Page 268 - The Drucker Lectures

The Future of the Corporation IV [ 249

This trend is also at the core of our race problem because fac-
tory jobs in mass production industry were the one area in which
uneducated and untrained blacks had tremendous upward mobil-
ity. They got very high-paid unionized jobs in Detroit or Bridge-
port, and these are the jobs that are now going very fast. They’re
being replaced by jobs for educated people with high skills.
The agriculture transformation caused no social problems in
this country because the people who were displaced from the
farm moved into factory jobs that required few skills and paid
twice as much. There are plenty of jobs available in the knowl-
edge economy, but they require great skills, and they pay less
well than unionized manufacturing jobs. In Detroit today, an
automobile worker with 20 years of seniority costs about $40 an
hour, if you factor in overtime pay and benefits or health insur-
ance. That’s not what the knowledge economy can pay.
So the displaced factory worker today, even if he has the skills,
would face a sharp drop in income and job security. And the trou-
ble is, he or she doesn’t have the skills. And this is at the core of
our American race problem because blacks are disproportionately
represented in this group. The fact that one-half of our black pop-
ulation has become middle class and has moved out of the inner
city has only made the challenge to the other half more acute.
Everybody talks about exporting jobs. You’ve heard of that,
haven’t you? Well, nobody talks about the jobs that Toyota or
Nissan or Siemens have created in this country. They are not the
same jobs. And they are not in the same place. But actually, we
have had a surplus of jobs imported to America. This means that,
economically, we have no jobs problem. But we have a social prob-
lem because the displaced people don’t have the skills for the new
jobs, and they’re also not in the same location. The newcomers
didn’t go into Detroit. And so exporting jobs is the wrong thing
to talk about. The problem is that the new jobs are not where the
old ones were, and they require new skills and new attitudes.