【英语生活】为星巴克一代找工作

As most Americans return to work following Monday’s fourth of July holiday, so the nation’s political class also return to their jobs, following majority leader Harry Reid’s cancelling of the Senate’s scheduled Independence Day recess. Top of the agenda will be negotiations to avoid a crisis over the nation’s debt ceiling. But another issue should also top the agenda: the sluggish US jobs recovery.

The labour market has stalled again in recent months, while the debate over what to do about jobs has long been caught in a political cul-de-sac. The traditional economic tools of the right and left – tax cuts and government spending – have failed to offer much relief in a time when the economy is global, capital is mobile and a few extra dollars in a family’s bank account can go to purchase Chinese-made televisions and clothes at Walmart.

Injecting more money into the economy might have worked when we lived in a national, as opposed to a globalised, economy; when big businesses created most jobs; and when the paradigmatic workplace was the regimented assembly line. But America and other modern economies have entered what might be called the new work order – an economy where most workers are untethered from large institutions and bouncing from one job to the next. In this economy, each worker is, in effect, their own small business – responsible for guiding their own career and economic future.

Although advocates of the top-down approaches of helping big companies or expanding big government may not realise it, we live in a bottom-up economy: today’s job creators are less likely to be industrialists throwing up factories than to be laid-off workers firing up their laptops in a Starbucks.

Research has shown that, over the past generation, start-ups less than five years old have accounted for all net job growth in the US. The current challenge is that the recent economic slowdown is directly tied to a very real entrepreneurial slowdown. The number of new businesses with employees fell by more than 17 per cent between 2007 and 2009. The number of new employer companies in 2009 was at its lowest level since 1992. Self-employment rates have been falling over the past couple of years, even while a study this year from the Small Business Administration demonstrated that 65 per cent of the jobs created by start-ups between 1997 and 2008 were jobs that entrepreneurs created for themselves. As the study’s author put it: “Business creation is job creation.”

So it is on entrepreneurs, often an afterthought in the conventional jobs discussion, that the nation should focus. Revitalising entrepreneurship should start with a tax holiday for new businesses that is directly tied to the number of jobs they create. Healthcare and retirement benefits should be more universal, personalised, affordable and portable so that entrepreneurs have a greater ability to walk away from big companies and strike out on their own. More states should follow the lead of places such as New Jersey and Oregon, which have started to modernise unemployment benefits so that they not only cushion the blow for laid-off workers but also encourage and enable them to find better jobs and create new ones for themselves and others. The Obama administration’s Startup America public-private partnership should be expanded so that businesses can be started with the kind of urgency and resources the federal government used to bail out failed corporations.

It is worthy and important to have a debate about whether corporate tax reductions and regulatory relief, or high-speed trains and smart grids, will do more to make the US internationally competitive. But in this “new work order” the gaping hole in the economic conversation is an agenda for making Americans more personally competitive. A sense of energy and urgency behind that goal is long overdue if the economy is to be turned around.

Understanding and grappling with this transformed economy is the first step on a road to recovery. The immediate cause of the Great Recession, like the Great Depression 80 years earlier, may have been a culture of excess and irresponsibility from Main Street to Wall Street, but the solution will only come by doing for this time what the New Deal eventually did in the 1930s: updating economic policies to respond to a new world.

The writer is president of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress

7月4日的美国独立日之后，大部分美国人回到了工作岗位；参议院多数党领袖、民主党议员哈里?里德(Harry Reid)取消了参议院原定的独立日休会之后，议员们也在继续工作。当务之急将是开展谈判，以求避免在美国债务上限问题上发生危机。然而，另一个问题同样需要紧急处理：美国就业复苏无力。

近几个月来，劳动力市场再次陷入停滞，而有关如何处理就业问题的辩论早已陷入政治上的僵局。在经济全球化、资本流动化的时代，一个家庭可以用账户上多出的少量美元去沃尔玛(Walmart)购买中国制造的电视机和服装，右翼和左翼政党的传统经济工具（减税和增加政府开支）无法起到很大作用。

在经济进入全球化时代以前，大部分工作岗位是由大企业创造的，严格规划的流水线车间是典型的工作场所，那时，向经济注入更多资金可能会奏效。然而，美国和其他现代化经济体已经步入一个堪称“新工作秩序”的时代，在这种经济中，大部分劳动者与大企业没有瓜葛，他们不断转换工作。这种经济中的每一位劳动者实际上都是“自己”这个小企业的老板，要为自己的职业方向和经济前途负责。

尽管支持“自上而下”方式（帮助大企业或扩大政府）的人士可能没有察觉，但我们生活在一个“自下而上”的经济中：如今，工作岗位创造者更有可能是坐在星巴克(Starbucks)里启动电脑的失业者，而非创办一家又一家工厂的实业家。

研究表明，在过去一代人期间，美国就业数量的净增长全部由创立不到5年的初创企业创造。目前的挑战在于，最近的经济放缓与一场非常切实的创业放缓直接相关。2007年至2009年间，有雇员的新企业数量降低逾17%。2009年，新雇主企业数量降到了1992年以来的最低点。过去两年里自雇就业率不断下降，尽管美国联邦小企业管理局(SBA)今年的一项研究表明，1997年至2008年期间，初创公司创造的工作岗位中，有65%是创业者为自己创造的。正如该项研究的作者所说：“创业就是创造就业”。

因此，美国人真正应该关注的是创业者——在常规就业讨论中经常被视为可有可无的人群。重振创业能力，应该从设立免税期开始，免税期与新企业所创造的工作数量直接挂钩。我们应该扩大医保和养老金的覆盖范围，使其变得更个人化、更可承受、更便于转移，减轻创业者离开大公司独自创业的后顾之忧。新泽西和俄勒冈州的做法值得更多州学习，它们已经开始改革失业福利金，使其不仅能够减弱失业对劳动者的打击，还能鼓励和帮助他们找到更好的工作、以及为自己和他人创造新的工作。奥巴马政府的“创业美国”(Startup America)公私合作伙伴关系应该扩大覆盖范围，用联邦政府纾困那些濒临倒闭的大企业的紧迫性和资源来推动创业。

我们应该而且有必要展开一场辩论，主题是：就提高美国的国际竞争力而言，是削减企业税并给予监管方面的支持更有效，还是修建高铁和智能电网更有效？然而，在这种“新工作秩序”下，提高美国人的个人竞争力这一议题，是经济对话中的空白点。要扭转经济，我们早就应该以更大的能量和紧迫感来推动这一目标。

理解并驾驭这个转型后的经济，是走向复苏的第一步。正如80年前的大萧条一样，导致近年大衰退(Great Recession)的直接原因，也许是从普罗大众到华尔街银行家的过度和不负责任，但就像上世纪30年代罗斯福新政(New Deal)最终所做的那样，解决之道只有一条：根据新情况调整经济政策。

作者是《民主期刊》(Democracy: A Journal of Ideas)主席，美国进步中心（美国民主党智库——译者注）高级研究员

译者/吴蔚