Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994 TAG: 9312290256
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF DeBELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Instead, they are cogs in the "global economy" - a cliche of journalists, politicians and economists, but also a fact of modern economic life.
It's all part of the changes wrought by dizzying advances in communication\ and travel technology.
For the workers of America, those changes are weighted with both promise\ and peril. Promise for those with sufficient education and training for the\ best 21st-century jobs. Peril for multitudes of other workers - including those\ with only high school diplomas.
And peril for all of U.S. society, experts say, unless changes are made in\ public policy to prevent the evolution of a population consisting mostly of\ haves and have-nots.
"The new jobs which will be created in the coming decade will require much\ higher levels of skill than the average job of today," concluded the governor's\ advisory committee that drew up "The Virginia Plan for Strengthening the\ Commonwealth's 21st Century Workforce" in 1991.
"A majority will require education beyond the high school level with solid\ preparation in communication, science, and mathematics."
It's already happening. According to a New York Times report on recent\ figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60 percent of the new jobs\ created in the past year went to managers and professionals, whereas new hiring\ among blue-collar workers was stagnant.
This was attributed in part to the gradual refilling of executive ranks\ that were depleted during recent belt-tightening years. But it also reflects\ trends that experts say will favor the educated and well-trained over unskilled\ workers.
Increasingly, new jobs are not in manufacturing. Those jobs are being lost\ to foreign competition, automation and improving productivity. New domestic\ jobs tend to be in services and other nonmanufacturing sectors.
Those who qualify for the best of them will be well rewarded in the\ international marketplace. The least qualified may face dead-end jobs,\ sometimes at poverty-level wages. And the competition for all jobs will be\ fierce as new contenders enter the fray in unprecedented numbers.
Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explores the subject in his 1991 book,\ "The Work of Nations." He says three broad categories of work are emerging:
Routine production services. This includes traditional assembly-line\ work, data processing, low-level supervisory jobs and the like. The work\ requires little education beyond the capacity to read and perform simple\ computations.
In-person services. This work also may entail repetitive tasks, but, unlike routine production services, is characterized by person-to-person contact. Cashiers, waiters, secretaries, retail sales people and fast-food workers are typical in-person service types.
Many of the jobs do not require education beyond a high school diploma and limited vocational training.
In contrast with routine production services, which are declining as a percentage of work in the United States, in-person services are growing rapidly. Reich says more than 3 million in-service jobs were created just in fast-food outlets, bars and restaurants during the 1980s. That's more than the combined number of routine production jobs that existed in the automobile, steel-making and textile industries at the end of the decade.
"Symbolic-analytic" services. This is the most desirable of Reich's job categories. It involves the manipulation and trading not of tangible goods but of symbols - data, words, and oral and visual pictures. Symbolic analysts are further broken down into those who identify problems, those who solve them, and those who link the former through the process of "strategic brokering."
Symbolic analysts include research scientists, lawyers, various consultants, architects, journalists, investment bankers, musicians, university professors, marketers and public relations people.
Most symbolic analysts have graduated from four-year colleges and many have graduate degrees as as well. They spend lots of time in meetings, on the telephone and jetting from place to place for meetings, presentations and wheeling and dealing.
Symbolic analysis accounts for a relatively small share of U.S. jobs (about 20 percent) and always will. But its practitioners take in a disproportionate share of income. Not all of them will get rich, but for many symbolic analysts, the future looks sweet in Reich's scheme of things.
For other workers, the future is not so promising.
Routine production jobs were the backbone of the post-World War II American economy, but they have been vanishing by the hundreds of thousands since the 1970s - displaced by automation, productivity improvements and the increasingly frequent shift of jobs to foreign countries where labor costs are lower.
The latter phenomenon is what makes the modern workplace international rather than domestic. It has affected not only assembly-line work but the data processing that is at the heart of modern commerce and industry.
Workers in Ireland, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and other countries now process flight data for U.S. airlines, subscription orders for U.S. publishers, claims for U.S. insurance companies, and so on. Members of the large English-speaking community of India are not only processing data but programming computer software for U.S. industry.
The attraction of foreign workers is that they work for less than Americans. And the huge distances between Galway and Chicago or Bangalore and Dallas are meaningless thanks to advances in electronic communication. Information can be transmitted in the blink of an eye via phone line, cable or satellite.
Reich says the future also is bleak for in-person servers, though perhaps not so bleak as for routine production workers. There will always be a need for waiters, barbers and other personal servers, which is more than can be said with absolute assurance for production workers in the United States.
The problem is, in-person servers generally are paid at or near the minimum wage. They typically receive few if any benefits such as health insurance, and many can find only part-time work. Moreover, there is little prospect for improvement in their lot because of strong competition for what jobs there are:
Competition from former routine production workers who can't find factory jobs; competition from dropouts and high-school graduates who no longer qualify for the better jobs; competition from the vending machines, automated tellers, self-service fuel pumps and telemarketing services that are taking more and more jobs from personal servers; and competition from growing numbers of women, minorities and immigrants in the workplace.
"Non-whites, women and immigrants will make up more than five-sixths of the net additions to the workforce between now and the year 2000, though they make up only half of it today," according to the landmark 1987 Hudson Institute study, "Workforce 2000."
Sitting pretty as one century prepares to give way to another are Reich's symbolic analysts, especially those expected to be most in demand: scientists and researchers, management consultants, public relations experts, investment bankers and lawyers who specialize in "financial circumnavigations," top corporate executives, and artist/magnates on the order of Steven Spielberg, Bill Cosby and Madonna.
Big-league symbolic analysts owe their marketability to advances in worldwide communication and transportation technologies. And with increasing demand for the services of such people comes increasing compensation.
"Never before in history has opulence on such a scale been gained by people who have earned it . . . legally," Reich writes.
The looming danger, as the secretary of labor acknowledges, is the development of a United States consisting mostly of haves and have-nots with few in between. Besides raising the specter of increasing poverty and welfare costs, such conditions would threaten the economy by depriving it of consumer purchasing power.
The foundation already is in place. Incomes of the poorest one-fifth of Americans declined 5 percent between 1977 and 1990, whereas the richest one-fifth of the population became about 9 percent richer. The disparity is particularly sharp between those with college educations and those with a high school diploma or less.
Poor Americans are paying more of their income in taxes, and rich Americans are paying less, thanks to loopholes and shelters discovered by "the cleverest symbolic-analytic tax specialists that money could buy."
By 2020, Reich says, 60 percent of all income earned by Americans will be earned by the top one-fifth of the population. The bottom one-fifth will account for 2 percent.
Reich says the proportion of Americans going to college has begun to decline, in part because of high costs that keep low- and middle-income students out. Public funding for worker training and retraining declined 50 percent during the 1980s, and private retraining efforts tend to be disproportionately concentrated on executives.
This must change if the United States is to avoid a two-tier society and develop a labor force that's marketable internationally, Reich asserts. He calls for more progressive taxes to help close the income gap, and recommends that the country "guard against class rigidities by ensuring that any reasonably talented American child can become a symbolic analyst - regardless of family income or race."
There should be "early intervention to ensure the health and nutrition of small children," the secretary says, along with strong and accessible preschool programs, improvements in educational quality, and changes to make college affordable and open to all.
The task of transforming the entire American work force into a sought-after international commodity would in practice be "daunting," Reich concedes. But "in principle," he writes, "all of America's routine production workers could become symbolic analysts and let their old jobs drift overseas to developing nations."
by CNB