Whew! In the 1990s, Willy Loman wouldn’t have the resume to get into sales. And therein lies the real dilemma behind “the downsizing of America.” This year’s campaign rhetoric would have you believe that middle-class jobs are fast disappearing for you and your kids. With giants from AT&T to Wells Fargo announcing massive layoffs-and with so many other workers getting only slim raises-who wouldn’t be worried? Yet strange things are going on out there in the job market. While Americans fret about the demise of the good jobs they remember, the economy is creating millions of new ones that once we would never have dreamed of. The trouble is: many require skills that most of today’s workers still don’t have.
Based on the numbers, we should all be happily sitting in our freshly painted split-levels with new cars in the driveway. In many parts of the country, it’s jobs, not workers, that are going begging. “The biggest problem we have here is trying to get good people,” complains Silicon Valley venture capitalist Stephens Millard, who’s trying to staff-up two high-tech firms. The national jobless rate is a scant 5.5 percent, down from 5.8 percent in January, the government reported last Friday. More than 700,000 Dew jobs were created, the biggest one-month total in a dozen years. The stock and bond markets didn’t like it, but workers should. At big companies Eke Ameritech and at small ones like Proto View Development in Cranbury, N.J., they’re hiring.
If there’s one fact that everyone thinks he knows, it’s this: most new jobs are low-wage jobs. Superficially, that’s true. Of the 8.3 million positions created since 1993, only 300,000 are in durable-goods manufacturing, where pay is relatively high. Retailers, by contrast, added a million. Figures like that lie behind the 1992 Labor Department study which found one in six college grads doing work that required only a high-school education. Yet as is always the case with economics, you’d best give those stats a closer look. “The occupational classifications that the government uses are out of date,” says economist Joel Popkin, who’s trying to revise them. Yes, plenty of folks wait tables. But low-wage classifications such as “services” hide a lot of new high-tech jobs, because that’s how Uncle Sam keeps the numbers.
Technology gets the rap for disrupting industry after industry. But it’s also turning bad jobs into good ones. Consider banking, where 200,000 jobs have vanished since 1990. Last month First Union Bank customer-service rep Julie Spry moved from a branch to a cubicle in Charlotte, N.C. Now she’s a telephone banker, urging customers to do more business with the bank. Three years ago First Union had no such positions. By the end of the decade it expects to have 1,000 people like Spry delivering personal attention to folks who prefer computers and cash machines and never go near a branch. Spry even has business cards bearing her photo, so her clients will feel that they know a banker they’ve never met. Working the phone takes a college degree and a different style from work in a branch. There’s a payoff. Even with sales incentives, most of First Union’s branch reps don’t earn much over $20,000. Telephone bankers can do twice that, turning a low-paid job into a middle-class income.
Kate Smith’s job used to be called drafting. The colored pencils and T squares are gone, but the work isn’t. At Brooktree Corp. in San Diego, Smith, 33, spends her days staring at a screen in a darkened room, trying to align the intricate circuitry of a computer chip. “It’s like putting a puzzle together,” she says. Brooktree courted her three years ago with flowers and a plane ticket for her interview, then offered a salary that can go to $70,000 plus stock options. Sound good? This isn’t rocket science, or even engineering. Becoming a designer requires only a two-year community-college degree.
Computer skills alone are no salvation. Technology changes work–and not everyone who has mastered the old work will succeed at the new. Two years ago Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., decided that paying librarians to look up facts is a waste of money. Instead, wants teams of librarians like Stacy Hach, 33, to function as consultants, using computers to pull together analyses for scientists and market researchers. “This is way beyond what would be considered the original skills of librarians,” says Hach’s boss, Bill Townsend. Librarians are moving toward a two-tier pay scale, Townsend says, with those who can analyze information earning much more than those who shelve books.
Junior often has an easier job search than Mom and Dad these days. Internet, hypertext, C++ programming language? No problem. “Young men and women proved adept at moving into occupations that were expanding and had high wages,” economists John Tyler, Richard Murnane and Frank Levy found in a new study of college grads from the 1980s. The demand for skills is so intense that Jackson State Community College in Tennessee will soon teach manufacturing technology 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While adults sweat the loss of lifetime jobs, students have learned to fear obsolescence. They don’t ask about long-term commitments but about challenges, says University of Nebraska placement officer Geri Cotter. “They really worry about being bored,” Cotter adds. “They’re afraid of the mundane.”
And they’re very career-oriented. Chad Baldwin may not have done his career any favors studying liberal arts at Miami of Ohio. But between Spanish classes, he hung around the computer lab. When he won an internship at Chicago ad agency J. Walter Thompson, he used his summer to look into the future. “I figured interactive advertising was going to be a hot area,” he concluded. The CD-ROM he produced for his senior project helped persuade J. Walter Thompson/Interactive Enterprise in San Francisco to snap him up at premium pay. Now, Baldwin spends his days–and nights–designing the Web sites companies erect to tout themselves online. It’s a job that didn’t exist in an industry that didn’t exist when the 22-year-old started college.
Americans’ gnawing sense of ill-being is understandable–and ideal political fodder. But fear may be a lagging indicator. After years of layoffs, marque names like Boeing and Delta Air Lines are looking to hire again. By 2003, the University of Michigan projected last month, U.S. automakers will take on more than 200,000 workers. When those old-line jobs come back, though, they won’t be immune to the technoshocks that make job security an outdated expectation. The MTV crowd can live with that. Their parents will have a tougher time.
