Work in the United States
Learning Outcomes
- Describe the current U.S. workforce and the trend of polarization
- Describe the U.S. workforce as pertaining to women, racial minorities, and immigrants
The American Dream has always been based on the availability of 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 excel in school, then you’ll have the opportunity to land a good job. And although the reality has always been more complex than the myth might lead us to believe, 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. Today, while the recovery is still incomplete, many sectors of the economy are expanding, and unemployment rates have receded.
The Changing Workforce
The mix of jobs available in the United States began changing many years before the 2008 recession, and, as mentioned above, the American Dream has not always been easy to achieve. Geography, race, gender, and other factors have complicated the pathway to success. More recently, the 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 in Mumbai, India, and Newfoundland, Canada. 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 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 product scanners, card readers, and change dispensers can largely 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.
Real Money, Virtual Worlds
If you are not one of the tens of millions gamers who enjoy World of Warcraft or other online virtual world games, you might not even know what MMORPG stands for. But if you made a living playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), as a growing number of enterprising gamer