Good manufacturing jobs
I promised to pass along some of the interesting articles and reports that I ran across in my new job. Here’s the first one, Babies, Bathwater, and American Manufacturing: What’s Worth Saving and How, by Dan Luria and Joel Rogers of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (yes, the acronym is COWS).
It’s a short article (only 5 pages), and worth reading in its whole, but these are some of the points that jumped out at me:
All manufacturing jobs are not equal. When put like this, this seems like a statement of the obvious. But much of the writing and rhetoric about manufacturing treats it all the same, whether acting as if all manufacturing jobs are worth fighting for (what Luria and Rogers call "manufacturing centrism", the glorification of making "something you can drop on your foot") or dismissing them all as hopelessly 20th century.
In deciding whether a job is good or bad, you need to control for the amount of education/training required. A job that pays $14 an hour is great for a high school dropout, and quite respectable for a high school graduate, but pretty depressing for someone with a 4 year degree. If two jobs pay the same amount, but one requires several years of specialized training first, the other one is a lot more attractive.
My expansion on this idea is that jobs that require firm specific training are worse than jobs that require industry specific training, which in turn are worse than jobs that require general skills. If you’re going to ask a potential worker to go to school for two years to develop skills that aren’t going to help them get a job anywhere else, you darn well better be guaranteeing them a job for the long haul.
Employers have been politically united beyond their interest — good employers don’t fight to be treated differently from bad employers. As Luria and Rogers write, "owing to the relative weakness of labor in the U.S., there is an unnatural degree of class cohesion in the American business community, which further encourages supression of differences in interest within it." I thought this was an interesting point, mostly because it’s so pervasively true that it fades into the wallpaper. I know the business community isn’t entirely monolithic — the Committee for Economic Development certainly doesn’t argue for the same positions as the US Chamber of Commerce — but it doesn’t differentiate itself along the lines of job quality. You don’t see employers who provide health insurance lobbying for higher taxes on those who don’t.
May 29th, 2006 at 10:40 am
We occasionally see hints of “good employers” advocating against the bad ones here in Seattle/Washington state. Recently it was on discussion of health insurance initiative (or it might have been the disability insurance pool). An organized consortium of business did advocate for employee friendly policies.
I think the division between employers who are more generous/less generous to their employees hasn’t become significant because “good” employers don’t want to commit to always being good. They want to be able to change their minds. So, they don’t want to attack companies that don’t pay their share, especially if the result is a burden generally on taxpayers. I think the good/bad employers can be a bit more divided when they pay into a pool (for example, the unemployment insurance pool in WA, where your rate depends on how frequently your employees use the pool).
bj
PS: Remember 3:00 PM today.
May 29th, 2006 at 10:57 am
I agree with bj–the good employers seem to want to hold their options open, and therefore don’t seem to want to lobby against the bad ones. The notable exception is the Sustainable Business Network folks, but other than Ben & Jerry’s, I think they are mostly small businesses. Interesting article.
Other than that, how’s the new job going?