The Subject line is exactly right. Most new jobs
require less education than 30 years ago. More
College education in the last 30 years has been a
get-out for employers who've simply needed to
choose from a more finely graded list. It's been
a get-out for politicians who can con the public
that their children are being prepared for a new
age. Colleges and universities have been able to
expand enormously by reducing entrance
requirements and, at the other end, inventing
Mickey Mouse degrees (which students don't
complain about -- at least not until very
recently). Real wages for most jobs have declined
in the lst 30 years. More jobs are becoming
part-time or short-time. Long term jobless are accumulating.
Is it a case that the education system has not
been able to adjust to a new age, or it is that
it has accommodated itself too well in the last
30 years? I believed the former when I first
joined FW List some -- what? -- 15 years ago? I
now believe that the latter is the case. Marx was
right after all. The culture changes willy-nilly
according to the basic characteristics of a
changing wealth-producing economy. As new, more
efficient production systems come along no amount
of political ideas, plans, legislation,
education, adequate state welfare, etc -- the
pouring of new wine into old bottle -- can adapt
well enough. It happens the other way round and
much more slowly. It's the economy that forces
changes on the culture -- population size, type
of education, social class structure, ideological
beliefs (and fashionable hysterias!), etc -- and
it takes a century at least to fully realize that
momentous changes had happened in the meantime.
Having made that insightful observation, Marx is
going to be no use to us today. He couldn't even
accurately forecast the unfolding of the
'ordinary' industrial revolution that had started
in his day. He couldn't possibly have anticipated
the rampant innovation that's now going nor the
fantastic level of competition (and subsequent
automation) among the businesses that produce the
basic stock of urban-based goods that everybody
buys. We're now moving into an era in which
previous incentives are no longer going to operate.
Keith
At 15:43 29/11/2012, you wrote:
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Kurtz
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:25 AM
Subject: [Ottawadissenters] Most New Jobs Don't Require College Education
<http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9162>http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9162
Bio
Jeannette Wicks-Lim completed her Ph.D. in
economics at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst in 2005. Wicks-Lim specializes in labor
economics with an emphasis on the low-wage labor
market and has an overlapping interest in the
political economy of race. Her dissertation,
Mandated wage floors and the wage structure:
Analyzing the ripple effects of minimum and
prevailing wage laws, is a study of the overall
impact of mandated wage floors on wages.
Specifically, she provides empirical estimates
of the extent to which mandated wage floors
cause wage changes beyond those required by law,
either through wage effects that ripple across
the wage distribution or spillover to workers
that are not covered by mandated wage floors.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The
Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
A new study has found that two-thirds of
American jobs being created and that are likely
to be created only require a high school
education or less. So the idea that people are
going to educate themselves out of unemployment
and poverty doesn't seem to have a heck of a perspective.
Now joining us to talk about this research is
Jeannette Wicks-Lim. She's an assistant research
professor at PERI institute at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. She also writes for
theNew Labor Forum, where she has a new piece
called "The Working Poor: A Booming
Demographic." Thanks for joining us again, Jeannette.
JEANNETTE WICKS-LIM, ASSIST. RESEARCH PROF., PERI: Thanks for having me.
JAY: So talk about what you found, first of all,
in terms of the nature of jobs that are
available, and then what significance that has.
WICKS-LIM: Right. Well, and just to repeat what
you said and just to underscore this point,
because it seems like a lot of the news stories
these dayswell, this has been an old news
storyis that low-wage workers, what they really
[incompr.] is a college education, and that's
what they willyou know, that will be the key to
getting them into a better-paying job and get
them out of a status of working poverty.
And when you look at what's actually out there
in the U.S. economy and the types of jobs that
are offered, what you find is, by the Department
of Labor's own reports, about 70 percent of the
jobs that are currently available, and also the
jobs that can be expected to be created between
now and 2020, about 70 percent of them only
require a high school degree or less to have
entry-level positions. So a lot of these jobs do
not require this college education that seems to
be pushed over and over again in order to
increase the welfare of low-wage workers.
And what you also find, what I also found when I
was looking at these figures is that you do see
that the workforce has become more and more
educated over the last three decades. I mean, if
you look at figures from 1979 to 2011, you see
that in the workforce, aboutwe started at about
40 percent of the workforce having some level of
college experience, and that's now reached over
60 percent. At the same time, over the same
number of years, you've seen that workers
earning a very low wage rate of $10 an hour or
less, 25 percent of the workforce are in that
low wage level. So, you know, we have the same
constant share of very lowly paid jobs, about a quarter of the workforce.
