Any job that’s even slightly routine is disappearing from the U.S. But this doesn’t mean we are left with fewer jobs. It means only that we have fewer routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing. When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won’t be returning—but new jobs will take their place. A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that weren’t listed in the Census Bureau’s occupation codes in 1967. Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalists be warned: You’re on the wrong side of history. You see only the loss of old jobs. You’re overlooking all the new ones.
The reason they’re so easy to overlook is that so much of the new value added is invisible. A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They’re composers, writers and producers. They’re lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. I call this “symbolic analytic” work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas.
Symbolic-analytic work can’t be directly touched or held in your hands, as goods that come out of factories can be. In fact, many of these tasks are officially classified as services rather than manufacturing. Yet almost whatever consumers buy these days, they’re paying more for these sorts of tasks than for the physical material or its assemblage. On the back of every iPod is the notice “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China.” You can bet iPod’s design garners a bigger share of the iPod’s purchase price than its assembly.
The biggest challenge we face over the long term — beyond the current depression — isn’t how to bring manufacturing back. It’s how to improve the earnings of America’s expanding army of low-wage workers who are doing personal service jobs in hotels, hospitals, big-box retail stores, restaurant chains, and all the other businesses that need bodies but not high skills.
Friday 29 May 2009
The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part I) ☀
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