Page 118 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture I [ 99

ceivable even 25 years ago that in an election you simply wrote
off the labor unions. In 1988, neither candidate paid any atten-
tion to them. They were simply written off.
I’m not saying that it’s final. But if you look in retrospect at
capitalism and ask who has been the beneficiary, most of you
will answer “the capitalists.” And most of you are dead wrong.
The great beneficiary of the last 150 years has been the indus-
trial worker. There is nothing in social history comparable to it.
And now it’s suddenly all over.
The center of gravity is shifting. And, by the way, if you don’t
understand this, you don’t understand all the figures you are getting
quoted about income distribution. It’s not that the rich are getting
richer and the poor are getting poorer. It is that the large middle
class, without education and without skill, is no longer growing,
but is shrinking fast. And from now on increasingly, in order to
earn a middle-class living, you have to have formal schooling.
Believe me, for the last 30 to 40 years, to sit on your rear end
and go to school was economically nonrational and counterpro-
ductive. The smart thing was to drop out at age 16 and go to
work in the steel mill or the automobile factory or the rubber
factory, the unionized mass-production factory. And six months
later, you would make more money than you had much chance
of making by sitting on your rear end and getting a high school
degree, let alone a college or a graduate degree. That’s over.
I’m going to sit down the day after tomorrow with one of our
very large automobile companies, and we are going to spend a
morning looking at manpower. And they sent me their internal
projections, on which there’s a majority opinion and the dissent.
And the majority opinion says by the year 2000, assuming the
same number of cars to turn out, our employment will be down
to no more than one-third of what it is now. And the majority
dissent says two-fifths. Well, it’s very clear on the basis of their
most recent plants, that probably even one-third is high. And