The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

We are in the early stages of a long-term shift from mass labor to highly skilled elite labor, accompanied by increasing automation in the production of goods and the delivery of services. Workerless factories and virtual companies loom on the horizon. While the emerging knowledge sector and new markets abroad will create some new jobs, these will be too few to absorb the millions of workers displaced by new technologies in the manufacturing and service sectors. Although unemployment is still relatively low, it can be expected to climb steadily and inexorably as the global economy catapults into the Information Age over the course of the next half century. Every nation will have to grapple with the question of what to do with the millions of people whose labor is needed less, or not at all, in an ever more automated global economy.

Labor markets are central to economic life. They shape the organization of work and the lives of those who work or need work. Recent experience confirms a systemic tilt in favor of employers' needs and interests at the expense of earnings, job security, and opportunities for new entrants to the labor force. Conservative ideology has been effectively linked to employers' interests. The result has been that public policies of demonstrated effectiveness in assuring a better balance in labor markets have been weakened. Changing labor market conditions will require renewal and redesign of these tested remedies and development of new measures adequate to respond to new conditions in the global economy and in labor markets. Among these the most important will be reduced working time, limits on freedom to invest or disinvest capital, stronger community-based power to share in the decision-making process and in the distribution of costs and benefits, and a new synthesis of paid work, work that is important to society, and leisure. These are specified and discussed.

Highly developed human capital will be the source of comparative advantage in the twenty-first-century global economy. America's human capital development system—K-12, postsecondary training, higher education, and on-th-job learning—has severe problems that must be corrected if the nation is to compete effectively. Nationally benchmarked standards to measure the educational performance of our students is the best way to proceed.

Science and technology developments over the past 25 years have had profound effects on workplace productivity and income. Prevailing wisdom holds that significant levels of investment in plant and equipment and the consequent economic growth lead, in the context of a market economy, to more permanent jobs. The authors contest this claim. They argue that the tendency of technology investment is inherently labor saving, in both goods production and the services. Most new jobs that are being created, primarily in the services, have been contingent, part-time, benefit free, and frequently temporary. Thus there will be a shortage of decent-paying permanent jobs in the future. The authors argue that the premise of economic and social policy must take work as an active presupposition.

In this article, I describe the work performed by service providers, defined broadly, and the changes in this work engendered by an increasing reliance on encounters as a form of service delivery. This delivery mechanism facilitates the view of service providers as labor costs to be managed and reduced rather than human resources to be nurtured and developed. The provision of services by encounters may be a prelude both to the substitution of machine providers for humans and to large-scale unemployment.

With a strong economy bringing skill shortages in technical jobs, Austin, Texas, has sought to learn the essentials of the German apprenticeship system for the development of its local youths and to help resolve labor supply problems encountered by local employers. Going beyond the conventional research and study tours, Austin has invited direct participation from European training experts and has established an apprentice exchange for Austin youths with the Chamber of Small and Medium-Sized Firms and Crafts in Koblenz, Austin's sister city in Germany. The Capital Area Training Foundation, an industry-led, nonprofit corporation, was formed to guide the development of the school-to-work system through its affiliated industry steering committees established in each of the region's major industry sectors. These steering committees decide on the industry's approach to working with schools, confirm industry skill standards and curriculum frameworks, provide career information, and organize opportunities for active career exploration and work-based learning.

This article explores the response taken by Hawaii's people and society to workers displaced by the closing of sugar and pineapple plantations. Rooted in culture, history, and a labor market that is institutionally different from that of much of the United States, the response to structural unemployment is both unconscious and systematic. Also explored is the potential impact these closures can have on Hawaii's economy and society. Will Hawaii go back to the future and return to a society dominated by a business oligarchy such as existed throughout much of the plantation era? Or will it go back to the future as happened with the Democratic Revolution of 1954 and the birth of the modern Hawaiian economy? Can we distinguish between the two approaches today? These questions will be resolved based on whether Hawaii's people decide on a renewal of traditional ideas and beliefs or on an overthrow of these ideas.

