Dead-End Jobs: a Growth Industry : Education: The trend toward a low-wage, low-skill economy deflates businessmen’s calls for better schools.
According to the California Business Roundtable, 50% of the state’s executives believe that public education must be “restructured” to improve “entry-level job skills” that are abysmally deficient.
In presenting a roundtable report to Gov. Pete Wilson, Pacific Telesis chairman Sam Ginn complained that his company gave a seventh-grade-level reading test to 6,400 applicants for the job of “operator” and more than half failed. He cited this as an example of business’ need for improved public education to provide “workers with skills that will allow us to be competitive into the next century.”
What Ginn didn’t say was that for the 2,700 who passed the test there were only 700 job openings, paying poverty-level wages of less than $7 an hour. In truth, the schools now provide PacTel with nearly four times the number of qualified operator-candidates it needs.
It’s wishful thinking to believe that we are becoming a technologically advanced economy requiring better-educated students. In fact, we are evolving into a low-wage, low-skill economy that (for most jobs) requires education that is little better than what we now provide.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects “computer systems analysts” to be the nation’s fastest-growing occupation between 1988 and 2000, increasing total employment by 53%. But growth in this small group means only 214,000 new jobs. Meanwhile, there will be 730,000 additional jobs for sales people, 556,000 for janitors and maids, 551,000 for waiters.
American youth are staying in school longer, with plummeting economic rewards. From 1973 to 1986, the average wage of young male high school graduates declined 28%, to $10,720. This is hardly an environment that motivates young people to complete high school, much less go on to college. True, some technical fields have shortages of college grads, but overall, graduates now exceed openings in jobs requiring college education by 100,000 each year. In 10 years, 20% of our 34 million college grads will be underemployed in jobs that do not require degrees.
Assembly-line jobs have not been replaced by high-wage, high-tech positions. Instead, job growth has been mainly in retail and unskilled service occupations. In 1974, 46% of employed young black males held manufacturing or craft jobs; by 1986, this figure dropped to 25%. Our declining manufacturing sector pays a median weekly wage of $415, compared with $357 for service employment and $276 for retail. This is why in the 1980s, despite increased educational levels, average hourly wages for Americans fell from $12.93 to $11.72.
If the business community wants to help bring about the high-skill society it so often talks about, it must provide more jobs that reward and challenge those with a solid high school education. Instead, beating up on public schools has become a substitute for needed changes in economic policy. Germany and Japan, for example, subsidize growth industries and avoid exporting manufacturing jobs in a “free trade” frenzy. They rebuild infrastructure and encourage long-term investment over short-term speculation. They mandate worker participation in factory decision-making to improve quality and flexibility. Such policies create a demand for educated workers, enhancing the motivation of students, teachers and school officials.
Certainly our schools need improvement, and our democratic society should educate all young people to their maximum potential. But our economic crisis cannot be solved mainly by graduating better-educated workers. If education were sufficient, not Korea but India, with its surplus of highly educated workers, would be the economic miracle of Asia. If we continue blaming our schools for the failure of our fiscal, monetary, trade and industrial policies, neither our schools nor our economy can expect to succeed.
