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Under Trump, the jobs boom has finally reached blue-collar workers. Will it last?
Growth in this sector is occurring at the fastest rate since 1984.
Blue-collar jobs, long a small and shrinking part of the U.S. economy, are now growing at a faster clip than those in the nation’s much larger service economy. Many factors collided to produce the blue-collar boom. Some are linked to short-term boom-and-bust cycles, but others may endure.
The rapid hiring in blue-collar sectors is delivering benefits to areas that turned out heavily for Trump in the 2016 election, according to the Brookings Institution, a shift from earlier in this expansion, when large and midsize cities experienced most of the gains.
The biggest drivers of the blue-collar hiring surge are the rebound in oil prices, the need to rebuild after disasters such as Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and rising demand generated by a growing economy.
.. The economy has added fewer jobs per month, on average, than it did during President Barack Obama’s second term.
.. Coal mining added about a thousand jobs in the year ending in July, according to the Labor Department. Steel and aluminum production have gained only a couple thousand, while businesses that use these metals are warning of heavy layoffs if Trump’s tariffs stay in place.
.. The real drivers of the blue-collar boom are construction and manufacturing, which have added hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Trump era. These industries benefit most from a strong global economy.
.. Only 13.9 percent of workers are employed in blue-collar professions, vs, 15 percent in government and 71.1 percent in the service sector. But “muscle jobs” still play an outsize role in some communities.
.. “In places like Ohio and Wisconsin, manufacturing is part of the DNA. Voters there know what was lost and they see who is hiring now,”
.. “There are manufacturing jobs available right now, but young people have moved on. An entire generation of Americans has forgotten about manufacturing as a career path,” Paul said.
It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs
The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.
.. Consider the Industrial Revolution. Well before it took place, in the 19th century, another revolution in work occurred in the 18th century, which historians call the “industrious revolution.” Before this revolution, people worked where they lived, perhaps at a farm or a shop. The manufacturing of textiles, for example, relied on networks of independent farmers who spun fibers and wove cloth. They worked on their own; they were not employees.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts.
This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution.
.. the creation of factory technology was possible only because people’s relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home.
.. our current historical moment is better understood as a second industrious revolution
.. Over these four decades we have seen an increase in the use of day laborers, office temps, management consultants, contract assemblers, adjunct professors, Blackwater mercenaries and every other kind of worker filing an I.R.S. form 1099. These jobs span the income ranks, but they share what all work seems to have in common in the post-1970s economy: They are temporary and insecure.
.. In the last 10 years, 94 percent of net new jobs have appeared outside of traditional employment... services like Uber and online freelance markets like TaskRabbit were created to take advantage of an already independent work force; they are not creating it... Uber is a symptom, not a cause... shortly after World War II, a Milwaukee man named Elmer Winter founded Manpower, the first major temp agency, to supply emergency secretaries... The emergence in the 1970s of a new, strictly financial view of corporations, a philosophy that favored stock and bond prices over production, of short-term gains over long-term investment. Theories of “lean” corporate organization became popular, especially those sold by management consultants and business gurus.
.. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.
Trump’s Economic Claims Are Overblown
And the rate of job growth during Mr. Trump’s first 19 months in office (194,000 jobs per month) is slightly less than the rate at which jobs were added during Mr. Obama’s final 19 months (205,000 per month). So the good news on jobs is the same good news Americans have been hearing for the last three years.
.. Over the first 18 months since Mr. Trump took office, real earnings, which reflect earnings after accounting for inflation, rose at an annual rate of just 0.3 percent.
.. Without these extraordinary interventions, the underlying rate of economic expansion in the second quarter of this year was about 2.7 percent.. Moreover, that 4.1 percent number isn’t heroic. During the Obama presidency, the economy produced four quarters of growth that were higher. And the consensus among private and government forecasters is that the G.D.P. growth rate is likely to ebb quickly, once tariffs are actually in effect and the tax cut gains are all realized. Goldman Sachs, for example, forecasts that the annualized growth rate will fall to 3.3 percent in the third quarter and then taper down to 1.5 percent by the end of 2019... the Trump administration’s policies have done little for the average worker. Mr. Trump’s tax cut delivered 84 percent of its benefits to business and to individuals with incomes above $75,000 a year.