Krugman: The answer to more American jobs is UNIONS

[Bluebear]

...The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. ... As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated....

Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[Possumpoint]

1. Pardon Me

Just who are you going to bargin with, the computer that replaces you? Doesn't anyone else realize that there is planned deconstruction of the wage levels and living standards in this country. Wealth is and will be concentrated in a select few and the rest of us will be allowed to fight for the crumbs.

[Bluebear]

4. Hence the call for solidarity among workers.

[fishwax]

5. all the more reason for solidarity

:kick:

[TomClash]

2. So, Dr. Krugman, in other words . . .

. . . we need SOCIALISM. :thumbsup:

[moondust]

3. Workers of all kinds need to stick together.

Call them unions or guilds or occupational clubs or sewing circles or whatever.

[fishwax]

6. seems to me this should be basic common sense among democrats

Would that it were so.

k/r
:kick:

[unkachuck]

7. K&R....n/t

[hay rick]

8. We don't need collective bargaining.

We can always fall back on collective begging.

[Modern_Matthew]

9. Just started a job and in the orientation...

The anti-union video was longer than the video welcoming us to our new workplace.

I won't go into any names. :D