The vaunted post–dot.com economy has produced fine jobs for high-tech wizards, entrepreneurs, and marketers, but far fewer jobs for ordinary graduates and other semi-skilled workers. According to the US Department of Labor, the animation industry—a key sector in the new digital economy—had only sixty-nine thousand jobs across the USA in 2012. What’s more, this exciting sector, one that converted once-unemployable fine arts graduates into tech-stars, is notoriously fickle and cyclical, with companies expanding and contracting their workforce with distressing regularity and with many firms discovering that they can keep just the high-end design work in North America, although even that is facing competition from Japan and South Korea, with the more routine animation work—the digital equivalent of manufacturing assembly work—being automated or outsourced to China, India, and other countries.
Where is the work? Glassdoor, an American jobs and employment site, compiled a list of jobs in the United States for which there is the highest demand. Here are the top ten:[5]
How does this match up with the experience of recent graduates? An estimate of the production of lawyers in the USA indicated that the profession expected to add almost two hundred thousand positions between 2012 and 2022. In that same time period, American law schools were expected to graduate more than three hundred thousand new lawyers. What are the other hundred thousand going to do? And remember that there are many unemployed and underemployed law school graduates already in the labour force, competing for one of the two hundred thousand new jobs.[6] To touch on a topic to be discussed at length later, major employers have increasingly discovered that four-year college graduates, especially in the high-technology sectors, are not necessarily a good match with job openings. They have turned to short-course providers, particularly in software related areas, who provide specially trained workers (many of whom already have a degree or two) with career-ready preparation.
These examples make several simple points. There are lots of jobs, and very good jobs, available in the North American economy. The jobs, however, do not align very well with the fields of study of American and Canadian college and university students. And even when there is a direct connection—law school and lawyers’ jobs, computer science and software architect—there is often a mismatch between the size of the graduating class and the needs of the workplace. One starts to feel sorry for the university students and graduates of today, because the challenge of determining the right fields of study, the most promising fields of employment, and the best fit for a career is becoming extremely difficult, given the shifting realities of the North American workforce.
And for those who don’t want to go to college for four years, there are still some surprisingly well-paid jobs that require training, but not a full degree. According to Nicholas Wyman’s book Job U, these (presumably not the starting salaries) include:
| Radiation therapist | $77,500 |
| Elevator technician | $76,600 |
| Nuclear medicine technologist | $70,180 |
| Airline and commercial pilot | $98,410 |
| Dental hygienist | $70,200 |
| Medical sales | $85,000 |
| Air traffic controller | $122,500 |
With a series of economic crises—including the 2008–2009 chaos created by the American subprime meltdown—piling on top of global workplace changes, job opportunities dried up quickly. College graduates got jobs—employers who had a chance to choose between a university or a high school graduate usually opted for the former—but few of the hirees expected that they would be working in Starbucks, a fire hall, at Home Depot, or a Walmart. What a difference in a few decades! In the 1970s, rental-car companies hired high school dropouts to staff their counters. By the 2010s, Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the USA declared with pride in its NCAA March Madness television commercials that it was the largest employer of college graduates in the country. Enterprise is a successful and well-regarded company. Many of the graduates are hired into management-stream positions and some do progress through the ranks of the company. It’s probably safe to say, however, that few parents and college-bound students ever sat around the dining room table, college application forms and guidebooks at the ready, student loan forms almost filled out, thinking that the end result of their studies would be work as a clerk at a car-rental firm.
The scale of the transformation of the North American industrial and professional workforce is not widely known. But tremors have been rumbling under the labour force for decades, with surface cracks emerging during recessions as the cruel pressures of international competition and technological change undermine such traditionally strong sectors as automobile and technological manufacturing. Detroit has emerged as the poster child for the continent-wide industrial meltdown, a city in complete free fall, with blocks of abandoned homes, widespread African American poverty, and near anarchy, surrounded by safe, comfortable, and largely Caucasian suburbs of sustained prosperity. In Detroit, the greatest increase in employment in the period 2008 to 2018 is estimated to be in home health aides, not a well-paid occupation.[7]
The crisis was not limited to Detroit. In Cleveland, Ohio, and other industrial cities in the Great Lakes and American Northeast, large companies shed hundreds of thousands of well-paid, unionized jobs. Recent economic challenges have seen the problems spread throughout southern Ontario and into other northern-tier industrial states. Urban blight, fuelled by a widespread flight of jobs and people from industrial areas, became the hallmark of what had previously been the industrial heartland for the Western industrial world. It is as if, only forty years from now, Silicon Valley were to become a wasteland of abandoned high-tech campuses, with the McMansions of former high-tech executives derelict, occupied by squatters, or converted into crack dens in some form of apocalyptic Detroit on the Pacific. What seems ridiculous and unimaginable for Silicon Valley, or Austin, Texas, or San Diego, or Boston was just as far-fetched for the Detroit of the 1970s. We are entering unfamiliar territory, with little evidence that people are paying attention to the warning signs.
The story inside the numbers is particularly jarring. It turns out that North America, the land of opportunity, is becoming decidedly less so. The story is much broader than the Occupy movement’s indictment of the One Percent and the endless—and partially deserved—critique of the richest people in the Americas. Few people realistically expect to rise up into the financial stratosphere, and, except for those who are obsessed by popular culture—fans of the Kardashians and their ilk—few intelligent people care much about the “uber-rich.” Sensible people know that most of the One Percent, like the ever-fascinating Donald Trump, started rich, with boosts from their parents. Most people simply seek a reasonable income, with enough money for the basics and a few extras, a comfortable home, and health security. North Americans overwhelmingly aspire simply to the middle class, or at least to the package of financial outcomes and material well-being historically associated with that status.
Loss of Industrial Jobs
One of the great success stories of post–World War II North America was that the rapidly expanding American consumer economy created conditions that propelled millions of otherwise average people from poverty into middle-class lifestyles. What stood out in this era was that, for the first time in human history, the Western industrial economy produced a large number of well-paid, wage-labour positions for people of average ability and skill. In previous generations, say before 1940, people of below average or of average ability struggled to find good work, and only a fortunate few earned enough money on a regular basis to enjoy a stable and comfortable life. The post–World War II period produced urban growth, fuelled the rapid expansion of suburbs, and raised expectations across society. The related development of the managerial class built an even broader foundation for national prosperity. This class included a large group of government workers in the rapidly expanding civil service, the staff of the expansive financial industry, the emergence of massive entertainment and media industries, and the stunning growth of the consumer retail trade, which included a large advertising sector. To top it off, the Cold War and the American adoption of the domino theory forced the USA to engage communism on many fronts, and that required a large standing military—and an even larger military-industrial complex to buttress America’s international commitments.
The simultaneous rise of management,