Now, what does that mean, you have more and more
workers being educated but you still have a very
significant share of workers earning very low
wages? What it means is that you have better and
better educated low-wage workers. So if you look
at these $10 an hour or less workers, you see
that betweenyou know, over the last three
decades, there was 25 percent of the workers who
had some college experience, and now you've got
20 percent of these workers with some college
experience. So they are indeed better-educated.
So maybe, you know, they're following this idea
that getting more education will improve their
economic status. But in fact what we find is
that the economic status does not improve.
JAY: So why this change? We're supposedly going
into the technology economy and the information
technology and so on and so on, which all
supposedly implies better-educated people will do better.
WICKS-LIM: Well, I think it's just a
misrepresentation of what's happening in the
U.S. workforce. And what you often will hear, if
you listen carefully, in news reports about
what's happening with the workforce, what you
often will hear people say is that the
fastest-growing jobs are in these high-tech
fields that require a high level of educational
credentials and that, you know, pay good wages.
Well, these jobs take up a very small share of
the workforce, so they may indeed be growing
very fast. They represent a very small number of
workers in the overall economy.
Instead what's [incompr.] the mainstay in terms
of work in the U.S. economy are these jobs that
only require a high school degree or less.
They're usually tied to the service economy. So
if you lookagain, this is something that's
reported by the Department of Labor. One of the
things that they report among the top 30
occupations with the largest job growth, between
what they are projecting, between 2010 and 2020,
that amongst those top 30 jobs, many of them are
very low wage jobs, very low wage occupations.
And what I did, actually, in this recent piece
that I did is that I compared the occupations in
this list of the top 30 occupations with the
largest job growth over the next ten years to
the most common jobs held by the working poor.
In fact, the majority of the occupations in both
these lists are the same. In other words, the
jobs that are adding the most number of jobs,
the ones that are expected to add the most
number of jobs over the next ten years, are the
same kinds of jobs that the working poor hold.
So that's really a more accurate description of
what are the most common, most prevalent, the
jobs that are going to be adding the most new
positions over the next ten years are these
kinds of jobs. And you can imagine what these
jobs areyou know, consist of. They're jobs like
janitors, security guards, childcare workers,
home health care aides, those types of
positions. And those are positions that people,
you know, are pretty well aware are pretty
common in the U.S. economy, and they just, in
fact, make up a large proportion of the workforce.
JAY: And, of course, the other thing that's
happening is that even jobs that traditionally
paid significantly more, like in the auto
industry, where it used to be a starting worker
would make $24 to $26 an hour to begin, the new
contracts now have starting workers at $14, or
even less in somein auto parts manufacturing,
and the kind of two-tier contracts are happening
all over the country. So even those working
class jobs that in theory did pay more are disappearing.
WICKS-LIM: Yeah, that's true. I think what we've
been seeing in the recent decades is a large
growth in jobs that pay very low wages, and then
some growth in jobs that pay very high wages,
and those sort of middle-income jobs that pay
decent wages, the ones that you were just
talking about, the, you know, auto manufacturing
jobs, their pay is either decreasing, or their jobs are going overseas.
JAY: And of course that has pretty broad
implications for the whole economy as well,
because, I mean, we've been saying on The Real
Newsand I canit's probably rather obvious to
people that if demand doesn't increase, if more
people can't buy more stuff, then the economy
continues to stagnate. But that means higher
wages, and in fact things are moving in the opposite direction.
WICKS-LIM: Right. [incompr.] other interesting
thing to point out is that a lot of these
low-wage jobs that are, you know, this large
share of the workforce, these are jobs that are
not going to be, you know, pushed offshore.
They're not jobs that are easilyI don't know
what the right word is, but you can't, you know,
replace them easily with machines. So, you know,
jobs like a childcare worker or a home health
aide, these are jobs that need to be done by
people within the U.S. border. So these jobs
actually have the potential to be, you know,
improved, because it's not easy to say, well,
you know, a firm isn't going to just ship them
off to another country, and it's notthey're not
positions that are easily, you know, done away
with by replacing them with machines. So these
are jobs that have potential to become better-quality jobs.
But you do needwhat I argue in the piece is you
need a stronger labor movement.
JAY: Thanks for joining us, Jeannette.
WICKS-LIM: Thank you, Paul.
End
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