During last week’s Presidential address / jobs bill sales pitch, there was something Obama said that might have sent a chill down your spine. While making clear his refusal to stand by while large corporations force workers to lowball themselves on wages and basic protection in order to maintain steady work, the President seemed to openly (and quite eerily) acknowledge the apocalyptic path America’s job market is currently heading down. “We shouldn’t be in a race to the bottom, where we offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards,” he declared, receiving predictably mixed reactions from many of his pro-big business Republican colleagues.Of course, a lot of what it takes to stop that from happening depends on the other side of that aisle, which is currently stocked with a radical opposition intent on dismantling (among other things) regulations that protect the quality of American work. It’s the very same opposition that has proven it has no qualms about holding the world’s economy down the barrel of a gun in order to get the draconian spending cuts they want for social programs and protect their corporate backers from having to forfeit their various tax loopholes. So when we start to think about whether or not Obama’s jobs plan can survive the bureaucratic killing floor and reverse this trend, some of us are, with good reason, not particularly optimistic.The upcoming indie film Ghosts With Shit Jobs assumes the worst, postulating America’s future slide into a haven for third world labor by envisioning the depressing new kinds of lifestyles its citizens might lead. Equal parts grim, prophetic sci-fi and black comedy with the thickness of industrial smog, the story follows a timeline that begins with the United States’ August 5th downgrade, showcasing various groups and individuals living in a topsy-turvey post-economic America where labor is outsourced from China. The characters span the gamut of the new American workforce: a gang of scrappers who gather silk from spiderwebs underneath crumbling highways, a human spambot being payed to mention products everywhere she goes and a couple that makes …. well, robotic babies, I guess.It’s a different kind of apocalypse, devoid of any Mad Max-style desert wandering or visions of large-scale physical destruction. But it’s the kind that evokes that sort of inescapable nervous laughter from anyone closely following the goings-on in Washington. Let’s hope it stays on the movie screen where it belongs.
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