On November 2, 2012, Adam Davidson writes a powerful and MUST READ article in The New York Times:
The atrophying of the country’s ability to “make real things” has been much lamented, but the truth is that U.S. manufacturing has never been stronger. While there are no universally accepted numbers, the United Nations Statistics Division calculates that the dollar value of goods made in America is at an all-time high of $1.9 trillion, just about even with China. The catch is that the number of American workers needed to create all thatvalue has dropped steadily. In the mid-1940s, more than half of the New Jersey work force was in factories; today around 7 percent do. There are the same number of manufacturing jobs nationwide as there were in 1941, when the country was just more than one-third its current population. For much of the 20th century — and especially in the boom decades of the ’50s and ’60s, when U.S. factories had little global competition — manufacturing provided something that simply doesn’t exist anymore: a job for anyone willing to put in a hard day’s work. The Boeing plant making Chinook helicopters outside Philly, the Johnson & Johnson campus in New Brunswick, N.J., the Merck plants in Rahway, N.J., and Fort Washington, Pa., and the acres of chemical and natural gas refineries throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware — they all tell the same story: a handful of highly trained workers guiding machines that return huge value to shareholders while all the time finding ways to produce more goods with fewer workers.
That doesn’t stop both presidential candidates from constantly invoking the magnificent working-class economy we once had and can have again, if only we give them our vote. Manufacturing nostalgia is as powerful as ever. But one more look out the Amtrak window reveals something else: the shiny new buildings that are actually filled with workers have nothing to do with manufacturing. They’re in the broad service sector, in the anonymous office centers that bloomed out of nowhere — near Metropark Station in New Jersey and in Claymont, Del., and Aberdeen, Md. — to hold law firms and engineering companies and I.T. firms. For people with advanced training, the service sector means an above-average wage, a below-average risk of unemployment and days sitting at a desk. For those with only a high-school degree or no degree at all, far fewer jobs are available, and the ones that are pay poorly and disappear quickly. Calling for a return to the days when everybody who was willing to put in a hard day’s work could make a good living at the factory is a fantasy, maybe a lie and certainly an implicit acknowledgment that nobody has any idea what to do with the underemployed in the slums of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Southeast D.C. It’s safer to talk about Pakistan.
