My latest columns:
A growing chorus of commentators believes America faces an increasingly jobless future. They argue that the US economy can no longer create meaningful numbers of high-paying jobs, especially for less skilled workers who lack college or more advanced degrees.
There is no question that millions of high-paying jobs have been eliminated and private sector job creation has been anaemic. The US unemployment level did fall to 9.5 per cent in the latest figures released on Friday, but this decrease was mostly because more than half a million people gave up looking for work at all.
Periods of crisis and creative destruction such as the current one are when new categories of jobs are created as old categories of jobs are destroyed. The key to a sustained recovery is to turn as many of these – as well as existing lower-paying jobs – into better, family-supporting jobs.
“Why Canada Needs a Great Reset” in Ottawa Citizen.
With the G8 and G20 summits behind us, most Canadians now realize how comparatively unscathed we’ve come through the great economic crisis. But we shouldn’t be too hasty to pat ourselves on the back. Our economy is badly in need of significant structural changes. Without the pressure of a crisis, there’s a real danger that we’ll settle for complacency, instead…
Thanks to Canada’s risk-averse system of financial regulation, its banks are model citizens, admired around the globe; Canada’s housing markets swiftly rebounded and are already booming again. Though Canada’s gross domestic product declined just as precipitously as the U.S.’s did, we got off lightly when it came to unemployment. Some of Canada’s laid-off auto workers are being called back to work at formerly quiet factories from Windsor to Oshawa, and companies from Research in Motion to Loblaw are hiring new workers to support their growth.
Read the full piece here (PDF).
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“The Fourth Place” at The Daily Beast:
Starting July 1, Starbucks is offering free, one-click WiFi to its customers. “We offer many of the comforts you’d find at home,” its announcement proclaims. “So is it any surprise we offer free Internet access, too? It’s just part of being neighborly.” Starbucks aspires to be our home away from home, our next door neighbor, and even a remote office. And why not? It’s clear that we need such places.
It used to be that we knew when we were on and when we were off the clock, even if we didn’t punch in and out at the factory door. Work happened at, well, work. The Internet, cellphones, and BlackBerries—and the widespread adoption of a laid-back work-style that started in Silicon Valley—have changed that forever. Many of us, especially those of us whose most important work product comes out of our heads, no longer wear business attire or even show up at the office every day. Nevertheless, we are on the job 24/7.
Read the full piece here (PDF).
July 7th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
To turn service jobs into better (higher paying, better benefits) jobs requires one of the following to occur:
1. Improve efficiency which means fewer people required to generate the same output. In fact this was one of the major reasons that manufacturing wages increased. The U.S. is still a major manufacturing force; however, the number of people required to create the goods has declined dramatically. If the same happens in the service industry, where do the unneeded workers go?
2. Increased prices which means that consumers will pay more for the same amount of service output. To the extent that consumer income is stagnant, the higher cost will mean fewer services are demanded. I also suspect it will lead to more DIY as people decide they can more their own lawn and change their own oil.
3. Individuals who are now earning higher wages will have to accept “wage compression” which means the status of their job is lowered. If higher service wages result in everyone else asking for higher income, we will be back in the same position of service workers being relatively underpaid.
July 7th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
From the Financial Times article,
“Last fall, the City of Toronto and the Martin Prosperity Institute organised a summit with representatives from the public, private and non-profit sectors to develop new strategies for upgrading service work.”
Are there any success stories to report either in Toronto or Ontario? Are there any large groups of service workers that have higher paying jobs as a result? Related to that, what is meant by a high paying job? I often get the impression that this means $50,000/year in salary plus benefits (pension, education, health etc). Is that a reasonable yard stick? Without some sort of clear definition of what counts as a high paying job, it will be very difficult it not impossible to measure success toward that goal.
Also, the FT article refers to the success of the author’s father in the post World War 2 US economy. Unions are given some partial credit for this achievement. Do unions have a continuing role to play in securing good pay and benefits?
July 9th, 2010 at 5:16 am
RF, wasn’t there an acute labor shortage after WWII? That was the stated reason for the Braceros program to meet the shortage of agricultural laborers. Do we have a comparable labor shortage now? It seems not, so it is unlikely that the post-WWII wage-trends will repeat themselves.
“High-paying jobs for less skilled workers” – this wish is in conflict with abundant low-education immigrants to the US and abundant low-education workers in 3rd world countries.