I've been trying to wrap my arms around the question of "where on earth are middle-skilled middle-class jobs supposed to come from if not from manufacturing" lately, and though I don't really have any answers, I do have a couple of thoughts.
The big one is that I'm growing more and more disillusioned with the distinction between "manufacturing" and "services," or even "goods-producing" and "services." If you work on the Google search engine, for instance, you're working on a service, not a good. Being a doctor is classified as working in the service sector, and so too is being a lab technician. I think that people tend to think of the "service sector" as low-wage, low-skill, and the goods-producing sector as somewhat higher wage, and appropriate for many skills. I'm not sure it's as clear as all that.
So then the question is why were manufacturing jobs traditionally high-wage jobs? There seem to be a few answers to this (unions, industrial policy, capital intensity, etc), but the one that I've found most persuasive is that they could be. To a degree I really didn't understand before picking through the endless tables and graphs in 'Where Are All The Good Jobs Going?', high wages were a choice that businesses could make. Some of them were forced into making that choice through unions and some of them were lured into making that choice because they wanted the best workers. But a lot of them just made that choice because, well, they could. This was a period in American history, after all, when CEOs regularly warned against the consequences of "ruinous competition."
Of course, now we're in a period when we not only venerate competition, but actually have to compete. The financialization of the economy means more managers have to answer to shareholders, and shareholders don't want to see high labor costs unless it's clear they're getting a return for them. Foreign competition has made the wage gap between different sorts of workers vast: Paying American workers a good wage while the other guy pays Thai workers a bad wage leaves you at much more of a competitive disadvantage than paying American workers a good wage while the other guy pays American workers a mediocre wage. Unions are partially in decline because of policy, but they're partially in decline because these forces make it very hard for them to survive. Bottom line? It's hard to pay workers well in America now, even if you want to.
It's easier to pay them well, of course, if you have to. Without getting too deep into the methodology of the book, it's fairly persuasive on the idea that the good jobs aren't going away so much as they're sorting themselves by education and ability. At the same time, the pace of educational attainment in America has slowed considerably. So the percentage of good jobs that require credentialed workers has increased, but the percentage of credentialed workers hasn't. That's probably a big part of this story, and it speaks to the need for much, much more investment in the workforce.
I'd really like to find an answer that's more interesting than "education" here. And maybe I will. I'm toying around with the idea that we're in a weird interregnum period in which a lot of other countries have become rich and educated enough for their workers to compete with our workers but not quite rich and educated enough for their workers to begin buying things from our workers, and that this'll largely sort itself out as time goes on. But I'm not sure that's right, and even if it, it's also not very comforting.
Source: http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=dd32ff3b37dd4ea1dc21453d81ad7c94
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