Monday, April 23, 2012
I don't know how many times I've seen liberal
commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of
high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line
at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable
retirement.
As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived
next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal
nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
The assembly-line work was boring and repetitive. That's
because management imbibed Frederick W. Taylor's theories that workers were
stupid and could not be trusted with any initiative.
It was also because the thousands of pages of work rules
in United Auto Workers contract, which forbade assembly-line speedups, also
barred any initiative or flexible response.
That's why the UAW in 1970 staged a long strike against
General Motors to give workers the option of early retirement, 30-and-out. All
those guys who had gotten assembly line jobs at 18 or 21 could quit at 48 or
51.
The only problem was that when they retired they lost
their health insurance. So the UAW got the Detroit Three auto companies to pay
for generous retiree health benefits that covered elective medical and dental
procedures with little or no co-payments.
It was those retiree health benefits more than anything
else that eventually drove General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy and into
ownership by the government and the UAW.
The liberal nostalgiacs would like to see an economy that
gives low-skill high school graduates similar opportunities. That's what Barack
Obama seems to be envisioning when he talks about hundreds of thousands of
"green jobs."
But those "green jobs" have not come into
existence despite massive government subsidies and crony capitalism. It's
become apparent that the old Detroit model was unsustainable and cannot be
revived even by the most gifted community organizer and adjunct law professor.
For one thing, in a rapidly changing and technologically
advanced economy, the lifetime job seems to be a thing of the past. Particularly
"lifetime" jobs where you work only 30 years and then get supported
for the next 30 or so years of your life.
Today's young people can't expect to join large
organizations and in effect ride escalators for the rest of their careers. The
new companies emerging as winners in high tech -- think Apple or Google -- just
don't employ that many people, at least in the United States.
Similarly, today's manufacturing firms produce about as
large a share of the gross national product as they used to with a much smaller
percentage of the labor force.
Moreover, there's evidence that recent growth in some of
the professions -- the law, higher education -- has been a bubble, and is about
to burst.
The bad news for the Millennial generation that is entering
its work years is that the economy of the future won't look like the economy
we've grown accustomed to. The "hope and change" that Barack Obama
promised hasn't produced much more than college loans that will be hard to pay
off and a health care law that lets them stay on Mommy and Daddy's health
insurance till they're 26.
The good news is that information technology provides the
iPod/Facebook generation with the means to find work and create careers that
build on their own personal talents and interests.
As Walter Russell Mead writes in his brilliant
the-american-interest.com blog, "The career paths that (young people) have
been trained for are narrowing, and they are going to have to launch out in
directions they and their teachers didn't expect. They were bred and groomed to
live as house pets; they are going to have to learn to thrive in the
wild."
But, as Mead continues, "The future is filled with
enterprises not yet born, jobs that don't yet exist, wealth that hasn't been
created, wonderful products and life-altering service not yet given form."
As Jim Manzi argues in his new book
"Uncontrolled," we can't predict what this new work world will look
like. It will be invented through trial and error.
What we can be sure of is that creating your own career
will produce a stronger sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. Young people who
do so won't hate their work the way those autoworkers hated those assembly line
jobs.
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