Читать книгу Changing Contours of Work - Stephen Sweet - Страница 31

The new economy is also frequently described as requiring a more educated workforce. According to this view, the “knowledge economy” or the “information economy” depends on a large and growing supply of highly educated, technically sophisticated employees, rather than the low-skill workers needed by mass production industry. An important element of this high-skill workforce is the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) workforce; policy makers argue that economic growth increasingly depends on an adequate supply of workers trained in these areas, individuals who can design and maintain new technologies.

STEM jobs have, in fact, grown significantly. These trends need to be interpreted carefully, however, because opportunities for work in some STEM occupations have not been expanding. While there are many more jobs for workers with computer science training, for example, the same cannot be said for physicists, chemists, or even certain kinds of engineers, where demand has grown more slowly, or not at all. Nor has the expansion of STEM employment been steady; on the contrary, since World War II, it has been marked by a boom-bust cycle, as periods of high demand are followed by an overproduction of graduates, layoffs, and falling demand (e.g., what happened after the Vietnam War or the more recent dot.com bust of the early twenty-first century). In some instances, exaggerated predictions of actual or looming shortages of qualified STEM workers can be linked to advocates with political agendas at stake (Salzman, Kuehn, and Lowell 2013; Teitelbaum 2014). So, while the growth of STEM employment is real and likely to continue, it will likely remain a relatively small, if increasingly important, part of the contemporary economy.

As the STEM workforce has grown, so have hopes that the new economy will create large numbers of well-paying, secure, challenging jobs. The success of enterprises such as Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook fuels enthusiastic visions of high-tech workers deeply engaged with creative work, making pioneering breakthroughs, and transforming knowledge into lucrative business opportunities. The demand for engineers, research scientists, and computer professionals, and the reality of success stories, indicate that these hopes are not unfounded. However, there is reason not to jump to the conclusion that the low-skill mass production economy has been fully replaced by an economy dominated by autonomous, creative STEM workers.

First, it should be remembered that not all jobs in high-technology, science-based sectors are well-paid, high-skill jobs. The computer industry employs many professionals but also needs relatively unskilled workers to assemble, package, and transport its products. Even sophisticated artificial intelligence systems such as search engines or the technologies that make businesses such as Uber and Lyft possible rely on badly paid workers (sometimes referred to as “ghost workers” since they are hidden from view) who do the things the technology can’t—such as screening out “adult” content from searches or checking that your Uber driver is actually the person Uber screened and has determined to be an acceptable driver (Gray and Suri 2019). Similarly, while health care requires doctors, researchers, and other skilled professionals, no hospital can function without a significant number of orderlies, maintenance workers, aides, technicians, and clerks. Nor are the trends for the professional STEM workforce uniformly positive. For example, STEM salary growth has not outpaced salary growth in other occupations, suggesting that the demand for STEM professionals is not as great as had been anticipated (Hira 2010, Teitelbaum 2014).

In addition, the independent, creative, entrepreneurial STEM career exemplified by Steve Jobs of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is not the reality experienced by many employees in this sector. While earlier predictions (e.g., Kraft 1984) that high-technology work would be simplified and routinized in much the same way as manufacturing have proven exaggerated, STEM professionals work in jobs affected by a number of dynamics reminiscent of the old economy. For example, STEM employers in industries such as information technology (IT) can reduce the upward pressure on salaries produced by the shortage of well-trained workers by importing qualified employees from overseas. Much like manufacturing employers in the past, who encouraged and even sponsored immigration to keep labor costs down, contemporary IT employers look to countries such as India for sources of affordable labor. There is a growing controversy over the H1-B visa program that facilitates the import of technical professionals from overseas, as some claim that employers use this not because there is a shortage, but as a source of less expensive labor (Salzman et al. 2013, Teitelbaum 2014). Moreover, the new economy offers novel opportunities to take advantage of the availability of lower-cost labor overseas. Many analysts have noted how the electronics revolution has made it possible to digitize steps in the work process and locate them offshore, retaining only portions of the work to be performed in the United States (Aspray 2010, Blinder 2006). Interestingly, the import of technical professionals and the outsourcing of jobs may be directly linked; among the largest users of the H1-B visa program are Indian technology companies, who sponsor technical professionals coming to the United States to work for a time, then return them to India where they become key components of the growing Indian high-technology workforce (Teitelbaum 2014).

The actual work performed by STEM professionals generally requires considerable skill and expertise. However, it is not uniformly creative or autonomous in the way suggested by the more euphoric visions of the contemporary, high-technology workplace. Not all computer programming work, for example, is fully creative. Some computer professionals are engaged in the design of new systems and products and apply genuine creative autonomy as they enjoy the freedom to play with new ideas and concepts in their work. However, much computer programming (while it can be technically demanding) also can be relatively routine, formulaic work. For example, composing the well-understood computer code that forms the core of even new programs, or checking and debugging programs, can be (and often is) performed by lower-paid and sometimes less-qualified employees. This type of work is most likely to be outsourced to countries such as India (Aspray 2010, Parthasarathy 2004). There is also evidence of the emergence of what one observer called “pink-collar ghettoes” in coding, with women concentrated in the less challenging, lower-paid front-end coding jobs, while men gravitate to more challenging and more financially rewarding work in the back end—working on servers, security protocols, Blockchain, and the like (Thompson 2019).

Finally, even the more creative kinds of programming work are often managed in ways familiar to the old economy. Rather than being given a free hand to design and create whatever and however they please, computer professionals typically must design programs on schedules set for them by managers or external customers (in the case of suppliers and subcontractors to larger firms). They also often are required to incorporate user suggestions into their designs, and their compliance with these and other expectations is closely monitored (Barrett 2004). The jobs of software developers are a long way from being the routinized work of mass production workers—they enjoy much more autonomy and have more creative decision-making ability than does anyone working on an assembly line. At the same time, as in the old economy, employers tend to seek ways to limit the cost of labor and attempt to manage and control it. In sum, there has been a growth in high-skill work in the new economy and some of this work is performed in new ways with new intents. Nevertheless, high-skill work has not replaced low-skill work, and even high-skilled workers have been subject to controls established in the old economy.