This article examines whether retraining helps dislocated or displaced workers find new jobs or receive comparable pay. Dislocated or displaced workers are experienced workers who are dismissed due to work-site closings or significant downsizings. The authors compare dislocated workers who received retraining to dislocated workers who did not receive retraining. They find that retraining fails to improve the probability that workers will get new jobs, get full-time jobs, get higher pay, receive decent benefits, experience acceptable working conditions, have reasonable commute times, or get new jobs with a future, that is, with reasonable security in continued employment.

Within the past two decades, the “brutal American management methods,” which caused a national upheaval against Firestone in the 1970s, have become common practice in Swiss and other European corporations. These practices include global sourcing, dislocation of work to Third World countries, and workforce reductions by rationalization. In the middle of this general trend, Volkswagen in Germany set a countermodel: by introducing the four-day workweek, it redistributed work in the existing workforce, increased the sense of solidarity, and avoided layoffs. Volkswagen's actions added new fire to the heated European debate on how to deal with unemployment: by further deregulation or by work-time reduction and redistribution of work? In Europe, quite in contrast to the United States, an ongoing tension exists between modernization and the traditional culture, a tension manifest in a deep schism within the population.

Today, with the longest recession since World War II, unemployment is a growing fear among Japan's 52 million wage and salary earners. White-collar employees now outnumber blue-collar employees, and the labor force is increasingly mobile. As the structure of Japan's economy continues to change, Japanese labor markets are especially vulnerable to deterioration, without job creation sufficient to overcome job losses. Only a minority of workers have lifetime employment. Measures taken by government, employers, and worker organizations to support full employment in Japan go back 20 years. This three-way consensus successfully smoothed the way from production-first policies of the first two decades of post-World War II Japan to moderate growth, which emphasized equity and equality as well as full employment. The Japanese economy now seems to have entered a new phase, with the principal actors in the system of industrial relations, government and organized labor along with business, undergoing a restructuring that may undermine the longstanding consensus. This article examines institutions that have underpinned full employment in Japan, with an eye to changes now occurring.

Business, financial, technological, economic, social, and political trends indicate an impending mass wave of structural unemployment rivaling that of the Great Depression within a decade. In this article, a dozen prophylactic and therapeutic remedies are suggested, all of which require a rethinking of socioeconomic policy, reevaluation of goals for the long-term future, and recognition that new policies must be approached as continuing, open-ended social experiments.

New technologies are increasingly common in America's workplaces. The pace of technological change can be expected to increase in the future. The impacts of technological change include job loss, changes in skills, and health and safety effects, among others. These are of great importance to the workforce. From a social policy perspective, however, the most important impact of technological change is its effect on the power relationships between workers and managers in the workplace. Many of the traditional sources of union or worker power or leverage are undermined as new technologies are designed, developed, and implemented. Effective technology policy needs to go beyond dealing with the symptoms of technological change to taking on the core issue, which is precisely the loss of power that the workforce experiences.

Plant closings and the widespread disappearance of industrial jobs have severely strained the American labor movement. To successfully recruit the millions of workers in service and other expanding occupations, some observers have proposed that unions adopt a form of occupational unionism that would seek to unite members around the sort of broadly conceived work that they do rather than the narrow job duties they perform at a specific work site. This article looks 10 years into the future. It presents an interview with a fictional labor leader who has embraced the model of occupational unionism, contributing to a dramatic revival of union size and influence. It is impressionistic and suggestive, not comprehensive. It is a blending of fact and fiction based on the author's projections of how advanced technology, skill-related initiatives, and research findings in cognitive science could contribute to a resurgent labor movement. The two government programs cited, skill standards and the school-to-work initiative, are real, in their early stages of evolution.

The search for full employment represents a societal delusion, given that the world does not need and cannot use all of the human labor available and, as time goes on, will need less and less. The pace of technologically created unemployment is increasing, and unceasing efforts to create jobs and to obscure the amount of real unemployment inevitably lead to personal degradation, societal corruption, economic disaster, and global danger. A new social paradigm, which does not posit work as its underlying and overarching value, is needed. Among other suggestions, that for a universal basic income has attracted serious international interest.