One of the most widespread and durable presumptions about the modern American economy is that good middle-class jobs are an endangered species, threatened by the twin toxins of technology and globalization. But is it true? Does the torrent of news stories about companies shipping American jobs to less-developed countries actually represent an accurate portrait of a middle-class job market gone bust?

In his new paper for the Progressive Policy Institute, “The Jobs Puzzle: How Increased Trade Affects the Middle Class,” economist Stephen J. Rose offers compelling evidence that in recent decades middle-class jobs have generally become more plentiful, even though there have been trade surges and influxes of new workers into the labor market. Simply put, the alarmists across the political spectrum are wrong when it comes to the theory that trade leads to an overall loss of middle-class jobs.

The paper’s findings include the following:

• On the whole, the growth in trade and technology over the past three decades has generated meaningful employment growth for the middle class. As a general rule, middle-class jobs are not disappearing. Rather, they are being replaced, often-though not always-by higher-paying jobs.
• Gender plays a striking and meaningful role in determining which workers were more likely to gain middle-class jobs as trade grew.
• Women experienced a sharp increase in middle-class employment during this period. As recently as 28 years ago, over 60 percent of women workers were in the lowest pay category, and only three percent earned more than $50,000 a year. By contrast, today more than 36 percent of new jobs for women pay more than $50,000.

For men, the growth in trade has been a more ambivalent phenomenon. Well-educated men fared well. However, less-educated men suffered an unmistakable decline in fortunes. It is this group of Americans that must be the target of any policy prescriptions addressing the employment effects of trade. The nation should focus its concerns not on the mythic and overbroad “disappearance of the middle class,” but on the very real, very graspable challenge at hand-making a better education available to the young men who are entering the workforce of the 21st century.

This entry was posted on 10.04.2007 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Economic Opportunity, Helping Families. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.