Well, that’s kind of the message we’ve been bombarded with for the past decade or two: the solution to future employment is to get retrained and get smarter because, guess what, you’re too dumb and unskilled in the great “New Economy” of the future. This has been one of my pet peeves for lo these many years…

So, I’ve got a new column on this as part of my on-going series “Working in America” at TomPaine.com: “Workers of the Real World.” Tell me what YOU think.

Understand, this rhetoric we hear is not just heaped on us by conservatives and corporations–though as I point out in the article, there’s a clear reason companies want workers to believe this nonsense (it offers hope and obscures how the unjust economy is really being planned and created).

It’s liberals, too. One of the great purveyors of the education-is-salvation myth is Robert Reich. A decade ago, I showed how Reich just makes up examples that crumble in the face of facts. But, he just keeps chugging along, espousing views that are artfully written–but, unfortunately, are nonsense.

One of his most recent pronouncements appeared in the pages of The Washington Post on November 2nd 2004. Headlined “High-Tech Jobs Are Going Abroad! But That’s Okay,” it was amusing and bizarre at the same time—Reich was at war with himself.

First, he acknowledged the loss of thousands of information technology jobs and the battering of peoples’ salaries. Then, he told us that 10 percent of all information-technology jobs will move off-shore by the end of 2004 into the waiting hands of foreign workers who “can do a lot of high-tech jobs more cheaply than they can be done here.”

But, he, then, promised, “When the U.S. economy fully bounces back from recession…a large portion of high-tech jobs that were lost after 2000 will come back in some form.” Why? No reason given why any company would replace a job costing one-fifth in salary of what an American worker would command.

He goes on to say that the threat of intellectual property theft, sabotage, cyber-terrorism or organized crime will keep “the overall percent of high-tech jobs going abroad” relatively small. But, then, in the next sentence, he admits that, “not much of this has happened.” Oh, well, nice theory even if there is no evidence to support it.

He moved on to the academic equivalent of easy-listening music. We’re told that “high tech work entails the process of innovating” (gee, deep), that such work is about “discovering and solving problems,” (even deeper) and, then, (are you ready?), “There’s no necessary limit to the number of high-tech jobs around the world because there’s no finite limit to the ingenuity of the human mind. And there’s no limit to human needs that can be satisfied.”

Before I can catch my breath, Reich tells us all about the great rewards awaiting the masses, and the professionals who surround them, who are willing to work in biotechnology, nanotechnology and new-materials technologies.
And, then, the final stunner at the end: “But it makes no sense for us to try to protect or preserve high-tech jobs in America or block efforts by companies to outsource. Our economic future is weeded to technological change, and most of the jobs of the future are still ours to invent.”

Nonsense, as I point out in the TomPaine piece. One thing I didn’t mention, though, which is worth saying here is that the definition of a “high-tech” job is slippery—a small percentage of those jobs are of the type Reich and others view as elite high-technology jobs. Most of the jobs—software development, design—are within educational reach of a far bigger pool of workers around the world.

The most jarring notion that Reich promotes is that American workers are smarter than anyone in the world. That simply isn’t true, particularly when companies are willing to invest capital in research and innovative technologies around the world. Frankly, Reich’s view is discomfortingly nationalistic and mildly racist.

At one level, I know the man is just trying to cover his ass—his theory has proven to be dead wrong and, if people paid close attention, he would be discredited. There was a time where he was everywhere in the 1990s, promoting his Field of Dreams job theory—if workers would just get educated and retrained, they had nothing to fear, particularly of so-called “free trade,” because the future of the nation lay in “symbolic analysts.”

It was Reich’s way of having it both ways—supporting so-called “free trade,” which would be devastating to millions of workers, but, at the same time, showing concern for their future by exhorting them to just get smarter.
Reich represents a certain segment of political thought: college-educated liberals who continue to try to walk a very thin line. They view themselves as people with a social conscience, but they believe in the free market largely because it’s rarely bitten them directly in their behinds; some, though not Reich, are even anti-union because they view unions as restraining the dynamism of the economy.

But, until they get that so-called “free trade” is a mirage, that the market, far from dynamic, is a captive of abusive corporate power, they are not the allies of workers.

Anyway, enough of that…tell me what you think.