NewWork Reviews

NewWork Reviews

NewWork Reviews

Reviewed by
Laurence Shatkin
Proprietor of Verbal Media, LLC, a consulting company that specializes in career information.
Former Development Scientist
Educational Testing Service
E-mail: Laurence@myself.com

Sometimes sequels suffer because the first book in the series makes such an impact with its originality and timeliness that the follow-up receives less attention, even though it is an important work with great merits of its own. This has been the case with Arthur C. Clarke's sequels to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I hope it does not become the fate of Workforce 2020, the new sequel to the epochal Workforce 2000 . It would be a pity if the sequel were overshadowed by the Hudson Institute's earlier publication, because the new book has an important message in its own right, and its clear style, abundance of colorful charts and tables, bulleted chapter summaries, and short length make it an easy read and help it to communicate its ideas effectively.

While other writers (notably Lester Thurow and Paul Krugman) are arguing over whether the great changes in the American workplace are being caused by rapid technological change or by increasing international trade, Judy and D'Amico cite both of these forces as important. Some of the other forces that they expect to influence Workforce 2020 greatly are the aging of the American workforce, its increasing ethnic diversification, and deregulation and liberalization both at home and abroad.

They foresee an America that is more integrated than ever before into a world economy, one in which developing nations will be increasingly important players. Increasing deregulation and liberalization within these nations' borders and among nations will break down monopolies, stoke competition, and increase both the pace of development abroad and the ease with which goods -- and entire industries -- can move from one country to another.

Yet Judy and D'Amico dispense with the common wisdom that says that manufacturing as a whole is leaving America's shores. On the contrary, they expect that the products of manufacturing will continue to rise as a share of American exports, and although the low-skilled, low-paid manufacturing jobs will be lost either to automation or to foreign countries, and overall employment in the manufacturing sector will decrease, this part of the economy will produce many high-skilled, high-paying jobs.

As an example, they spend some time discussing the microcomputer industry -- one of the most dynamic players in the manufacturing sector -- which has shipped the manufacturing of memory chips overseas, but which has kept the manufacturing of microprocessors here at home, where it supports numerous high-level workers involved in chip design, software engineering, manufacturing engineering (tackling the problems of producing ever-tinier transistors), and management. They also make a point of denouncing the protectionism that Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan promoted in the last presidential campaign, making the classic free-trade case that protectionism merely results in economic stagnation.

In their chapter on work, compensation, and occupations, Judy and D'Amico cite many of the familiar trends: breakdown of traditional gender barriers, decrease in traditional job security, the boom in temporary labor services, the growth of telecommuting. But they look beyond the simple, headline-grabbing factoids and perform a more careful analysis of the trends. For example, they find that job tenure for men with four or more years of college actually increased by 9% between 1983 and 1991; they also find that temporary workers are not as low-skilled, uneducated, bereft of fringe benefits, stuck in a dead-end job, or unhappy as is commonly assumed.

They report the familiar trend toward polarization of the workforce into high-paying and low-paying occupations, with a decrease in middle-paying occupations; yet they also find evidence of an unexpected amount of upward mobility among low-income workers with basic skills, education, and motivation to work. They cite a study based on income-tax returns that shows that "only 5 percent of those in the bottom quintile of the income distribution in 1975 were still there in 1991. Furthermore, a majority of those who had been in the bottom quintile actually rose to places in the top three quintiles..." (pp. 61-62).

Another point they make that defies common wisdom is that higher education is no guarantee of higher earnings; they point out that the average wages of college graduates vary greatly according to what major the graduate specialized in. Here again they avoid tabloid oversimplification by pointing out the great variation of incomes within the group of people who had been in any particular major; for example, "we find 20 percent of female philosophy, religion, and theology graduates earning more than $47,000 -- even though this field has the lowest median earnings of all the subjects covered in the study" (p. 69).

They also attack some conventional assumptions about which occupations will provide the most jobs. It is a common belief that there will be few jobs in blue-collar and relatively low-skilled white-collar positions; but although net job growth in these categories will be low, total job openings will be high because of replacement needs as workers of the baby boom generation retire. Net job growth in the professional and managerial categories will be high, even in industrial sectors such as manufacturing that will lose workers overall. They present two interesting tables showing the 25 fastest growing occupations, 1994-2005, and the 25 fastest shrinking .

