By Milton Ezrati
Monday, August 07, 2017
Note: The following
piece originally appeared in City Journal.
No matter how much politicians promise to protect us,
technology and globalization will continue to transform the American workplace,
driving the U.S. economy to abandon simpler, labor-intensive production
processes, turn increasingly toward more mechanized, digitized, high-value
efforts, and, accordingly, demand an ever-better-trained workforce. Though
these trends should generally create prosperity, they will also bring
significant social disruptions. Indeed, they already have: Income disparities
between rich and poor have widened, with the skilled and educated seeing
enhanced earning opportunities and the less skilled and less educated finding
their options constrained. Less and less is left of the old, stable middle
class, the product of an era when the semiskilled could maintain security in a
job for life. Unless we can better prepare workers for this dramatic economic
shift, social decline will worsen.
One popular response, obviously given prominent voice in
the 2016 election, would seek to block globalization and otherwise search for ways
to force up wages for the less skilled. It’s an understandable reaction, but
whatever Washington thinks of its powers, it can neither turn back the clock
nor repeal economic laws. Trade protections and legislated wage supports will
not only fail to protect the vulnerable; they will also inflict broader
economic harm. Policymakers would do better to accommodate the impact of
globalization and technological innovation, refocus the economy accordingly,
alter the nature of the workplace, and train (and retrain) the labor force.
Only in this way can the United States ease social frictions and ensure a
healthy new middle class for the 21st century.
In many respects, the disruption that the American
economy is experiencing is an old story. Technological advancements have
pressured economies in one way or another since the Industrial Revolution. Each
innovation and each advance in world trade have more thoroughly mechanized
production processes and moved them to cheaper, more efficient venues. And each
economic development has demanded more of workers.
The first spinning machines and power looms required
training for people with no experience operating equipment beyond driving a
horse-drawn reaper or working a hand loom. No doubt a search of commentary from
the period would reveal a familiar anxiety over the fate of workers who either
would not or could not learn the new techniques — and perhaps also about
growing income disparities between those who could adapt to these new
challenges and those who could not.
The pace of change has quickened since the end of World
War II. Even as American manufacturing enjoyed its heyday during the 1950s and
1960s, technological advances helped managers produce more with fewer workers,
slashing costs. Rudimentary computerization enabled offices and other service
industries to follow suit. Industrial output exploded, rising almost 4 percent
a year, on average, but the creation of well-paying jobs lagged, expanding at a
mere 0.8 percent annual rate. Meantime, Europe and Japan leveraged their
then-lower wage scales to compete increasingly with American production and
American workers.
Though the middle class was doing well at the time, the
1950s film The Desk Set reflected
popular fears of how computerization would vaporize formerly secure,
well-paying office jobs. The film ended happily for all, but computers really
would supplant workers. Foreign competition, even at this early stage of
globalization, cost jobs, too. By the 1960s, American trade representative
Michael Blumenthal was warning that, for every car that Detroit sold abroad,
Americans were buying three foreign imports. President John F. Kennedy, noting
the effects of both import competition and automation, warned of the “dark
menace of industrial dislocation, increasing unemployment, and deepening
poverty.” By the 1970s, AFL-CIO president George Meany was complaining loudly
about the rising market share of imports. Describing free trade as “a joke and
a myth,” he demanded “tighter restraints on imports.”
By the 1980s, Japanese gains had trade hawks riveted.
Lost market share, especially in autos and steel, meant layoffs in Detroit and
Pittsburgh. Elsewhere, manufacturing kept using technology to shed workers.
While industrial production rose some 20 percent over the course of that
decade, manufacturing employment fell 7.4 percent. In services, computerization
and automation advanced to the point where the fears expressed in The Desk Set started to become reality.
Answering machines replaced thousands of telephone operators across the
country. Word processing made many typists redundant. Automatic teller
machines, even as they gave millions of people access to their own money
outside bankers’ hours, put others out of work. Most found alternative
employment. The country increased jobs overall during this time — 18 million
over the course of the decade. But the new jobs, not as secure as the old ones,
often paid less.
