Amid all the blather about V-shaped and U-shaped economic recoveries, it’s become pretty clear that we don’t have any recovery at all. And that there’s none on the near horizon. It looks, in fact, like we’re screwed. What’s less clear is exactly what happened.
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The enabler is our friend technology. Both the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times carried stories this week about how technological innovation is taking jobs away rather than increasing them, as many experts expected. But that’s not news to Harris, who began studying the economy after he was laid off from U.S. Steel’s South Works plant in 1982.
“We lost a lot of jobs to technology before we lost them to other countries,” Harris says. At U.S. Steel, where he started out in the blast furnace and then became a machine-shop apprentice, he recalls that the skilled workers he was training with “came in one day and found computer boards attached to their machines.” During that decade, in factories across America, skilled labor was replaced by microchips, middle management was eliminated, and productivity skyrocketed. “By 1988,” Harris notes in his 2008 book, Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World, the U.S. required only 40 percent of its blue-collar labor force to produce an amount of manufactured goods equal to that produced in 1977.”
Meanwhile, we have a shrinking middle class here and growing poverty. “That has political implications that we’re seeing, for example, in the Occupy protests,” Harris says. “There’s a feeling of alienation, a sense that the national government is controlled by corporations. We gave billions to the banks (including foreign-owned banks), which they used to increase their own bonuses. What if that money went into infrastructure development, hiring people to build bridges, sewer systems, roads?
