About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

544 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1996)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0544 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Throughout my nearly four decades now as an industrial sociologist, I have been preoccupied with an ironic and far-reaching question: what if paid employment was to steadily disappear? What would become of the men and women for whom such employment, especially good jobs, was a central organizing element in their lives? Above all, what could we dare to do now to alleviate the worse possible consequences of such a development? This is hardly an armchair or ivory-tower line of speculation. Over the past twenty years I have been privileged to teach courses twice a year, for a week each time, at the AFL-CIO George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland. My adult students, all labor activists, regularly share aloud in class their ongoing and generally harrowing experiences with corpo- rate downsizing, the upgrading of worker productivity, the arrival of ever better automation, and other dazzling sources of the relentless loss of jobs. The oldest among them report that the range and pace of job loss is greater than anything they have ever known, and the youngest sigh with recognition of the troubles they anticipate ahead. Similarly, in my years of consulting coast to coast with school districts eager to improve their school-to-work connection, I am increasingly meeting educators who no longer trust that they can guide youngsters into tomorrow's world of work, so hazy and uncertain is the picture. Parents are even more troubled as confidence ebbs in the likelihood that there will always be enough good jobs, or even enough poor jobs, for their offspring. Pollsters tell of the sagging faith youngsters have in their ability to improve on the standard of living earned by their folks. Traveling overseas, I found in my interviews recently with Swedish labor leaders much anxiety stirred by an unprecedented level of joblessness in a country with one of the highest levels of unionization in the free world. Western Europe, including Germany, is likewise troubled, and the former Soviet Union and China both confront a growing unemployment problem, one compounded by the hunger to catch up with advanced postindustrial nations even while somehow ensuring enough employees a regular payroll and hope for even better times. As far-fetched as the possibility of rapid job loss may sound to currently well-off Americans, anxiety about this is actually well taken, given the rapid pace with which agricultural work in advanced nations shrank in the first half of the twentieth century and the steady erosion of manufacturing jobs in these same countries in the second half. Now, to compound the matter, we verge on an entirely new workplace existence, one we can extrapolate cautiously from steadily emerging partner- ships of human workers with awesomely smart equipment. The latter, once 8

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most