WASHINGTON
The steady loss of “good jobs” by less-educated workers has left them more vulnerable to recession than at any time in nearly 30 years, and signs are mounting that a recession is either already here or coming soon.
High-school dropouts and even high-school graduates who lack specialized job training have seen their already limited employment prospects steadily decline during America’s decades-long shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service economy.
Not long ago, Americans who were unable to attend college could count on finding local factory jobs after high school. The lucky ones landed in muscular industries such as aviation, steel and automobiles, while others found work on assembly lines building durable goods.
These and other “good jobs” were the signature byproducts of a robust economy that once was the envy of the world. The jobs provided stability and decent wages that allowed families to buy homes, provide for their children and retire in modest comfort.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research defines a “good job” as one with health insurance, a pension plan and earnings of at least $17 per hour. That works out to about $34,000 a year, the inflation-adjusted median income for men in 1979, when U.S. manufacturing jobs numbered 19.6 million, an all-time high.
Since then, however, the economy has lost nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs 52,000 in February alone. Among them were many of the 3.5 million “good jobs” lost from 2000 to 2006, according to John Schmitt, a senior economist at CEPR.
As those jobs disappeared, many blue-collar workers were forced to take jobs with far less pay and benefit security.
This caused the share of high-school graduates with good jobs to fall from about one in five in 1979 to one in seven in 2005, Schmitt found. For those who didn’t finish high school, the decline was even steeper. The share of these workers with good jobs fell from roughly one in seven to one in 25 over the same period.
With a recession certain to accelerate job losses, experts say that less-educated workers who lack marketable job skills likely will have the hardest time holding onto their jobs and the toughest time finding new employment.
“People in the middle and at the bottom (of the wage scale) are going to be the bulk of the victims in a recession,” Schmitt said. “They’re proportionally going to take a much bigger hit.”
In Groveton, N.H., where papermaking has long been a part of local life, Murray Rogers was among 300 workers who lost their jobs in December when the sprawling Wasau Paper mill on the Upper Ammonoosuc River shut its doors after more than 100 years of operation.
A 50-year-old pipefitter and welder, Rogers was a year out of high school in 1976 when he began working at the mill. Over his 31 years at the plant, his wages had swelled to nearly $21 an hour.
As president of the local steelworkers union, Rogers took a one-year job with a group that helps find jobs for displaced mill workers. Most are taking pay cuts as they try to find new careers without the higher education and specialized training that the new job market demands.
Helping fuel the loss of good jobs has been a decline in union membership, industry deregulation, increased outsourcing of state and government services and economic policies that focus more on containing inflation than on maintaining full employment, Schmitt said.
As good jobs become harder to find, bad jobs have become much easier to get. In 1979, 41 percent of workers who didn’t finish high school held “bad jobs,” those with no health insurance or pension plans and paid less than $16.50 an hour in inflation-adjusted wages. By 2005, that number had grown to 61 percent, Schmitt found.
David Meza of Beaverton, Ore., is struggling to escape that trend. Meza, 47, worked 14 years assembling heavy-duty trucks for the Freightliner truck company. But when most of the production operations were moved to Mexico, he was laid off in March 2007.
An 11th-grade dropout who taught himself to read and write, Meza never earned his General Equivalency Diploma because he was making $21.50 an hour without it. He didn’t realize his mistake until he started looking for a new job.
“I had a lot of experience. I ran a forklift, worked at canneries in Alaska, been a truck driver, but none of that matters unless I’ve got a GED. So I’m pushing myself as hard as I’ve ever done in my life to get it,” he said.
As the job search continues, Meza longs for the days when overtime was plentiful and employers interviewed job applicants in person, instead of reading their resumes online.
“Those were the good ol’ days,” he said.