It is interesting to note that in the health care field, which has become glamorous in recent years, most of the expected growth will be in low-skilled to semi-skilled occupations such as home health aide and medical assistant. The occupations that are rapidly shrinking, such as computer operator and machine tool cutting operator, are mainly victims of automation. The authors perform an interesting analysis of the skill requirements of the fast-growing occupations, using the skill ratings provided by the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Although I have some reservations about the currency of these skill ratings, the overall trend -- that the fast-growing occupations tend to require higher skills than the fast-shrinking occupations -- is probably genuine.

Their discussion of the "graying of America" inevitably raises the cloudy future of Social Security and Medicare, both of which will require either reductions in benefits or else increases in taxation -- two unpalatable solutions. Judy and D'Amico believe that the most likely outcome is reduced benefits and postponed retirements, but they point out that the best way to minimize the pain of these measures is to have a booming economy generating high tax revenues and to provide incentives that keep the aging baby boomers in the workforce.

In fact, they note, the health of the economy will in part depend on keeping the high-skilled boomers happily productive much longer than their parents. Flexible work hours and telecommuting may help in this regard, but I can't help wondering what influence sociological or cultural factors will have. We boomers have done things differently throughout our life-stages to date. Currently we seem to take a lot of pride in doing things at more advanced ages than previously was the norm -- e.g., bearing children, running marathons, and attending rock concerts in our 40s and 50s -- so in 25 years we may well be taking pride in extending our working careers into our 70s and 80s. Of course, in doing so we may simply be putting the best face on what will be an economic necessity.

Besides the aging boomers who are kept on, another source of skilled workers will be immigration, which has already supplied many contributors to the dynamic microcomputer industry in this country. Of course, the main source of new skilled workers will be native-born young people, so Judy and D'Amico discuss the need for improved education in our elementary and secondary schools. Their main hope for improvement is through increased competition, and they cite charter schools and voucher programs as examples (although it is still too soon to judge the worth of these strategies).

They rightly emphasize the need to make the elementary and secondary schools do their job of teaching basic skills, rather than shifting the burden to community colleges and employers. In addition, they call for a better match between what young people study in college and what the workforce will need. Although they discuss this mismatch partly in terms of the majors that students take, they acknowledge that what is most essential is that students acquire the necessary skills, whatever their major may be. The implication (not their wording) is that guidance in college, and in high schools as well, needs to focus increasingly on learning goals rather than on traditional subject categories.

I had only one problem with Workforce 2020: The discussion of the relationship between college majors and future earnings drew my attention to a questionable assumption that the authors maintain throughout the book, namely that high-paying jobs are the most desirable. Because my background is in career guidance (not to mention that my college major was English, one of the fields that is probably not very promising in terms of salary), I resist the assumption that everyone has the same work-related values, namely with income as the number-one priority.

In fact, research shows that values differ widely, and income especially loses its primacy among the females who will increasingly dominate the workforce. Nevertheless, I recognize that to some extent, the better paying jobs emphasized by the authors will also be those that offer greater satisfaction of many other values -- prestige, independence, variety, leadership, to name a few, and including some that tend to have greater appeal to females, such as flexible working hours.

Workforce 2020 is largely the work of economists, and people in this discipline are partial to gauging a nation's well-being by computing its gross national product, rather than by (somehow) computing its gross national satisfaction. As I recall the words of my high school textbook, the science of economics is about "human needs and how they are satisfied" (actually, it said "man's needs" -- this was in the 1960s), but economists tend to use dollars as the chief indicator of satisfaction. People in the career guidance field take a broader view.

Although Workforce 2020 is not intended to be the first thing that young people should turn to when planning their careers, it provides many valuable insights for those of us who work in career guidance. It also deserves the attention of policy-makers, educators, business planners, and anyone who cares about forces shaping the economic future of the United States.

Laurence Shatkin
E-mail: Laurence@myself.com

June 1, 1997