bs can be terrible jobs, as they were for much of American history and as they are today in China, where the Foxconn corporation’s company town recently had to put up netting around its dormitories in response to a wave of suicides by exploited serfs making components for U.S. multinationals like Apple. Closely related to the question of whether a good job is a union job is the question of the length of employment contracts. From the perspective of organized labor, a good job is one in which there are fixed annual or other contracts, with negotiated wages and benefits. There was a time in the early history of the American republic, however, when fixed contracts were associated with indentured servitude. At-will employment, which permits workers to quit at any time, as well as to be fired at any time, was considered a great advance by early Americans over traditional feudal British labor contracts of various kinds. Is a good job one that comes with employer-provided benefits? Two groups in American history have supported employer benefits, in preference to government benefits: large corporations and unions. Large corporations, beginning in the early 20th century, viewed the provision of health insurance, defined benefit pensions and other benefits as a way of reducing the attraction of unions or collectivist politics to workers. Labor unions, while they may support universal benefits as well, have their own reason for supporting employer-based benefits: It gives them with something they can win from employers and provide to their members. But many progressives and social democrats have always preferred universal, portable government programs like Social Security and Medicare that are identical and available to all citizens. If you accept this logic, then a good job is not necessarily one that comes with benefits from the employer. Indeed, if an adequate universal economic security system existed, there would be no need for employer-based health insurance or employer-provided pensions or employer-subsidized 401K retirement accounts to exist. Employers would provide workers with wages and nothing more. Speaking of wages, what is the relationship between wages and the definition of a good job? Americans have answered this question in radically different ways. From the late 19th century until the 1960s, a "living wage" was often identified with a "family wage" sufficient for a male breadwinner to support not only himself but also a non-working wife and several children. To the consternation of later generations of liberals, the fiery Irish-American labor activist "Mother" Jones said that she supported unionization because it would permit men to make enough money that their wives could stay at home and raise their children. During the golden age of American capitalism between World War II and the 1960s, the breadwinner wage system was reflected in a gendered job system, pressure on women to be homemakers, and practices like firing female schoolteachers when they married, on the assumption that their husbands would support them and their jobs could be given to single women who needed them more. Victories in the civil rights era against workplace sexism and the migration into the workforce of most adult women, including most mothers of small children, shattered the family wage system. One result of the increase in two-earner couples is an ambiguity about the phrase "living wage." Is it a two-earner family wage -- that is, a living wage one that can support one working parent and one child, so that a two-earner couple can support two children? Or is it a wage that permits a single working parent to support one, two or more children without depending on welfare? Similar questions can be asked about the minimum wage. Should the minimum wage be enough to keep a single adult individual out of poverty? Or should the minimum wage be a "living wage" high enough to support children as well as the worker? The question of what constitutes a good wage is complicated even further by wage subsidies, like the earned income tax credit. Introduced late in the 20th century, the EITC subsidy supplements low wages for poor people in the workforce and has become the largest federal welfare program. The EITC is supported by liberals, because it raises the overall incomes of the working poor, and by conservatives, because it is a disguised subsidy to low-wage employers. But the apparent generosity of the EITC raises troubling questions. Its premise, after all, is that it i