opportunities dried up quickly. College graduates got jobs—employers who had a chance to choose between a university or a high school graduate usually opted for the former—but few of the hirees expected that they would be working in Starbucks, a fire hall, at Home Depot, or a Walmart. What a difference in a few decades! In the 1970s, rental-car companies hired high school dropouts to staff their counters. By the 2010s, Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the USA declared with pride in its NCAA March Madness television commercials that it was the largest employer of college graduates in the country. Enterprise is a successful and well-regarded company. Many of the graduates are hired into management-stream positions and some do progress through the ranks of the company. It’s probably safe to say, however, that few parents and college-bound students ever sat around the dining room table, college application forms and guidebooks at the ready, student loan forms almost filled out, thinking that the end result of their studies would be work as a clerk at a car-rental firm.
The scale of the transformation of the North American industrial and professional workforce is not widely known. But tremors have been rumbling under the labour force for decades, with surface cracks emerging during recessions as the cruel pressures of international competition and technological change undermine such traditionally strong sectors as automobile and technological manufacturing. Detroit has emerged as the poster child for the continent-wide industrial meltdown, a city in complete free fall, with blocks of abandoned homes, widespread African American poverty, and near anarchy, surrounded by safe, comfortable, and largely Caucasian suburbs of sustained prosperity. In Detroit, the greatest increase in employment in the period 2008 to 2018 is estimated to be in home health aides, not a well-paid occupation.[7]
The crisis was not limited to Detroit. In Cleveland, Ohio, and other industrial cities in the Great Lakes and American Northeast, large companies shed hundreds of thousands of well-paid, unionized jobs. Recent economic challenges have seen the problems spread throughout southern Ontario and into other northern-tier industrial states. Urban blight, fuelled by a widespread flight of jobs and people from industrial areas, became the hallmark of what had previously been the industrial heartland for the Western industrial world. It is as if, only forty years from now, Silicon Valley were to become a wasteland of abandoned high-tech campuses, with the McMansions of former high-tech executives derelict, occupied by squatters, or converted into crack dens in some form of apocalyptic Detroit on the Pacific. What seems ridiculous and unimaginable for Silicon Valley, or Austin, Texas, or San Diego, or Boston was just as far-fetched for the Detroit of the 1970s. We are entering unfamiliar territory, with little evidence that people are paying attention to the warning signs.
The story inside the numbers is particularly jarring. It turns out that North America, the land of opportunity, is becoming decidedly less so. The story is much broader than the Occupy movement’s indictment of the One Percent and the endless—and partially deserved—critique of the richest people in the Americas. Few people realistically expect to rise up into the financial stratosphere, and, except for those who are obsessed by popular culture—fans of the Kardashians and their ilk—few intelligent people care much about the “uber-rich.” Sensible people know that most of the One Percent, like the ever-fascinating Donald Trump, started rich, with boosts from their parents. Most people simply seek a reasonable income, with enough money for the basics and a few extras, a comfortable home, and health security. North Americans overwhelmingly aspire simply to the middle class, or at least to the package of financial outcomes and material well-being historically associated with that status.
Loss of Industrial Jobs
One of the great success stories of post–World War II North America was that the rapidly expanding American consumer economy created conditions that propelled millions of otherwise average people from poverty into middle-class lifestyles. What stood out in this era was that, for the first time in human history, the Western industrial economy produced a large number of well-paid, wage-labour positions for people of average ability and skill. In previous generations, say before 1940, people of below average or of average ability struggled to find good work, and only a fortunate few earned enough money on a regular basis to enjoy a stable and comfortable life. The post–World War II period produced urban growth, fuelled the rapid expansion of suburbs, and raised expectations across society. The related development of the managerial class built an even broader foundation for national prosperity. This class included a large group of government workers in the rapidly expanding civil service, the staff of the expansive financial industry, the emergence of massive entertainment and media industries, and the stunning growth of the consumer retail trade, which included a large advertising sector. To top it off, the Cold War and the American adoption of the domino theory forced the USA to engage communism on many fronts, and that required a large standing military—and an even larger military-industrial complex to buttress America’s international commitments.
The simultaneous rise of management, retail commerce, public administration, and high technology created intense demand for college- and university-trained graduates, while also offering decent incomes for armies of industrial workers who had minimal training and no particularly specialized skills. Opportunities for the well-educated were matched by prospects for hard-working and dependable workers of average ability. This was the America of the great postwar boom, a nation ascendant internationally, with an economy that dominated the world and social opportunities that were unmatched anywhere. Young people leaving America’s high schools had a variety of good options, including a post-secondary education followed by entry into the burgeoning white-collar workforce, direct employment in any one of the thousands of manual and factory operations across the continent, or military service as a backup option. Not everything was rosy, of course, since it never is. African Americans had to surmount many barriers to opportunity, and immigrants often struggled to adjust. Women did not experience major employment and income gains until the 1970s. Even America at its height was no paradise. But the country worked better than almost all others on the planet.
The flood tide of American prosperity and social harmony began to ebb in the 1990s. Industrial closures swept across the United States, as companies fell victim to outdated technologies and intense Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese competition. The closures shifted to Canada and Mexico after the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect in 1994. Women did find more jobs, but stagnant or declining incomes forced millions of families to have both parents working just to maintain their standard of living. Ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans, paid the greatest share of the cost, but so did poorly paid coal miners in the Appalachians and factory workers in uncompetitive industries. Impressions of prosperity lingered, buttressed by America’s unrelenting confidence in the free market, a preposterously overhyped dot-com boom, and an explosion of home values and fraudulent mortgages. But underneath the façade of one of the world’s least-regulated financial markets, the shiny possibilities of Silicon Valley adventurism, and hyperinflation in house prices, major cracks were emerging in the North American superstructure.
The most alarming change, with profound implications for youth prospects in the twenty-first century, was the rapid decline of opportunities for people of average ability and limited skill. With robots and mechanization replacing many factory workers, with global competition eliminating tens of thousands of jobs and crippling the effectiveness of most industrial trade unions, and with much of the country’s economic growth occurring in high technology and finance, the general-purpose industrial labourer lost access to work, income, and opportunity. There were occasional bright spots—Alaska pipeline developments in the 1970s, North Dakota and Wyoming shale gas in the 2010s, Alaska and Texas oil plays, and artificially hyped housing construction—but the overall experience was distressing. Entire towns and regions, from Ohio and Illinois to rural Pennsylvania and upstate New York, suffered through prolonged collapse, urban decay, and a massive increase in poverty among the laid-off workers. In the twenty-first century, the pace of technological displacement accelerated. The current cost of replacing a worker with a machine in the industrial sector is around $100,000. If an industrial machine can be purchased for that sum, a regular position can be eliminated. For many companies, the resulting increase in efficiency and productivity is the only way to remain competitive.
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