As the 20th century drew to a close, the rise of emerging
economies, mostly in Asia, presented more aggressive wage competition than
ever: Workers in these economies get paid as little as one-hundredth of what
Americans earn, a much greater gap than ever existed with Europe and Japan.
Because these economies have focused their production on simpler,
labor-intensive processes, where their relatively low literacy rates and skill
levels matter less, the impact on semiskilled and unskilled American workers
was profound. Once-reliable sectors for low-skilled American workers —
textiles, clothing, shoes, the assembly of retail electronics, retail call
centers — all but vanished from the U.S. economy. Those finding alternative
employment have suffered wage declines of between 15 percent and 40 percent.
The relentless advance of computer technology has disrupted
entire industries in the 21st century. By making it possible to prepare and
send documents electronically, computer technology has eliminated countless
office and retail clerical positions, for instance, as well as messenger and
delivery jobs. By enabling the “just-in-time” monitoring and maintenance of
warehouse inventories, computerization has eliminated scores of positions in
retail and wholesale operations. Robots, long used in auto assembly and other
heavy manufacturing to eliminate thousands of assembly-line jobs for the
semiskilled, now enhanced with artificial intelligence, will soon threaten jobs
in myriad fields.
Businesses are doing more with fewer and fewer workers.
Since 1990, the economy has increased its production of real goods and services
some 85 percent, but we’ve seen overall job growth of only 31 percent. Many
have gained spectacularly from these advances, but that is cold comfort to
displaced workers.
All this change was certain to cause social frictions.
But by offering enhanced benefits to top earners, the new economy has
intensified the frictions. Productivity advances from labor-saving innovations
have accrued to this class — workers with the training to run the new systems
and equipment and the managers and shareholders of the more efficient and more
profitable operations. But in addition to this pattern, which held in previous
technological periods as well, globalization now offers the added boon of
easier access to global markets and command of greater productive resources —
natural, capital, and labor — especially overseas. Instead of dividing revenues
with relatively expensive American labor, those at the top can now accrue a
huge surplus by producing in the cheapest place and selling to the world.
National income and tax statistics capture the cumulative
effect. The richest tenth of the population has seen its income grow five times
faster over the last two decades than the bottom fifth. The earnings of the top
20th during this time have risen some 9 percent a year, while the bottom 20th
has suffered a 2.5 percent rate of decline. The top quarter of earners has gone
from making ten times the pay of the bottom quarter in the 1970s to some 15
times today. The IRS notes that the wealthiest 1 percent of income-tax payers
commands some 22 percent of the total income subject to tax, while the bottom
50 percent commands less than 13 percent — both greater extremes than ever
before recorded.
Yes, many analyses have called into question the precise
import of these statistical comparisons. Some point out how such figures fail
to account for much more generous public benefits than existed 20 years ago.
These data also fail to account for mobility between income cohorts; those at
the bottom seldom stay there but instead often rise through the income
distribution over time. Others argue that what matters most is whether most
people are better off than they were, not how much richer the rich get. These
contrary points are valid and warrant attention. Still, they cannot change the
picture of a much less equal workplace and one in which the old middle class,
with its once-large component of semiskilled workers, seems on the way to
extinction.
As these pressures increase, a broad constituency has
formed to demand, usually of government, an end to the pain. Merchants and
local governments in the regions most affected have joined the outcry as they
have lost business and tax revenues to factory closures and layoffs. Their
representatives in Washington have tallied the votes in favor of relief and
picked up the call, as has the media. The backlash has focused more on one
cause of the woe — globalization — than on another — technology — probably
because Americans are culturally disposed to cheer technological advancement.
The emerging robotics may test that inclination.
