Jobs and Work in the 21st Century

I picked this clip because job loss can lead to homelessness, and this is a part of the United States, the richest country on Earth.  I know.  I've been there.  If you live in a city anywhere, you don't have to go too far to find scenes like the ones you see in this video.

One key factor to why we have 3 million people homeless in the United States every year is the loss of high paying, middle class jobs.  But where did those jobs really go?  In this CNN Money article from earlier this year, we learn that 5 million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.  That doesn't include the millions lost in the previous two or three decades.  A study cited in the first paragraph of this Pew Research Center article states that as many as 47% of all American jobs are vulnerable to being replaced by "computerization."  Let that sink for a minute.  Then there's this 2015 article in The Atlantic, "A World Without Work," which looks at the financial and social decline of Youngstown, Ohio since the steel mill closed in 1977.  Youngstown, like most other towns, was thriving when I lived in Ohio as a little kid.  You can find one article after another about how technology, particularly robots, algorithms, and communication will make make tens of millions of jobs obsolete in the next few decades.  Using July 2016 numbers available online, I recently was able to estimate that at least 20.3 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed right now, in the summer of 2016.  The more I look at the future job market, the worse it seems to look.

But there are two signs to every coin.  In this short clip, Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe explains that there are lots of jobs available that require some training, but not a four year degree. This CNN Money article from September 2015 agrees, saying there are 5.8 million jobs available in the U.S., many of which are in "the trades," jobs that don't require a college degree, but do require specific training.  The term "skills gap" keeps appearing, meaning there are a lot of jobs but not enough people with the right skills to fill them.  But there aren't near enough high-paying jobs to rebuild the American middle class to what it once was.

The highly praised manufacturing jobs of years past now comprise less than 10% of the U.S. workforce.  The growth in jobs over the past 20 years has been in low wage service jobs, and high wage tech and what Richard Florida calls Creative Class jobs.  But there's not much in between, where the vast majority of U.S. employees once worked.  That's where a lot of the poverty and the homeless people in the clip above once were.  So how do we as a country get tens of millions of people working and making a decent living again?  Richard Florida believes a big part of the answer must be to make the service jobs better jobs.  I agree with that concept, but I don't think it will happen anywhere near soon enough.

So we're left with that question: how to we get tens of millions of Americans making a good living again?  I think we need to help millions of people create their own jobs. 

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process in my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.