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Come on,
President Obama, Help Create Fourth Wave Jobs – Faster!
By Rubin Patterson, Ph.D.
Guest Column
Although being dislocated out of an entire category of jobs
in big waves is hard, at least it isn’t as bad if there is
an equally big wave of new job categories opening up.
The well-known futurist Alvin Toffler has written about our
society’s previous Three Waves of jobs. What I wonder about
is how quickly can we get to the Fourth Wave of jobs since
the previous three are now woefully insufficient?
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane regarding the previous
Three Waves of jobs. First we had the agricultural wave that
began to wash over society some thousands of years ago.
During that time humans began abandoning their nomadic
lifestyles of moving here and there in search of new food
sources and accepting instead lifestyles structured around
settled agriculture.
The Second Wave was the industrial revolution. It is worth
noting that the precondition for any civilization is energy.
First Wave societies relied principally on human and animal
muscle power to extract food from the earth, build shelter
and produce clothing. Energy sources for Second Wave
societies were primarily fossil fuels. Unaware of the
significance of the changes, the industrial revolutionaries
at the time were setting humanity on an ecologically
unsustainable trek that we only began to appreciate late
last century.
Numerous
techniques were utilized to drive workers off the land and
into factories to carry out Second Wave production. One
field-to-factory dislocating force was technological
revolutions, such as the mechanical cotton picker or
harvester.
In 1949, 94 percent of the cotton in the South was picked by
the hands of African-Americans, but by 1964 that share was
down to only 22 percent.
A few years later, essentially 100 percent of the cotton was
harvested with machines. The great South to North black
migration between 1940 and 1970 of more than five million
was a part of the First Wave employment giving way to the
Second Wave.
Unbeknownst to blacks at the time of the migration, the
wheels were already in motion to automate and offshore those
industrial jobs, which would decades later be manifested in
massive unemployment in the inner-cities of formerly
industrial strongholds, including Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo
and others.
By 1956, America had become the world’s first nation to have
more white-collar workers than blue-collar workers. From
that point onward, America’s manufacturing workforce would
continuously decline as a percentage of the total. Whereas
in 1955 some 33 percent of Americans worked in
manufacturing, the share had dropped to 26 percent in 1974,
had fallen further to 15 percent by 1999, and is now barely
in double-digits at 10 percent.
Although many workers in the manufacturing sector didn’t
like being dislocated out of manufacturing, at least there
was another sector in which they could go. However, the
Third Wave arena of the service sector is also associated
with more uneven compensation, lower wage floors and more
contingent work opportunities.
As unattractive as Third Wave jobs already are for millions
of workers, they are steadily getting worse due to their
proven inability to sustain families. Just as we had to come
to terms with the elimination of agricultural jobs due to
automation in the forms of earth-altering mechanical devices
(e.g., tractors, harvesting machines) and chemical
defoliants and fertilizers – which are incredibly
energy-intensive and destructive biologically and
environmentally – and the elimination of manufacturing jobs
that have been accelerating since the 1970s due to
automation and offshoring, we are now coming to terms with
the fact that service jobs can also be eliminated due to
automation and offshoring.
We used to wonder if the Third Wave would end with humanity
crashing into a brick wall due to the crisis stemming from
too few jobs for citizens. Could the Fourth Wave just be
getting underway, which won’t crest for several more years,
and would subsequently provide decent jobs to millions, if
not billions, of fellow global citizens around the world?
It is becoming pretty clear that there is a considerable
amount of labor-intensive work to be done in this possible
Fourth Wave of eco-industrial production.
Let’s look at just one potential source, namely, brownfield
remediation. The Environmental Protection Agency says that
there are over 500,000 brownfield sites around the country.
There are rich economic and
employment opportunities to be harvested in remediating and
redeveloping the five million acres of brownfield sites
across the country.
Studies suggest that the average brownfield remediation and
redevelopment project creates about 10 jobs per acre. With
five million acres of brownfield sites that’s a whopping 50
million jobs that could be created. And given that the
average public expenditure per job for brownfield
remediation is $14,000 that comes to some $700 billion.
Don’t kid yourself – the government has to play a prominent
role in kick-starting the Fourth Wave just as it did with
the previous three. American agricultural success (First
Wave) started with government-supported slavery, but that
support extended to the Homestead Act and continues today in
the form of subsidies to giant agri-businesses.
The success of US manufacturing (Second Wave) was
supported in part by massive military and quasi-military
spending, which resulted, in part, in civilian manufacturing
success. Also, solid-state (i.e., miniaturized) electronics
came about in part due to NASA expenditures.
And then there is the 21st Century service (Third
Wave) economy, aided in large part by the Internet. The
Internet, of course, is a product of the Pentagon’s Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). None of the
previous job waves would have experienced the startling high
rates of productivity and innovation that we have witnessed
without the initial and massive support of the government.
We need the Obama administration and the rest of Washington
to make a gigantic investment splash in order to help create
new Fourth Wave green technologies and production techniques
to flow throughout the US and the global economy. In other
words, we need green jobs now – the Fourth Wave jobs!
Rubin Patterson, Ph.D., is professor of Sociology and the
interim director of Africana Studies at The University o
Toledo. He may be contacted at
rpatter@UTNet.UToledo.edu
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