mismanaged and borderline corrupt institutions in the world. Things started to pick up in 2014–2015 at the macro-level, with “good news” circulating about the recovery of the American economy, although the crash in oil, natural gas, and commodity prices damaged the resource sector and Euro-instability, associated with the near-death experience in Greece and China’s recent boom-and-bust cycle in the stock market, made it clear that a return to stability was a long way off.
Still, the much-ballyhooed recovery carried some ominous news. The jobs did not come back as expected. Much was made about a few promising developments. Apple, one of the world’s richest corporations and one of the best American firms at hiding its profits overseas (Apple Luxembourg is fabulously wealthy, thanks to US tax laws), noisily congratulated itself on opening a new factory in California, primarily to offset growing criticism of the labour practices at its Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturing facilities. But the reality was that jobs did not follow the upsurge in manufacturing in America. Why? In large part because the country’s impressive productivity gains and continued high level of investment in production-improving technologies increased manufacturing—but not manufacturing jobs. Economic recovery without a surge in employment seemed a partial victory, at best, and a worrisome sign about the economic future.
The New Economy Versus the Old Economy
The new economy produced some high-tech jobs, but the much-hyped growth turned out to be a whimper rather than a roar. Google and Facebook do not employ as many people as General Motors and John Deere. Google, worth $365 billion as of August 2015, heading, apparently to $1 trillion[2] and one of the world’s richest firms, had 53,600 employees in 2014, a drop of 200 from two years earlier. That same year, General Motors had 216,000 workers worldwide, a drop of 3,000 from 2013. But let’s get real here. Walmart—an impressive retailer with a fabulous high-tech backbone but not the dream employer of many young Americans—has 2.2 million employees worldwide and is the largest private-sector employer in the United States. It is a big drop back to the second-largest American employer, Yum! Brands, which has over 500,000 workers, mostly overseas. (Yum! operates Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.) UPS, a parcel delivery service and one of the best-automated firms in the USA, has almost 400,000 workers. There are high-tech or knowledge-based companies in the mix, with IBM (434,000), Hewlett-Packard (332,000), and General Electric (305,000) making the American top ten. The point is that Google is a drop in the employment bucket. Walmart has many times more employees.
For so-called “knowledge workers,” the target of governments and universities around the world, an uncertain future lies ahead:
… there is really a double dose of bad news. For not only are their jobs potentially easier to automate than other job types because no investment in mechanical equipment is required; but also, the financial incentive for getting rid of that job is significantly higher. As a result, we can expect that, in the future, automation will fall heavily on knowledge workers and in particular on highly paid workers. In cases where technology is not yet sufficient to automate the job, offshoring is likely to be pursued as an interim solution.[3]
Much the same has occurred in the finance sector, remarkably one of the most desired career paths for young North Americans. Because of the appalling scandals and malfeasance that have wracked it in recent years, you’d think the young would avoid it like the plague, but such is not the case. The banking system has actually continued to grow, particularly in the United States, with the expansion of service outlets in a highly competitive market, but most of the growth has been in service or teller-type positions. In Canada, where an oligopoly of five large banks controls the majority of the financial market, job reductions have been more pronounced. It needs to be said that Canada has one of the world’s most stable and dependable banking systems anywhere. While the USA was recovering from the collapse of Bear Stearns, Wells Fargo, Andersen Consulting, Fannie Mae, and many other financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, not a single Canadian bank closed down or was even seriously affected. Computerization has brought about sweeping changes, with work shifting from in-person support to online banking and heavily computerized systems. Banks hire many high-technology employees. The financial service and insurance industry remains a major employer—with close to six million employees (three times Walmart’s workforce) in 2014. The securities sector, with almost 890,000 workers in 2014, is expected to grow by an additional 12 percent by 2018. Employment data shows that this remains a service sector, with over 500,000 tellers, 367,000 insurance sales agents, and almost 300,000 securities and financial services sales agents.[4] This is, of course, old-economy work, knowledge-based to be sure, but not exactly the exciting new jobs-of- the-future stuff that promoters of the new economy have been talking about for several decades.
The vaunted post–dot.com economy has produced fine jobs for high-tech wizards, entrepreneurs, and marketers, but far fewer jobs for ordinary graduates and other semi-skilled workers. According to the US Department of Labor, the animation industry—a key sector in the new digital economy—had only sixty-nine thousand jobs across the USA in 2012. What’s more, this exciting sector, one that converted once-unemployable fine arts graduates into tech-stars, is notoriously fickle and cyclical, with companies expanding and contracting their workforce with distressing regularity and with many firms discovering that they can keep just the high-end design work in North America, although even that is facing competition from Japan and South Korea, with the more routine animation work—the digital equivalent of manufacturing assembly work—being automated or outsourced to China, India, and other countries.
Where is the work? Glassdoor, an American jobs and employment site, compiled a list of jobs in the United States for which there is the highest demand. Here are the top ten:[5]
How does this match up with the experience of recent graduates? An estimate of the production of lawyers in the USA indicated that the profession expected to add almost two hundred thousand positions between 2012 and 2022. In that same time period, American law schools were expected to graduate more than three hundred thousand new lawyers. What are the other hundred thousand going to do? And remember that there are many unemployed and underemployed law school graduates already in the labour force, competing for one of the two hundred thousand new jobs.[6] To touch on a topic to be discussed at length later, major employers have increasingly discovered that four-year college graduates, especially in the high-technology sectors, are not necessarily a good match with job openings. They have turned to short-course providers, particularly in software related areas, who provide specially trained workers (many of whom already have a degree or two) with career-ready preparation.
These examples make several simple points. There are lots of jobs, and very good jobs, available in the North American economy. The jobs, however, do not align very well with the fields of study of American and Canadian college and university students. And even when there is a direct connection—law school and lawyers’ jobs, computer science and software architect—there is often a mismatch between the size of the graduating class and the needs of the workplace. One starts to feel sorry for the university students and graduates of today, because the challenge of determining the right fields of study, the most promising fields of employment, and the best fit for a career is becoming extremely difficult, given the shifting realities of the North American workforce.
And for those who don’t want to go to college for four years, there are still some surprisingly well-paid jobs that require training, but not a full degree. According to Nicholas Wyman’s book Job U, these (presumably not the starting salaries) include:
| Radiation therapist | $77,500 |
| Elevator technician | $76,600 |
| Nuclear medicine technologist | $70,180 |
| Airline and commercial pilot | $98,410 |
| Dental hygienist | $70,200 |
| Medical sales | $85,000 |
| Air traffic controller | $122,500 |
With a series of economic crises—including the 2008–2009 chaos created by the American subprime meltdown—piling
