[Originally posted on goofyblog 1.5.07]
Everyone repeats it: Get an education. You overhear snippets of “school” talk on the street and in the subway, ads for this school, that school on every train. Ads on radio for art schools, billboards for business schools, tv spots for computer schools. Your mom, your grandma all say go to school. I think anyone under the age of 23 in any large city in the U.S. is going to school, about to go back to school, or just graduated from school.
It’s the big promise, right? The promise of prosperity—once you’re out and you pay back all that money you had to borrow to go to school, like everyone else you know.
Too bad it’s a phony idea. False promises that have no meaning in a “global” economy where Raj Smith in India got the same education as you did, most likely for free and now works in the gleaming new metropolis of Bangalore for $6K/year.
Raj is doing very well on $6,000. The corporation that out-sourced your $60K job is doing well hiring Raj and laying you off or not hiring you to begin with.
Jonathon Tasini has written a 2-part article about this issue. I’m going to quote from his writings as they are so powerful.
Talking about Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, and a speech he gave in ’94, Tasini investigates Reich’s impromptu declaration that epitomizes this “Field of Dreams” education-is-the-answer foolishness:
Oh. I’m leaving out the other occupation with a real future, law enforcement, but you don’t always have to have an advanced degree for that. As Tasini says:
Everyone repeats it: Get an education. You overhear snippets of “school” talk on the street and in the subway, ads for this school, that school on every train. Ads on radio for art schools, billboards for business schools, tv spots for computer schools. Your mom, your grandma all say go to school. I think anyone under the age of 23 in any large city in the U.S. is going to school, about to go back to school, or just graduated from school.
It’s the big promise, right? The promise of prosperity—once you’re out and you pay back all that money you had to borrow to go to school, like everyone else you know.
Too bad it’s a phony idea. False promises that have no meaning in a “global” economy where Raj Smith in India got the same education as you did, most likely for free and now works in the gleaming new metropolis of Bangalore for $6K/year.
Raj is doing very well on $6,000. The corporation that out-sourced your $60K job is doing well hiring Raj and laying you off or not hiring you to begin with.
Jonathon Tasini has written a 2-part article about this issue. I’m going to quote from his writings as they are so powerful.
Talking about Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, and a speech he gave in ’94, Tasini investigates Reich’s impromptu declaration that epitomizes this “Field of Dreams” education-is-the-answer foolishness:
Picking up the drinking glass sitting at his elbow, he said, “Take this glass next to me and you see that what you are paying for, what a consumer is actually paying for is less and less related to the actual production that goes into making the glass, more and more into the design engineering, the marketing, the legal services, all of the management consulting services, the distribution services, all of the services that go into making up this glass. These are not necessarily bad jobs, some of them are very good jobs, some of them are highly skilled jobs. We’ve got to make sure that more and more Americans get those kind of jobs.”Shocking and revealing, eh? Maybe that’s why I overhear so many “students” chatting about pre-med or law stuff, the only occupations with any real future in America. Or why the IT guy at my last job told me he shifted to in-house networking from programming because he figured it would be harder to off-shore his job that way (though not impossible).
The audience was mesmerized, taken in by this powerful mind who could, in the middle of a complicated speech, deftly analyze the value of a glass. Unfortunately, Reich simply made it up and was demonstrably wrong or, at best, he conveniently told only one side of the story. I decided to track the glass. I found out that its wholesale cost, at the time, was ninety-five cents and it’s called an Arctic Pattern, made, then, by J.G. Durand, a privately-held French company with more than 12,000 employees worldwide. Although the company had about 800 people who worked here in the U.S., the “Arctic Pattern [is] mostly produced in France,” a company spokesperson told me. More important, she said there is almost zero design engineering value in this glass–because it’s been around for twenty–TWENTY–years.
Libby Inc., a unionized Durand competitor, made a very similar glass called the Winchester. Wayne Zitkus, the company’s technical manager, completely contradicted Reich’s theory that the production costs are declining. “I don’t think that’s generally true,” he said. In fact, “labor costs are very high, energy and materials, those costs have all increased over the years and account for more of the production costs, not less.” He added that the basic design of the glass was done ten years ago.
Even more revealing, Zitkus told me that although the industry had entered into a higher-automated computer age, the company did not need people with higher levels of education for most of its jobs–Reich’s central Field of Dreams contention. With the exception of a few advanced jobs, does someone off the street need more skills, I asked? “Probably not,” he said. “We’re probably measuring people the same way [we did] ten years ago. We have tests to give to people to see whether they have general mechanical skills that we need. We’re educating people ourselves. We’ve trained people so rather than turn knobs they’re looking at numbers.”
The key fact from this whole episode is that what computer automation did do was not raise the required skills level but eliminate 35,000 jobs in the industry over the last ten years. Nobody has been able to find any direct connection between technological progress and skill upgrading–as Zitkus himself illustrated.
Oh. I’m leaving out the other occupation with a real future, law enforcement, but you don’t always have to have an advanced degree for that. As Tasini says:
Over and over again, the people of our country hear that the solution to inadequate wages, disappearing heath care, vanishing pensions, and staggering personal debt is quite simple: get educated. It may sound right but it’s utterly phony.Part I, Part II, previous articles.
Hardly a day goes by when politicians or pundits don’t slip in a plug for a “smarter” workforce.
Wages, not skills or education, are the most important issue facing workers throughout the globe. The disparity is so huge that American workers, no matter how smart they get, will never be able to compete against workers in other countries–unless, of course, Americans are willing to accept a drastic decline in their standard of living.
Education is a wonderful thing. Learning new ideas nourishes the human mind and keeps our spirits alive. I’m all for teachers and schools.
But, education is a cruel lie if it becomes the answer to the challenge of global competition. It’s insulting to workers to feed them the line that they are just too dumb to get a fairly compensated job. It isn’t their fault. And until we are willing to confront corporate power, people may hang diplomas on their walls of their homes even if they can’t feed their families.
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