On August 27, 2013, Brad Plumer writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
There are a few broad trends in the U.S. economy getting lots of attention lately. The job market , with high-paid and low-paid occupations growing quickly, while middle-class jobs are disappearing. And on top of that, median wages over the past decade. This is worth exploring a bit more in chart form. Catherine Mulbrandon of Visualizing Economics looking at the industries where job growth has been fastest between 2000 and 2011, breaking it down by income:
That’s one way to see the labor market getting increasingly polarized over the past decade, as industries with low average pay grow significantly and mid-range industries wither — mainly driven by the steep decline in U.S. manufacturing. We can also focus specifically on the recession and its aftermath. Mark Thoma research from Joshua Lerner of the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, looking at specific occupations rather than broad industries. Here the trend (click to enlarge):
Since 2010, lower-wage jobs like food preparation and personal care have grown fast. So have high-end jobs in management, finance and health care. But a number of middle-class occupations, particularly teaching and construction, have continued to decline. Here’s Lerner: “Where we have seen slower growth is in the middle. The light blue bars, which I term lower middle-wage jobs account for about 40 percent of all occupations in 2012 yet account for just 26 percent of the growth. The dark blue bars, which I term upper middle-wage jobs, account for another 19 percent of all occupations and 0 percent of the growth. This, by definition, is job polarization.” So why is this all happening? In the New York Times, David Autor and David Dorn that labor-saving technological change has, over time, replaced a number of “routine” middle-class jobs like manufacturing, while leaving low-end service jobs and high-end positions largely untouched.
The reality is that human productivity has not advanced, but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production––productive capital––is the reason that private sector corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save labor from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise is humanly impossible without non-human input. While the greatest impact of technological revolution has occurred in the manufacturing private sector, the other sectors, now functioning with low-paid human workers, will experience the job destruction and further wage degradation as companies never cease to produce products and services at less cost––and saving labor costs is ALWAYS part of that prescription.
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