Lo and behold, I just get finished writing about the phony promise of education as our economic salvation and, down from the mountaintop, drops a new report from—get this cool name—New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. I guess by putting “new” in the title the Commission was hoping to pull one over on us, make it sound spiffy and cutting-edge. I call this the Field of Dreams theory of jobs: train the workers and the jobs will just come.

We have this debate every so often in our country. And it’s just as phony now as it was when I first started writing about this in the early 1990s because of the nonsense being spewed by then-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. I point out Reich because it’s important to understand that the Field of Dreams foolishness is bi-partisan—and it comes from a bi-partisan unwillingness to look at the facts: that it is corporate power that is endangering the future of workers and their children, not the fact that they are stupid or go to bad schools or need to start school at age 3 or that teachers need to be paid based on merit.

To show readers how phony this whole discussion is I want to repeat a story that is more than a decade old. In August 1994, Reich was, once again, laying out his Field of Dreams theory before an audience convened by the Center for National Policy at the Hyatt Regency in Washington, D.C. Standing at a lectern, he was reading more or less from a text written by some invisible speechwriter when he decided, suddenly, to stray. Picking up the drinking glass sitting at his elbow, he said, “Take this glass next to me and you see that what you are paying for, what a consumer is actually paying for is less and less related to the actual production that goes into making the glass, more and more into the design engineering, the marketing, the legal services, all of the management consulting services, the distribution services, all of the services that go into making up this glass. These are not necessarily bad jobs, some of them are very good jobs, some of them are highly skilled jobs. We’ve got to make sure that more and more Americans get those kind of jobs.”

The audience was mesmerized, taken in by this powerful mind who could, in the middle of a complicated speech, deftly analyze the value of a glass. Unfortunately, Reich simply made it up and was demonstrably wrong or, at best, he conveniently told only one side of the story. I decided to track the glass. I found out that its wholesale cost, at the time, was ninety-five cents and it’s called an Arctic Pattern, made, then, by J.G. Durand, a privately-held French company with more than 12,000 employees worldwide. Although the company had about 800 people who worked here in the U.S., the “Arctic Pattern [is] mostly produced in France,” a company spokesperson told me. More important, she said there is almost zero design engineering value in this glass—because it’s been around for twenty—TWENTY—years. ppp
Libby Inc., a unionized Durand competitor, made a very similar glass called the Winchester. Wayne Zitkus, the company’s technical manager, completely contradicted Reich’s theory that the production costs are declining. “I don’t think that’s generally true,” he said. In fact, “labor costs are very high, energy and materials, those costs have all increased over the years and account for more of the production costs, not less.” He added that the basic design of the glass was done ten years ago.

Even more revealing, Zitkus told me that although the industry had entered into a higher-automated computer age, the company did not need people with higher levels of education for most of its jobs—Reich’s central Field of Dreams contention. With the exception of a few advanced jobs, does someone off the street need more skills, I asked? “Probably not,” he said. “We’re probably measuring people the same way [we did] ten years ago. We have tests to give to people to see whether they have general mechanical skills that we need. We’re educating people ourselves. We’ve trained people so rather than turn knobs they’re looking at numbers.”

The key fact from this whole episode is that what computer automation did do was not raise the required skills level but eliminate 35,000 jobs in the industry over the last ten years. Nobody has been able to find any direct connection between technological progress and skill upgrading—as Zitkus himself illustrated.

Back, then, Reich promoted the notion that to make a decent living you needed to earn a college degree. Remember the “wage gap”? The difference in wages for college-educated versus non-college educated workers. Damn right there was a gap—but it came mostly from the precipitous drop at the lower end-partly because of the merciless wage concessions, decline in unionization and growth in low-wage jobs—not from a dramatic gain on the highly- educated, high-skilled end. That’s a trend that has continued.

Reich’s glass snafu is not isolated, picky incident. In part, Reich, other liberals and education-is-the-answer advocates do not have the courage to challenge (or worse, they may see as harmless or inevitable) the acceptance of the flagless corporations knowing no national boundaries in an insatiable search for profits and the driving down of wages all in the service of the glorious free market.