ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
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5. Unskilled labor is no longer being compensated, and can never be compen–
sated by a dignified wage.
Advocates for protection and stimulation can, to be
sure, create a demand for some low end jobs in the short run. But nobody
can raise a family on what these jobs pay. And the problem will get worse.
Simple and repetitive jobs for semi-skilled or non-skilled persons are going
to be even more pressured by new software or by contractor-suppliers in
China, Brazil, and so forth. The result will be tragic inequalities. The
Harvard Business Review
has worried about the development of an
"apartheid economy" in advanced industrial economies for good reason.
Income inequalities are growing. According to
HBR,
between the early
1970s and the mid-1990s, real income in the top deciles has grown about
5 percent while it has declined about 15 percent in the bottom deciles.
College graduates earned about 43 percent more than high-school gradu–
ates did twenty years ago. They are earning 82 percent more today. The gap
is widening.
6. Labor unions will not make a difference.
It
is precisely because direct
labor used to be so simple, mechanical, and yet critical to value creation
(what business people call "value creation," what Adam Smith meant by
"exchange value," not value in use) that labor unions made sense. Unions
were a way for workers to get needed leverage in wage negotiation, and,
let's face it, a psychological lift from solidarity. One could speak of "cate–
gories" of workers because tasks were elementary and skills pathetically
interchangeable. Unions were also a way for companies to negotiate a pre–
dictable supply of labor for a set period, though it took some growing up
for management to learn this lesson. Anyway, the logic behind unions may
still apply to some kinds of work-fast-food servers, apparel assemblers,
hospital orderlies. But, again, any simple and repetitive job that requires lit–
tle individual creativity will become a prime target for computer-integrative
technologies as the years go by. No wonder less than 15 percent of work–
ers are in unions today, whereas 35 percent of workers were in unions in
the 1960s.
These changes in the circumstances of labor have been both very much
for the better and very much for the worse. They have meant virtually all
employees in our companies will have the chance for more agreeable work
than factory "hands" ever did.
As
barriers to entry drop in every industry,
equality of opportunity is more assured than ever before. But equality of result
seems much less assured. The number ofpeople any individual company needs
per dollar of sales is declining rapidly. People who are seen to create value will
do very well. People who cannot will be
in
trouble. An "up or out" dynamic
is taking over the management of knowledge businesses. And many compa–
nies, consulting organizations, and so forth have borrowed tenure-like
procedures from universities although they don't award tenure,just its denial.
