The Money Compass: Where Your Money Went and How to Get It Back

Chapter 12

Changing Job Patterns and You

People at Bear Stearns get tens of millions for doing a terrible job at manipulating financial markets. And people get minimum wage for taking care of our grandparents.

—Professor Barry Bluestone, Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

—Harry Truman (1958)

In Chapter 10, “Staying Poor in America,” a brief review of the changing manufacturing jobs in the United States was made. In this chapter, more detailed information will be provided as to exactly how manufacturing has changed in the United States, the reasons for those changes, and if there is any way for those who relied on those jobs to once again feel they have a way of getting back into the mainstream of the job market.

The Old Jobs Are Not Coming Back

Although manufacturing has long been shrinking as a proportion of America’s expanding workforce, the number of industrial jobs stayed more or less the same between 1970 and the late 1990s. Since then, however, manufacturing employment has fallen in every year . . . since 1996 the number of manufacturing jobs has shrunk by close to one-fifth in America,

Source: “Britain and Japan: Industrial Metamorphosis,” The Economist, September 29, 2005, www.economist.com/node/4462685

The chart in Figure 12.1 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrates Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment ...