SERVICES WHERE THE JOBS ARE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993                   TAG: 9301050439
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Staff
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
SERVICES WHERE THE JOBS ARE
AS ROANOKERS are only too aware, the service sector of the economy offers no guarantees of job security. The proposed takeover of Dominion Bank by First Union of Charlotte, N.C., with the loss this year of 850 of Dominion's 2,200 jobs in the Roanoke Valley, is evidence enough of that.
But despite the Dominion trauma - and, for that matter, despite the stated wishes of President-elect Clinton - jobs growth in the U.S. economy has been, is and will continue to be in the service sector, not in manufacturing.
This is not entirely lamentable. The number of American manufacturing jobs is not growing in part because U.S. manufacturers are getting better at producing more with fewer workers. If this trend were to stop, it might mean more low- or no-skill manufacturing jobs - but only at the price of lowering Americans' overall standard of living.
Today, according to a New York Times report, U.S. factories produce five times as much as they did in 1948. And they do it with about the same number (12.3 million) of assembly-line workers. In 1991, factory output per man-hour grew faster in the United States than in Germany or Japan.
The quest for increased efficiency is not limited to manufacturing, of course. Behind the Dominion-First Union merger, for example, are in part the economies of scale and elimination of duplication that will permit First Union to deliver the same services Dominion offered, at much lower cost.
Still, American manufacturing since World War II has consistently outpaced services in productivity increases. For the past year and a half, U.S. manufacturers' average 4-percent productivity increase has been double that of the service sector of the economy.
No wonder the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in forecasting a net increase of 20 million new jobs by the year 2000, predicts that all the gain will come in the service sector.
Nationally, Clinton has called for more manufacturing jobs. But the very programs he rightly pushes to promote U.S. manufacturing competitiveness - infrastructure improvement, investment in plant and equipment - are apt, however ironically, to work against manufacturing jobs growth.
It would be misguided to associate manufacturing jobs with low-skill and low-tech: Manufacturing is increasingly high-tech. The lines between services and manufacturing are blurred, moreover, as value-adding enhancements assume importance greater than the assembly of products.
It would be misguided, too, to overlook expanding export opportunities as a source of job growth for manufacturing. Locally, Western Virginia and the Roanoke Valley should by no means abandon efforts to lure prospective manufacturing employers, and to keep the ones already here.
But an equal or greater effort should be directed at landing and keeping service-sector jobs. As the prospective Virginia headquarters of First Union, for example, Roanoke should do as much as it reasonably can to encourage a future rise in employment here by the bank.
If you're on the lookout for jobs, look where the jobs are going to be.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB