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From: Gary Chapman
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: L.A. Times column, 9/13/99
Date: Monday, September 13, 1999 11:44AM
Friends,
Below is my Los Angeles Times column for this morning, Monday,
September 13, 1999. As always, please feel free to pass this on, but
please retain the copyright notice.
Best,
-- Gary
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Monday, September 13, 1999
Digital Nation
Opposing Views of U.S. Economy Are Worthy Debate Fodder for 2000 Election
By Gary Chapman
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
Last week's observance of Labor Day brought with it the annual media
coverage of the state of labor in the United States, a subject nearly
ignored the rest of the year. Except for Labor Day, workers are
typically treated as an abstract factor of production, a price for
employers and as wage statistics that might affect Wall Street or the
musings of Alan Greenspan.
But even last week's coverage of the state of labor in the U.S.
tended to avoid the obvious: The new high-tech economy is splitting
the country into several segments, not only between "haves and
have-nots," but between two entirely different views on the
underlying benefits of the U.S. economy, a phenomenon that could have
a profound impact on next year's national elections.
Here's one point of view: Not only is the U.S. economy in great
shape, it's the envy of the world.
High-tech is the engine of what is only five months shy of being the
longest economic expansion in U.S. history. The stock market is at
record levels. The federal government has a budget surplus.
Unemployment is at a 30-year low. Inflation is almost nonexistent.
Crime is down, cities are rebounding, the poor are going back to work
and even income inequality appears to be softening.
Here's the other view: Median family incomes for the middle-class
haven't budged, after adjusting for inflation, in 10 years.
The majority of workers, especially young to middle-aged men, are
making less now in hourly wages than 20 years ago. Nearly every
family requires two wage earners to preserve the family's financial
status quo, and Americans are working longer hours than others in the
industrialized world.
Americans also are running up record levels of debt, especially with
credit cards. The United States' foreign trade deficit has grown
faster than stock market prices. At a time of unprecedented national
wealth, more than a quarter of the nation's children live in poverty.
"What is the purpose of an economy?" asks Professor Robert Brenner,
Director of UCLA's Center for Social Theory and Comparative History
and author of the soon-to-be-published "Turbulence in the World
Economy" (Verso Books, 1999). "What are the criteria for whether an
economy is doing well or not doing well?"
Those are the kinds of questions Americans might ask political
candidates next year.
A debate is emerging among economists, academics and economic
observers about what explains the very mixed performance of the U.S.
economy. At the center of this debate is whether productivity is
going up, why it has been so low in the last decade, and whether
technology is really contributing to Americans' standard of living.
Brenner notes that during the last decade, with the exception of the
U.S. manufacturing sector, U.S. productivity growth has been the
worst in its history, half or even less than half the average rate of
growth for the previous 100 years.
He blames this on the strategy of U.S. corporations that took
advantage of low wages and a strong dollar, factors that depressed
the need to invest in productivity-enhancing technologies. If it's
cheap to do work with labor, Brenner argues, there is less pressure
to invest in greater productivity.
The question on the table is whether productivity can be stimulated
and bring with it higher wages, or whether companies will continue to
take profits at the expense of wages and leave most American families
stuck where they are.
One answer might be trade unions. "Strengthening unions would raise
wages and productivity," Brenner says. Trade unions would appear to
be the solution for a lot of problems facing American workers, such
as longer hours, fewer benefits and stagnant wages. The same problems
created unions a hundred years ago.
In fact, more Americans are sympathetic to unions than in the recent
past, especially younger workers, according to recent surveys
commissioned by the AFL-CIO.
In a survey of nonunion workers in nonsupervisory roles, 43% said
they would vote yes for a union, up from 30% in 1984. A majority of
workers -- 54% between the ages of 18 and 34 -- said they would
choose to join a union, the AFL-CIO survey reported.
These figures, if accurate, are portentous, but especially in
contrast to attitudes about trade unions in the affluent high-tech
sector. There, the subject of unions is treated with nearly unanimous
contempt and even anger, a feature of the individualist, libertarian
ethos that permeates the ranks of highly skilled and well-paid
technical workers.
Thus, we're seeing a deep and fundamental split among workers under
age 40 -- between the millions who don't have a college education and
the small elite that Wired magazine labeled "Generation Equity" who
are living on stock options, paper wealth and profit-taking from the
stock market.
This disparity could shape next year's election debates. Al Gore was
a high-tech candidate in 1992 and 1996, when many Republican
high-tech executives supported the Clinton-Gore ticket. Now younger
and richer high-tech leaders view Gore as ominously close to the
AFL-CIO and its agenda. As a supporter of both high-tech and unions,
Gore is trying to have it both ways, but that may be impossible.
The historical pattern of how technology has affected the economy
should teach us that technology has no "natural" logic of its own, as
some high-tech leaders claim. It is always an expression of economic
relations. High-tech could be used in different ways to benefit more
people than it does.
How can we get our political candidates to talk about that?
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the
University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at
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