4.3 - Work and the U.S. Labor Force

re-evaluating globalization

Globalization refers to the process of integrating governments, cultures, and financial markets through international trade into a single world market. There are benefits and drawbacks to globalization. Often the countries that fare the worst are those that depend on natural resource extraction for their wealth. Many critics fear globalization gives too much power to multinational corporations and that political decisions are influenced by these major financial players. With the worldwide pandemic, COVID-19, vulnerabilities in the supply chain became apparent and the concepts of extreme specialization and compartmentalization was called into question.

economy in sociology

In sociology, economy refers to the social institution through which a society's resources are exchanged and managed. The earliest economies were based on trade, which is often a simple exchange in which people traded one item for another. While today's economic activities are more complex than those early trades, the underlying goals remain the same: exchanging goods and services allows individuals to meet their needs and wants. In 1893, Émile Durkheim described what he called "mechanical" and "organic" solidarity that correlates to a society's economy.

mechanical solidarity

exists in simpler societies where social cohesion comes from sharing similar work, education, and religion. An object that a society agrees to assign a value to so it can be exchanged as payment.

automation

replaces workers with technology

Structural unemployment

A societal level of disjuncture between people seeking jobs and the jobs that are available.

The U.S. and the American Dream

The American Dream has always been based on opportunity. There is a great deal of mythologizing about the energetic upstart who can climb to success based on hard work alone. Common wisdom states that if you study hard, develop good work habits, and graduate high school and/or college, then you'll have the opportunity to land a good job. That has long been seen as the key to a successful life. And although the reality has always been more complex than suggested by the myth, the worldwide recession that began in 2008 took its toll on the American Dream. During the recession, more than 8 million U.S. workers lost their jobs and unemployment rates surpassed 10 percent on a national level. Today, while the recovery is still incomplete, many sectors of the economy are hiring and unemployment rates have receded. With the COVID-19 epidemic, and its impact on workers, employment, supply chains, government safety nets, and trust in the American system, the American Dream will move in a new direction and will need to be reframed in terms of rebuilding and recovery. Most developed countries such as the United States protect their citizens from absolute poverty by providing different levels of social services such as unemployment insurance, welfare, food assistance, etc. They may also provide job training and retraining so that people can reenter the job market. In the past, the elderly were particularly vulnerable to falling into poverty after they stopped working. However, pensions, retirement plans, and Social Security were designed to help prevent this. A major concern in the United States is the rising number of young people growing up in poverty. Growing up poor can cut off access to the education and services people need to move out of poverty and into stable employment. As we saw, more education was often a key to stability and those raised in poverty are the ones least able to find well-paying work, thus perpetuating a cycle.

Polarization in the Workforce

There have been a number of developments that gained momentum in the 2000's and led to polarization in the workforce. For example, increased outsourcing—or contracting a job or set of jobs to an outside source—of manufacturing jobs to developing nations has greatly diminished the number of high-paying, often unionized, blue-collar positions available. A similar problem has arisen in the white-collar sector, with many low-level clerical and support positions also being outsourced, as evidenced by the international technical-support call centers and . The number of supervisory and managerial positions has been reduced as companies streamline their command structures and industries continue to consolidate through mergers. Even highly educated skilled workers such as computer programmers have seen their jobs vanish overseas. The automation of the workplace, which replaces workers with technology, is another cause of the changes in the job market. Computers can be programmed to do many routine tasks faster and less expensively than people who used to do such tasks. Jobs like bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive tasks on production assembly lines all lend themselves to automation. Envision your local supermarket's self-scan checkout aisles. The automated cashiers affixed to the units take the place of paid employees. Now one cashier can oversee transactions at six or more self-scan aisles, which was a job that used to require one cashier per aisle. Despite the ongoing economic recovery, the job market is actually growing in some areas but in a very polarized fashion. Polarization means that a gap has developed in the job market, with most employment opportunities at the lowest and highest levels and few jobs for those with midlevel skills and education. At one end, there has been strong demand for low-skilled, low-paying jobs in industries like food service and retail.

Women in the Workforce, Immigration, Structural Unemployment

Women have been entering the workforce in ever-increasing numbers for several decades. They have also been finishing college and going on to earn higher degrees at higher rate than men. This has resulted in many women being better positioned to obtain high-paying, high-skilled jobs. Historically speaking, people will move from where there are few or no jobs to places where there are jobs unless something prevents them. The process of moving to a country is called immigration. Due to its reputation as the land of opportunity, the United States has long been the destination for workers of all skill levels. While the rate decreased somewhat during the economic slowdown of 2008, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, continue to be a major part of the U.S. workforce. A certain amount of unemployment is a direct result of the relative inflexibility of the labor market, considered structural unemployment, which describes when there is a societal level of disjuncture between people seeking jobs and the available jobs. This mismatch can be geographic (they are hiring in California, but most unemployed live in Alabama), technological (skilled workers are replaced by machines, as in the auto industry), or can result from any sudden change in the types of jobs people are seeking versus the types of companies that are hiring.

organic solidarity (A form of social cohesion that arises out of the mutual interdependence created by the specialization of work.)

arises out of the mutual interdependence created by the specialization of work. The complex U.S. economy, and the economies of other industrialized nations, meet the definition of organic solidarity. Most individuals perform a specialized task to earn money they use to trade for goods and services provided by others who perform different specialized tasks. In a simplified example, an elementary school teacher relies on farmers for food, doctors for healthcare, carpenters to build shelter, and so on. The farmers, doctors, and carpenters all rely on the teacher to educate their children. They are all dependent on each other and their work. In the 21st century, organic solidarity expanded to almost dizzying extremes when interdependence involved complex supply chains. But recently with the coronavirus pandemic, the wisdom of globalization and such intense interdependence has been questioned. The specialized tasks resulted in most of the world's manufacturing being concentrated in one area and most companies having a single source supplier. When the single source supplier was no longer able to maintain production, supply chains were disrupted leading to worldwide negative economic consequences. 98% of the world's goods have at least one component made in China. Many economies (Europe, the Caribbean, the U.S.) were heavily dependent on gatherings (tourism, trade shows, etc.), and in the case of a global pandemic, that sector shut down with devastating consequences.

Outsourcing

contracting a job or set of jobs to an outside source