To Ease Fears About Jobs, Put Imagination to Work

You could conclude that from learning in Times colleague David Streitfeld's recent article that underemployment, an economic malaise once associated only with underdeveloped countries, now afflicts the U.S. workforce.

You could believe that from the brushoff that supermarket company managements have given the food workers union in the now endless Southern California grocery strike. There has been no collective bargaining to speak of. Management wants workers to have a lower wage structure and less extensive health benefits so that the supermarkets can compete with nonunion rivals. The union, having failed to calculate organized labor's weakness in the U.S. economy today, is losing the strike. Management, says economist Harley Shaiken of UC Berkeley, "has torn up the social contract."

It sure seems to be in tatters. More than 27 million working Americans, about 20% of the U.S. labor force, earn wages below the poverty level, according to "Low-Wage America," a new book of studies by 38 economists published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Has it come to this? That the richest economy in world history is reduced to competing on cheap labor and gutted benefit programs?

No, it hasn't quite come to that. U.S. workers are understandably riven by fears of being replaced and many experts are riddled by doubts that the economy can continue to create good jobs, but the fears are in many ways overblown.

To see clearly and even optimistically into this new year and beyond just takes some straight thinking. And more, it takes "imagination," as economist James Galbraith of the University of Texas puts its. "There is no reason why we can't create plenty of good jobs," Galbraith says. That we seem to have lost our way understanding how to do that, he continues, "I blame on a failure of imagination."

We created millions of jobs of all kinds in the 1990s, when we had abundant investment in technology. Yes, that boom grew overripe, as booms will. But the imagination of that decade, the innovations in Internet communications that allow U.S. business to operate so efficiently around the world, helped to produce the very productivity gains and profit flows that spell economic recovery in 2004.

Forrester Research's forecast as the year starts is that U.S. companies will increase their investment in information technology, a trillion-dollar item in the U.S. economy, by 16% this year. No accident that economists also predict that the economy will create 1.5 million jobs this year.

Those 1990s innovations allowed American jobs seamlessly to be performed in India and China, spawning fears about countless millions of jobs being sent offshore.

And some transfer of jobs overseas is inescapable. Jobs that are transferable "are to a great extent governed by rules that can be computerized," says Professor Frank Levy of M.I.T., coauthor of "The New Division of Labor," to be published this year. But many other jobs -- any task that Levy describes as requiring "judgment and pattern recognition," whether it's driving a truck or preparing a legal brief -- can't be easily or cheaply computerized or transferred.