Arthur,
This article exemplifies the dilemma that most observers know about -- the
continuing rise in automation in existing occupations and, more seriously,
that new jobs mainly hinge around a new computerized/Internetted
infrastructure. What is never mentioned is that the vast stream of hundreds
of uniquely new consumer goods that underlay the broad mass of consumer
demand from about 1780-1980. We simply don't have that succession of
products any more -- only embellishments of existing ones or replacements.
Ever since hunter-gatherer times (10,000 years ago) the % of adults in
"value-adding" occupations has been declining from 100%. Today, at least
50% of the adult population could disappear and yet the present type of
economic infrastructure could continue. Of course, if this happened
overnight it would be chaos, but this is the basic drift of things with a
growing mass of dependents and dumbed down jobs in the advanced countries.
Keith
.At 22:14 13/05/2010 -0400, you wrote:
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
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Honesty hits the NY Times.
=============================
May 12, 2010 NY Times
In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/catherine_rampell/index.html?inline=nyt-per>CATHERINE
RAMPELL
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. Many of the jobs lost during the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/recession_and_depression/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>recession
are not coming back.
Period.
For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for
employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of
people like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers who were displaced
by technological advances and international trade.
The phasing out of these positions might have been accomplished through
less painful means like attrition, buyouts or more incremental layoffs.
But because of the recession, winter came early.
The tough environment has been especially disorienting for older and more
experienced workers like Cynthia Norton, 52, an unemployed administrative
assistant in Jacksonville.
I know Im good at this,says Ms. Norton. So how the hell did I end up here?
Administrative work has always been Ms. Nortons calling,she says, ever
since she started work as an assistant for her aunt at 16, back when the
uniform was a light blue polyester suit and a neckerchief. In the ensuing
decades she has filed, typed and answered phones for just about every
breed of business, from a law firm to a strip club. As a secretary at the
RAND Corporation, she once even had the honor of escorting
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/henry_a_kissinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Henry
Kissinger around the building.
But since she was laid off from an insurance company two years ago, no one
seems to need her well-honed office know-how.
Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical
and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer
working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been
outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be
revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine
operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007
to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel
agents fell by 40 percent.
This creative destructionin the job market can benefit the economy.
Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents,
whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes
American businesses more efficient. Year over year, productivity growth
was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate
profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.
But a huge group of people are being left out of the party.
Millions of workers who have already been unemployed for months, if not
years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market
continues to improve, economists say. The occupations they worked in, and
the skills they currently possess, are never coming back in style. And the
demand for new types of skills moves a lot more quickly than workers
especially older and less mobile workers are able to retrain and gain
those skills.
There is no easy policy solution for helping the people left behind. The
usual unemployment measures like jobless benefits and food stamps can
serve as temporary palliatives, but they cannot make workersskills
relevant again.
Ms. Norton has sent out hundreds of résumés without luck. Twice, the
openings she interviewed for were eliminated by employers who decided,
upon further reflection, that redistributing administrative tasks among
existing employees made more sense than replacing the outgoing secretary.
One employer decided this shortly after Ms. Norton had already started
showing up for work.
Ms. Norton is reluctant to believe that her three decades of experience
and her typing talents, up to 120 words a minute, are now obsolete. So she
looks for other explanations.
Employers, she thinks, fear she will be disloyal and jump ship for a
higher-paying job as soon as one comes along.
Sometimes she blames the bad economy in Jacksonville. Sometimes she sees
age discrimination. Sometimes she thinks the problem is that she has not
been able to afford a haircut in a while. Or perhaps the paper her résumé
is printed on is not nice enough.
The problem cannot be that the occupation she has devoted her life to has
been largely computerized, she says.
You cant replace the human thought process,she says. I can anticipate
peoples needs. Usually, I give them what they want before they even know
they need it. There will never be a machine that can do that.
And that is true, up to a point: human judgment still counts for
something. That means some of the filing jobs, just like some of the
manufacturing jobs, that were cut during the recession will return. But a
lot of them probably will not.
Offices, not just in Jacksonville but all over the country, have found
that life without a secretary or filing clerk which they may have begun
somewhat reluctantly when economic pressures demanded it is actually
pretty manageable.
After all, the office environment is more automated and digitized than
ever. Bosses can handle their own calendars, travel arrangements and files
through their own computers and ubiquitous BlackBerrys. In many offices,
voice mail systems and doorbells not receptionists greet callers and visitors.