Donald Trump, of course, has been the most prominent
voice of antiglobalization, promising to protect American jobs with an average
20 percent tariff on all imported goods and a 45 percent tariff on Chinese
imports. He also touted a 35 percent levy on goods entering the country from
the Mexican operations of U.S.-based firms. Some of his Republican rivals for
the nomination spoke out against free trade, too. On the Democratic side,
Bernie Sanders bragged that he had voted against every major trade agreement
since he entered Congress and promised to resist all efforts at trade
promotion. During her campaign, Hillary Clinton turned against the two pending
trade agreements, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership. She also reprised her positions from her 2008 run
for the Democratic nomination, when she sharply criticized the North American
Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico and otherwise called for a “time
out” on trade deals.
Other efforts to address the problem have focused more on
symptoms than on presumed causes. The widening use of food stamps, for
instance, aims at restoring a living standard that many less skilled workers
can no longer secure with their paychecks. Renewed efforts to increase the
minimum wage would, advocates claim, boost incomes for the less skilled.
Alternatively, government has tried to protect jobs and push up incomes
artificially through subsidies to struggling industries. Direct cash transfers
are less popular in the U.S. than in Europe. Here, both federal and state
governments prefer special tax breaks to accomplish the same ends.
All these notions, however well-intentioned and
emotionally understandable, constitute a cure worse than the disease. Certainly,
minimum-wage hikes can do little to bolster the beleaguered middle class.
Politicians and even some policymakers might believe that ordering management
to pay a regulated wage will raise incomes, but no business, large or small,
can pay people more than they produce, at least not for long. Complying with
such laws would force marginal firms out of business, costing jobs. Others
would defray the increased wage cost by installing robots and other
labor-saving devices. The few workers left to manage the equipment would do
better, but most others would lose out entirely.
Subsidies or tax breaks to affected industries are
another long-term dead end. Taxpayers wind up footing the bill, either funding
the amount handed over or making up for the taxes not paid by those getting the
breaks. Such burdens would then impede general economic progress by
shortchanging other worthy government projects, such as making infrastructure
improvements or bringing the unemployed back to work through retraining or
using a general tax cut to promote economic dynamism and encourage hiring.
Worse, by making others pay, subsidies not only strip from the favored few the
incentive to adapt but also rob the unfavored of the means to do so. And for
all this cost, history shows that subsidies rarely protect jobs or boost worker
incomes. The industries receiving them seldom pass the benefit on to their
employees, whom they often replace with labor-saving technologies, anyway.
Management, not the broader workforce, tends to gain from such policies.
Full-scale antiglobalization measures would be extremely
damaging. Protected firms and their workers might benefit, but other firms,
denied access to inexpensive imports, would be less profitable, and production
cutbacks and layoffs would follow. If these firms instead were to pass on the
increased cost of inputs through higher prices, consumers would take the hit.
Price comparisons between imports and domestically produced goods and services
during the last 20 years show that, were it not for relatively free trade, the
cost of living in the U.S. would have risen half again faster than it has. The
Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that trade’s
downward pressure on living costs over this time has cumulatively given every
man, woman, and child in the United States as much as $3,300 a year in
additional buying power. These benefits would disappear under a protectionist
regime.
Businesses and unions are well aware of these issues. All
would love subsidies and protection from foreign competition, but none seems
willing to pay the price for others to receive them, as two brief anecdotes
illustrate. When, some years ago, the AFL-CIO advocated trade restraint, the
carpenters’ and Teamsters unions dissented. Though happy to relieve others from
foreign competition, they were unwilling, they made clear, to force higher
living costs on their own members. And when, in 2002, President George W. Bush
placed tariffs on imported steel, he immediately faced opposition from domestic
steel users — the makers of appliances, autos, and the like. All objected
strenuously to the need to pay more for a vital input. Even the United Auto
Workers complained, seeing the threat to its members’ jobs. The president
eventually bowed to the pressure.
Avoiding the onerous costs of protectionism should not
mean ignoring the plight of displaced workers, passively watching the
destruction of the middle class, or suffering social instability. On the
contrary, with will and thought, the United States can prosper by retooling the
skills and orientation of its workforce.
