Page 19


OPEN MONDAY-SATURDAY I0-6 AND OPEN SUNDAY 10-4 WATSON & COMPANY BOOKS Parisian Charm. Omelette & Champagne Breakfast. Beautiful Crepes. Afternoon Cocktails. Gallant Waiters. Delicious Quiche. Evening Romance. Continental Steaks. Mysterious Women. Famous Pastries. Cognac & Midnight Rendezvous. In short, it’s about everything a great European style restaurant is all about. p ec e an Old . Cafe 3. 310 East 6th St. Austin, Texas t’s RcDlcAj;out?_ ANDERSON & COMPANY COFFEE TEA SPICES TWO JEITERSM SQUARE AUSTIN, TEXAS 7W131 512 453-1533 Send me your list. Name Street City Zip typically professional or managerial skills, the service sector creates three or more jobs characterized by low wages and typically limited skills, and virtually no medium-paid skilled jobs are created. 3. Studies by other researchers, including Bob Kuttner, Lester Thurow, Stephen Rose, Frank Levy, and Richard Michel and the Census Bureau confirm these findings. Census officials concluded: The economy is creating high-income jobs in high-technology industries and low-paying service jobs for workers such as builders, custodians and guards, cooks, waiters and waitresses, and nurses’ aides. But the number of middle-income jobs in the automobile, steel, machinery, construction, and other manufacturing industries has dropped sharply. Wages in the United States also are declining relative to other countries. During the 1970s, we had the lowest increase in real wages of any OECD \(Organization of Economic Cooperation U.S. had the highest GNP per capita in the world, but by 1980 we had slipped to ninth. Some critics minimize these trends by saying that they are “natural,” do not reflect growing need because of the growth of households with two wage earners, or are taking place very slowly. The latter argument is advanced by writers who use broad occupational categories which show that occupational distributions are expected to shift very little between 1980 and 1990 \(machine operators, for example, 13.9% of all workers in 1980 to 13.6% in 1990; craft trouble with this argument is that the broad categories average out and therefore conceal the polarizing trends. The trouble with the argument about more family members working to sustain family income is that the process is selflimiting not many families have another spouse to put into the work force. Some studies minimize the adverse general outlook for employment by noting a number of trends that are expected to reduce the supply of labor: the baby boom is over; the work force is aging, so a larger proportion will be out of the work force; and the youth unemployment problem will be diminished by declining fertility rates. If these optimistic growth forecasts are assumed, it is possible to show a labor shortage in the years ahead. The trouble with the current economic recovery to be optimistic assumptions about the impact of high tech on employment. High Technology There is, however, considerable uncertainty about the employment effects of high technology, a term which means different things to different people. To some it means the changes associated with microelectronics, but there are other closely-related changes which justify the use of the term “revolution” to describe what is happening; these include developments in automation, energy, and raw materials, agricultural and biological engineering, lasers, robotics, microelectronics, and the development of synthetic materials, all of which go together in a mutually reinforcing way to cause really monumental economic and social changes. One high-tech trend the so-called “information revolution” is very important because information is central to all human action. Indeed, there are those especially the Japanese who believe that national power will be determined by the amount of information made available by the so-called “smart” or fifth-generation computers. One assessment of the impact of just the communication component of this revolution is by Robert Jastrow of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies: “The communication revolution . . . will be far more radical than the previous ones spurred by speech, writing, printing and radio.” He predicts, “In the long term, the new satellites will provide a new nervous system for mankind, knitting the members of our species into a global society.” He likens this to “the breakthrough in the history of life several billion years ago when multicellular animals evolved Out of more primitive organisms.” Whether or not we accept Jastrow’s assessment, there is little doubt that we are involved in a revolution whose impact probably will be greater than the first industrial revolution. Indeed, this revolution already has had a profound impact on human affairs. 1. It has changed how and where people work: a. The Pacific Data Company of Dallas employs 200 Chinese data processors at a salary of $50 per month. b. A Swedish fire department keeps records in Ohio. c. Satellite Data Corporation, a New York company, has word processing workers in Barbados who are paid $1.50 per hour. In the U.S. similar workers are paid $4 to $12 per hour. 8 APRIL 6, 1984