And so, even when orders pick up, many of the newly de-clerked and
un-secretaried may not recall their laid-off assistants. At the very
least, any assistants they do hire will probably be younger people with
different skills.
Economists have seen this type of structural change, which happens over
the long term but is accelerated by a downturn, many times before.
This always happens in recessions,says John Schmitt, a senior economist
with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Employers see them as an
opportunity to clean house and then get ready for the next big move in the
labor market. Or in the product market as well.
Economists like
<http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci9-8/ci9-8.html>Erica
Groshen at the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_reserve_bank_of_new_york/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Federal
Reserve Bank of New York have argued that bigger structural job losses
help explain why the last two economic recoveries were jobless that is,
why job expansion lagged far behind overall growth.
But there is reason to think restructuring may take a bigger toll this
time around. The percentage of unemployed workers who were permanently let
go has hovered at a record high of over 50 percent for several months.
Additionally, the unemployment numbers show a notable split in the labor
pool, with most unemployed workers finding jobs after a relatively short
period of time, but a sizable chunk of the labor force unable to find new
work even after months or years of searching. This group comprising
generally older workers has pulled up the average length of time that a
current worker has been unemployed to a record high of 33 weeks as of
April. The percentage of unemployed people who have been looking for jobs
for more than six months is at 45.9 percent, the highest in at least six
decades.
And so the question is what kinds of policy responses can help workers
like Ms. Norton who are falling further and further behind in the economic
recovery, and are at risk of falling out of the middle class.
Ms. Norton has spent most of the last two years working part time at
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wal_mart_stores_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Wal-Mart
as a cashier, bringing home about a third of what she had earned as an
administrative assistant. Besides the hit to her pocketbook, she grew
frustrated that the work has not tapped her full potential.
A monkey could do what I do,she says of her work as a cashier. Actually, a
monkey would get bored.
Ms. Norton says she cannot find any government programs to help her
strengthen the thin bootstrapsshe intends to pull herself up by. Because
of the Wal-Mart job, she has been ineligible for unemployment benefits,
and she says she made too much money to qualify for food stamps or
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>Medicaid
last year.
If youre not a minority, or not handicapped, or not a young parent, or not
a veteran, or not in some other certain category, your hope of finding
help and any hope of finding work out there is basically nil,Ms. Norton
says. I know. Ive looked.
Of course, just as there is a structural decline in some industries,
others enjoy structural growth (the creativepart of creative destruction).
The key is to prepare the group of workers left behind for the growing
industry.
You can bring the jobs back for some of these people, but they wont be in
the same place,says Thomas Anton Kochan, a professor of management at the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
The White House has publicly challenged the idea that structural
unemployment is a big problem, with
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/christina_d_romer/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Christina
D. Romer, the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/white_house_council_of_economic_advisers/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Council
of Economic Advisers chairwoman, instead emphasizing that
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/Back-to-a-Better-Normal>stronger
economic growth is whats needed. Still, the administration has allocated
dollars for retraining in both the 2009
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/economic_stimulus/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>stimulus
package and other legislation, largely for clean technology jobs.
Ms. Norton, for her part, may be reluctant to acknowledge that many of her
traditional administrative assistant skills are obsolete, but she has
tried to retrain or as she puts it, adapt her existing skills to a new
career in the expanding health care industry.
Even that has proved difficult.
She attended an eight-month course last year, on a $17,000
<http://www.nytimes.com/info/student-loans/?inline=nyt-classifier>student
loan, to obtain certification as a medical assistant. She was trained to
do front-office work, like billing, as well as back-office work, like
giving injections and drawing blood.
The school that trained her, though, neglected to inform her that local
employers require at least a years worth of experience generally done
through volunteering at a clinic before hiring someone for a paid job in
the field.
She says she cannot afford to spend a year volunteering, especially with
her student loan coming due soon. She has one prospect for part-time
administrative work in Los Angeles where she once had her own
administrative support and secretarial services business, SilverKeys but
she does not have the money to relocate.
If I had $3,000 in my pocket right now, I would pack up my S.U.V., grab my
dog and go straight back,she says. Thats my only answer.
With so few local job prospects and most of her possessions of value
already liquidated she has considered selling her blood to help pay for
the move. But she says she cannot find a market for that, either; blood
collection agencies, she said, told her they do not buy her blood type.
Sometimes I think Id be better off in jail,she says, only half joking. Id
have three meals a day and structure in my life. Id be able to go to
school. Id have more opportunities if I were an inmate than I do here
trying to be a contributing member of society.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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