The first step would be to acknowledge that the
labor-intensive industries on which the lower middle class once depended will
not return, at least in their old form. Wage competition from emerging
economies is simply too intense for domestic operations to compete in the
labor-heavy production of shoes, toys, textiles, and the like. Robotics and
other technological applications may render domestic operations in these areas
viable again, but they will not bring a massive number of low-skilled jobs with
them.
The economy we need would instead embrace the turn toward
digitized, mechanized processes and focus more on the production of
sophisticated, high-value-added products. Only these can support jobs at
middle-class wages. The U.S., which enjoys a comparative advantage in these
areas, should be able to make the transition. The average American worker, for
instance, has 20 times the productive equipment and computing power at his or
her disposal than workers in China — and more still than workers in India,
Brazil, Vietnam, or Indonesia. And American workers have other advantages.
Adult literacy in the United States exceeds 99 percent, compared with 91
percent in China, 90 percent in Indonesia and Vietnam, 89 percent in Brazil,
and only 61 percent in India. For all we hear about impressive engineers and
other professionals from China, India, and other emerging economies, the
average worker has just 6.4 years of formal education in China, 5.1 years in India,
and 4.9 years in Brazil — compared with 13 years for workers in the U.S.
Market forces already have been transforming the American
economy along these lines for a while. The American chemical industry, for
instance, has moved the production of standardized products overseas but has
kept more complex, high-value, and customized activities at home. IBM decided
as early as 2004 that the production of personal computers had become
standardized and sold that division to the Chinese producer Lenovo. In announcing
the sale, IBM also mentioned its domestic shift to sophisticated consulting
services. General Electric has divided its massive power-equipment division,
sending its routine, low-value assembly and parts manufacturing to emerging
economies, while reserving for its costlier but better-trained American
workforce the more demanding areas of power-plant design, construction, and
installation. Even the clothing and textiles industry, while sending
conventional woolen and cotton spinning, weaving, cutting, and assembly work
abroad, still makes expensive specialty products in the U.S., including the
highly mechanized production of synthetic industrial fabrics.
The nature of the workplace has also begun to reflect the
new realities. The emphasis on higher-value product is shifting management’s
focus from standardized mass production to quality control, planning, and
design. Because so much high-value product is customized, at least to a degree,
employee communication skills, both internally and with customers, are
increasingly prized by management. The growing preponderance of better-trained
workers, with responsibilities for sophisticated equipment, systems, and client
communication, has begun to create different management styles. Hierarchies
have become less rigid. Labor Department surveys of how firms apportion
employee functions capture these changes. The proportion of positions in
straight supervision has dropped 5.5 percent over the past decade, even as the
proportion of those involved in planning, design, quality control, and related
areas has risen some 22 percent. These shifts are happening even in such
seemingly traditional industries as paper, autos, aircraft, and railroad
equipment.
America clearly will need a workforce trained to meet
future needs. Education at the university level will have a role in that
effort, as ever, but the crucial step will be vocational training to upgrade
the skill set of new entrants to the job force as well as those displaced from
old industries or old jobs. So far, Washington has missed the point. President
Obama and the Beltway bureaucracy focused almost exclusively on higher
education, particularly the study of science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics — the so-called STEM subjects. STEM graduates will undoubtedly play
a big role in the economy of the future, but they will have less to do with
rebuilding the middle class. To do that, Washington needs to end its obsession
with advanced degrees and instead help those who want to become machinists,
robot-repair technicians, installation specialists, client-liaison managers,
and other occupations that tend to require a post–high school education but not
a four-year university diploma. Helping these kinds of aspirants would surely
constitute a better use of the $50 billion a year that the country presently
spends on benefits to displaced workers, mostly to warehouse them. As the
National Bureau of Economic Research has documented, workers with marketable
education and training are no less secure than their counterparts four decades
ago.
