Labor Pool: Where The Fast-Growing Jobs Are
They're at McDonalds, not EMC
The jobs will pay well, they say. The only problem will be training enough workers to fill them.
"The Future of Work in Massachusetts," a new book created by the labor studies programs at four UMass campuses, presents a decidedly less rosy view. Touching on the subjects of lost manufacturing jobs, work-family balance and gender divisions in the workforce, the book makes a case that without some serious interventions the state economy will not generate the terrific opportunities we'd all like to see. Editor Tom Juravich, director of the Labor Center at UMass Amherst, notes that it's not a popular message.
"Who among us wants to be told that we'll never get that dream job or that we have no chance for the career we've always dreamed of?" he writes in his introduction.
Problematic Predictions
In an overview of the state's economy, Mark Brenner, the co-director of Labor Notes magazine and a contributor to the book, points out that just before the high-tech bubble burst in 2000, the state Division of Unemployment Assistance predicted that the fastest growing occupation over the next 10 years would be software engineers.
But by 2002, the last year for which data was available, employment in that job category had fallen 24 percent. Many of the other high-tech jobs that the state had placed great stock in went a similar way.
The job category that employed the most people in the state in 2003 was retail clerk, Brenner writes, and the fastest growing occupation between 2000 and 2002 was food preparation and serving.
With a few exceptions, like registered nurses (the second-largest occupation) and lawyers (the fifth-fastest growing), the jobs on Brenner's lists mostly pay low wages.
Brenner also argues that inequality is growing in the state. While real income growth rose 6.6 percent overall between 1979 and 2000, he writes, the top 40 percent of Massachusetts workers saw double-digit gains. The difference between 1989 and 2000 is even starker.
"The bottom 60 percent of the workforce lost ground in real terms over the 1990s," while higher-income workers saw continued growth, he writes.
Other contributors to the book call attention to more complex problems workers face, beyond their pay. In a chapter focused on doctors, nurses, nursing assistants and EMTs, Dan Clawson, Naomi Gerstel and Dana Huyser find that long and irregular hours make life difficult for many.
They write that 67 percent of the employees they studied were working more hours than they would like. One in five had to work mandatory overtime, and six out of seven sometimes or always worked through meal breaks.
Refocus
Several of the chapters suggest that it is becoming increasingly difficult for parents to balance work and family responsibilities. According to Brenner, the average annual hours of work among married couples with children in Massachusetts rose 14.2 percent between 1979 and 1999.
The book, which is being distributed to all high schools and public libraries in the state thanks to funding from the state legislature, sees unions as part of the solution to the problems it poses - which shouldn't come as a surprise, since the college labor centers that produced the book are pro-union.
Brenner suggests that typical governmental approaches like training designed to fit workers to "good" jobs are unlikely to offer much help. Instead, he writes, the state should work to transform "bad" jobs into "good" ones, taking the history of manufacturing as a guide.
"Historically, these jobs were not always well paid," he writes. "It was only through the collective efforts of generations of industrial workers ... that manufacturing work was transformed into a 'good job.'"
Brenner's prescription for the state includes both supporting unionization and making changes to minimum wage, taxation and health care policies.
Clawson and his colleagues are also hopeful about the changes unions could make, but they say the concerns they raise demand not just increased unionization but a change of focus for the labor movement. They note that, despite unions' early fights for the 40-hour week, "in the last fifty years few unions have made hours central to their campaigns and demands."
Changing that would not be easy, and altering state policies to make more jobs "good" would be even harder, but "The Future of Work in Massachusetts" suggests both are more sensible propositions than waiting for unlimited high-paying jobs to pop up.
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