…or so went an ad campaign by one of Europe’s leading mobile service providers – and you could, if you wanted to, apply the same aphorism to the predictions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics latest set of figures vis-?-vis employment.
Now, you might call me a curmudgeon but when you look at the President’s ‘State of the Nation’ address you might have been forgiven for thinking that it was the manufacturing sector that was about to grow in leaps and bounds. Think again!
According to the BLS there are going to be huge (as in lots of) job gains in some sectors and losses in others. To be fair their predictions suggest that gains will outweigh losses by a factor of 13 to 1 but its where the gains will be made that has me worried for the future of this once powerful manufacturing nation.
Let me outline some of the numbers for you!
Of the circa four million new posts just over a half will be in nursing and care, almost a million will be in the office, 700,000 in stores, 650,000 will be in logistics and trucking, 400,000 in the food sector (mainly prep and waiting on) and some 300,000 in post secondary teaching.
Turning to the negative side; we are predicting to lose; 138,000 in the postal sector, 115,000 in agriculture and assorted declines in sewing, fast food and various office occupations.
Nowhere in the positive list does it give any indication that we will be making things – so on the one hand the statisticians are painting a rosy picture for the service sector and the politicians a similar (albeit much smaller) picture for manufacturing. Whom should we believe?
OK, I said you might think me a curmudgeon but the facts are simple – at one time we had what you might call a ‘virtuous tax circle’ (VTC); people who made things got paid and paid taxes, they went out and spent their money on stuff that others made and paid sales tax on that and so on. No one likes paying taxes (indeed many of our top corporations and earners do a great deal to avoid doing so) but they are necessary to oil the wheels of this great nation. What happened was that sometime in the dim and distant past, companies began to ‘off-shore’ (it’s a euphemism for exporting jobs) manufacture to the emerging nations of the Far East – now I’m not decrying that because we have always bought product from exotic, faraway places – and this became less of a trickle and more of a flood of jobs in the manufacturing, IT and service sectors going abroad. The tax circle was broken; no longer
did we have a vibrant manufacturing sector producing cars, white goods, TVs, clothes and many other categories, these were all now produced in developing countries.
For the consumer, it looked like a win-win, stuff would be cheaper they could buy more and have greater choice. For the retailer their cost of sale would be coming down, supply chain costs would be less and their profits would grow. For the developing nations, well they just developed and grew bigger and better at manufacturing the stuff that we want.
But someone forgot all about the 7.5m manufacturing jobs lost, the cost to the nation of social security, the strains on the nation’s resources, the impact on social deprivation and health across the board. Some of those workers who lost jobs when production moved to the orient would get work in the burgeoning fast food and retail service sectors, but their tax contributions would be lower, further eroding the VTC.
I am not advocating wholesale repatriation of those production jobs that were lost, but the President hinted, actually he was a bit stronger than a mere hint, that he would seek to bring in legislation that included reductions in tax-breaks for those producing abroad, increases in incentives for setting up manufacturing here, possible trade measures (falling short of quotas though) all aimed at redressing the balance – possibly!
For me, at almost the closing stages of some fifty years in work, I find it astonishing that we can bask in the reflected glory of creating four million jobs over the next eight or so years through to 2020, yet forget that it was our manufacturing sector that sold out to the glittering prizes out East (or West dependent on your orientation). I’m an Apple aficionado, can’t get enough of the things ‘i’s everywhere across the house, yet not one of these iconic bits of tech is produced in the USA, it’s the same for computers, TVs and clothing.
It gives me great comfort to think that there will be a couple of million more care workers to look after me in my dotage – but I just wish that there were more people making the things I want, here in the US.
Turning back to my opening remarks about the future being bright. I am certain it will be if we have politicos and corporations who are strong enough to realize that we simply cannot be a nation of service workers, we need to be able to reinstate the virtuous tax circle – and quickly if we are to halt the spiral of decline.