Community colleges have made strides reorienting their
curriculums toward vocational training. In North Carolina — particularly in
counties devastated by the loss of the textile industry — community colleges
have reached out to firms across the country and around the world, promising
them that, if they relocate nearby, they can help write the school’s
curriculum. The response has been remarkably positive. Some states have moved
in this direction, as well. Michigan has had success retraining autoworkers,
for example, while South Carolina’s retraining program reportedly boosts the
earning power of its participants. The forging of a new middle class depends on
many more such efforts, including training partnerships between government, community
colleges, businesses, and private vocational schools.
The Trump administration and other policymakers would be
wise to take a serious look at the German approach to equipping citizens with
the skills they’ll need in tomorrow’s economy. There, vocational education is
serious business, with robust programs designed for both the young and for
displaced workers. Today’s German workforce boasts higher average skill levels
than are found in most countries, and Germany has one of the flattest income
distributions in the developed world — and one of the lowest unemployment
rates.
For the young, Germany offers a well-established
apprenticeship program, allowing bright young men and women to pursue
vocational training while on the payroll of participating companies. Candidates
in these programs are assigned mentors, who first teach so-called soft skills —
the need, for example, to report ready to work and on time every day. The
training then progresses to simple job skills and ultimately the high-level
skills that can command good pay. Many apprentices become lifelong friends with
their mentors and repay the training with strong company loyalty.
The two-decade-old Hartz reforms — named after Peter
Hartz, head of a German commission on labor-market reforms — have created a
number of vocational retraining initiatives for the unemployed. Participants’
unemployment benefits remain contingent on their active involvement in the plan
and are limited to between six and 12 months overall. After exhausting
unemployment relief, those who have still not found work see their benefits
decline to the level of the country’s means-tested welfare system. Those who
decline training or refuse to relocate to take advantage of suitable work
likewise lose some of their benefits.
The system also holds social-safety-net bureaucrats
accountable to quantitative goals. It helps them meet their targets by
authorizing unemployment offices to serve as temporary work agencies. If the
unemployment office fails to place a person within six weeks, it must give him
a voucher to pay the fees of a private placement agency. The system
successfully moves the unemployed to higher-skilled jobs that, like the
country’s apprenticeship program, benefit the worker, businesses, and the
German economy.
Even if the U.S. chose to emulate the German model in
some fashion, another problem would remain: how to make arrangements for those
cognitively or emotionally incapable of reentering the workforce. Too many
displaced workers seem unwilling to seek out training opportunities. Perhaps
despondent or bitter or both, they often remain on government relief and make
little effort to get back into the job market. Older workers, especially, have
trouble relocating to find work.
In some cases, technology can substitute for individual
inadequacies — as supermarket scanners, for instance, have reduced the need for
numerate checkout clerks. Some in this cohort will find work in these or other
remaining low-skilled positions — though many of these jobs are being fully
automated. Perhaps, as the new economy’s winners grow richer, more
opportunities for the less skilled will open in service positions, though the
salaries may fall short of a middle-class standard. If such positions are still
too few, society will have to see to the needs of this unfortunate group.
Whenever possible, government aid should be connected to work of some kind.
Even if not viable in a strict market sense, this work could serve a public
need and, importantly, give these people a sense of self-worth that handouts
cannot provide.
Adapting to our emerging economic reality is unavoidable.
The question is not whether the country will make the changes but whether it
can do so with significant amelioration of pain and avoidance of social stress.
Even at its smoothest, the effort presents serious obstacles. Experimentation,
tolerance for failure, and attention to the experiences of others will all be
required. Still, we should take heart in the fact that businesses, workers, and
even governments have already begun the process, and in time, their efforts are
likely to become more effective. If Washington could think outside the Beltway,
for a change, it would help a lot. It would be foolish to be complacent about
the country’s ability to meet the challenges of work in the 21st century. At
the same time, the evidence argues strongly against despair.
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