and is compensated as such.”

Kuttner suggests a policy under which “any job in the human services supported in whole or in part by federal funds would have to pay a professional wage and be part of a career track.”   For example, he suggests a minimum starting salary of $24,000 or $12 an hour, compared with $6 or $7 hourly rates now common in the nurse-aid, home care and child-work fields.  

“Opportunities for genuine advancement with pay increases would have to be part of the plan,” Kuttner continues.  He calls for expanded opportunities and financial support for additional training and professional education.

With higher wages and more training, human service workers at all levels can take on greater responsibility.  This, he argues, would counteract the practice of “Taylorism” – “fragmenting jobs into separate tasks and paying the lowest possible wage for each task”.  In human services, Kuttner sees this practice as having led to a reduction in the quality and consistency of services. “More workers would use a broader range of human skills to care for whole human beings,” says Kuttner.   

It is worth noting that this approach is also a part of Scandinavian program models in which professionally educated, better paid “social pedagogues” provide or participate in a combination of services – ranging from direct care assistance with activities of daily living to treatment planning, therapy, family contacts, etc. – tasks which typically would be divided up among hierarchically separate staff members in the U.S.  (See “SUNY Undergraduate Program Teaches Human Services in European Tradition”, NYNP, April 2003.)

Kuttner estimates the cost of implementing his proposal nationally at $150 billion a year, including $50 billion for providing universal, hig-quality pre-kindergarten and child care.  While admitting that it is “a lot of money”, he contrasts it with the $188 billion now being spent annually in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The promise of millions of good service-sector jobs that can’t be exported – providing senior care to our children, our parents and ourselves – is an example of the kind of idea that could capture the national imagination and revive the necessary political support for serious public outlay,” he argues. “It touches a national nerve of anxiety about where the good jobs will be for our children – and who will take care of us as we age.”

Professionalizing human services is only one of several public investment strategies which Kuttner offers in this book which was actually written and published prior to the election itself.  The book also came out before the worst of the financial collapse and market meltdowns in September and October.  As a result, Kuttner’s list of economic prescriptions which cost a total of $600 billion seems downright reasonable when compared with the more recent $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan. Unfortunately, one has to wonder whether that expenditure will ultimately crowd out other and more progressive social investment proposals.

As if in response, Kuttner reminds us that the last time we faced a “great depression” it took deficit spending far beyond anything currently under consideration – i.e. World War II – to get our economy truly back on track.  And, those investments in industrial capacity, infrastructure, education and workforce development, ultimately set the stage for the extended economic prosperity of the post war years.  

We may not need to go that far now.  But we need to go further than just bailing   out Wall Street.

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