VIEWPOINTS : JOBS IN AMERICA : Technology Has Lifted Quality of Today’s Work

With 14.4 million new jobs created in the past five years, Americans have been expanding employment faster than any other major industrial nation. Responding to the incentives of supply-side policy, U.S. citizens have launched a job miracle that amazes the leaders of the planned economies of the world.

But the real jobs miracle in America comes not in the amount of employment but in the dramatic improvement in the quality of American jobs. Contrary to widespread complaints about a low-wage “McJobs” economy, the new opportunities in the United States are unprecedented in their challenge, remuneration and real productivity.

The rise in the quality of work springs from a transformation of technology. Americans are mastering new technologies and starting new businesses at an unprecedented pace.

They have launched about 14,000 new software firms in six years, transforming the computer from an alien device to a popular appliance.

Using nine times more small computers than the Japanese, Americans are revitalizing the job market with the challenging new opportunities of the information age.

The new tools of knowledge are personal technologies, increasingly available to individuals, enabling people to launch new products and ideas from their own homes or garages.

There now are cheap work stations on which any individual can learn to design a computer chip, a new toy, a manufacturing layout, a dress or a complex business plan.

The new employment in America consists of opportunities that are truly new, reflecting new skills and services rather than the subsidized, retread patchwork of industrial employment provided in the so-called job-creation projects in European social democracies.

Economic analyst Warren Brookes of the Heritage Foundation estimates from the latest Labor Department data that two-thirds of the additional jobs created in America since the Reagan Administration tax cuts in 1981 have been managerial and professional slots paying more than $29,048 a year.

In addition, with new business starts more than doubling since 1978, to 640,000 a year, and with venture capital rising 200-fold over the average level during the high-tax years between 1970 and 1977, millions of Americans have begun earning entrepreneurial returns rather than wages and salaries.

With rising job opportunities, soaring real estate values and the stock market tripling the worth of individual retirement account and pension holdings, the middle class has reduced debt as a proportion of assets and sharply expanded its share of the national economy.

Meanwhile, despite the upsurge in new jobs, the percentage of workers at the minimum wage has dropped 31% since 1982, with the downward trend in low-paid jobs accelerating since 1984 as a proportion of the total.

By the only measure that counts--take-home pay--job quality has risen sharply. Real after-tax income per capita is up 11.3% since early 1981, and the rise is even greater if you take fringe benefits into account.

Nonetheless, in the ceaseless search for a new proletariat as a vanguard of Marxist revolt, the prophets of envy and gloom continue to tell of a jobs crisis in America. In florid falsehoods and lurid television images, media gurus prattle of a “vanishing middle class” and speak of a society riven between “greed at the top,” need at the bottom and homeless everywhere.

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) announced his presidential candidacy with a whole series of imaginary complaints, from falling wages to inadequate employment. He said the problem is Japan, which as anyone knows who drives a car or uses a videocassette recorder, is a major asset for the U.S. economy. The VCR, in fact, is responsible for an exciting revitalization of the American movie industry and for the emergence of huge new job and entrepreneurial opportunities in videocassette magazines, home movies, education and software far exceeding the VCR manufacturing employment in Japan.

Most of the advocates of a job crisis end their statistics in 1983 to catch the two recessions of the early 1980s and to miss the second-longest recovery of this century.

The Joint Economic Committee of Congress went to the extreme of appealing to Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, a pair of leftist economists from Boston University, to find a new proletariat to save. They came up with the theory that the jobs were no good. Ignoring that new jobs always tend to pay less than established jobs, they brought forth the shocking news that 58% of the new jobs created under President Reagan were below the minimum wage (less than $7,012 a year).

To conjure up this statistic, Bluestone and Harrison actually didn’t count jobs at all; instead, they counted people doing jobs. This was clever because low-paid jobs are held by more people (they have higher turnover) than high-paid jobs. If a McDonald’s job was held by four teen-agers during the course of a year, it was counted as four jobs. If a lawyer chose to take off 10 months of a year to have a baby or write a book, the two-month income made the law practice a low-paid job.

The first principle to understand about the quality of work is that it is an effect of the quality of workers. There is no such thing as an “economy” that creates jobs. People create jobs by producing more than they consume, by performing work that is useful to others.

In recent years, the most successful job creators in the United States have been immigrants. Black immigrants are 50% more likely than white natives to earn more than $35,000 a year. Cuban and Mexican immigrants who don’t even know the language quickly out-earn American citizens who prefer leisure and welfare to entry-level jobs.

The entire concept of “bad jobs” is deeply misleading, because it suggests that the “society” can somehow will “good jobs” into existence. Good jobs are the effect of hard work by productive workers and entrepreneurs. All the positive trends in the U.S. economy will gain new momentum from the new tax reform, lowering the top rates and opening new horizons for every wage and salary earner.

With the emergence of such new technologies as superconductivity, artificial intelligence, parallel processing, bioengineering and computerized chip design, job possibilities and entrepreneurial opportunities are more exciting than ever. Nonetheless, no one is going to create a job for you. You have to learn one of these fields--or one of thousands of others--and make yourself a creative worker. There is no such thing as an economy; you are the economy.