The jobs Americans do

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The jobs Americans do

by confuzzled dude Thu Feb 23, 2017 11:07 pm

The decline of the old working class has meant both an economic triumph for the nation and a personal tribulation for many of the workers. Technological progress has made American farms and factories more productive than ever, creating great wealth and cutting the cost of food and most other products. But the work no longer requires large numbers of workers. In 1900, factories and farms employed 60 percent of the work force. By 1950, a half-century later, those two sectors employed 36 percent. In 2014, they employed less than 10 percent.

For more than a century, since the trend was first documented, people have been prophesying a dire future in which the working class would no longer work. In 1964, a group of prominent liberals wrote President Johnson to warn of a “cybernation revolution” inexorably creating “a permanent impoverished and jobless class established in the midst of potential abundance.”

In 1950, service work made up about 40 percent of working-class labor in the United States. By 2005, that share had climbed to 56 percent, according to data from a 2013 analysis by the economists David Autor at M.I.T. and David Dorn at the University of Zurich. The available evidence, Autor said, suggests that this trend has continued “very rapidly” over the last decade, increasing the share of American workers who work in the service industries.

The wages of service work increasingly determine the welfare of the American working class and, to a substantial degree, the broader economy. But politicians have paid little attention. That’s partly because Americans continue to view service work as a way station, not a way of life. Teenagers get their first job at McDonald’s; mothers dip back into the work force as receptionists; seniors make a little extra money as Walmart greeters. The reality is that these are the kinds of jobs millions of Americans hold for their entire working lives. And increasingly, these are the jobs their children will perform, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/the-new-working-class.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Trump was in support of minimum wage increase, is he still?

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Join date : 2011-05-08