by Zoë Pollock
Richard Florida rethinks the service industry:
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, the US economy remains on track to generate 15 million new jobs over the next decade. 6.8 million of them will be high-skill, high-wage work in the knowledge, professional, and technical sectors of the economy. The other half will be much lower-paying, low-skill work in the routine service sector of the economy. More than 45 percent of the US workforce — 60 million workers — already do this kind of work, and they earn just half of what factory workers make — and only a third of what professional, technical and knowledge workers are paid.
If we're serious about creating good, family-supporting jobs, we have no choice but to upgrade those service jobs and turn them into adequate replacements for the blue-collar jobs that have been wiped out. We did it 70 or 80 years ago when we transformed manufacturing jobs from low-paid, dangerous work into high-paid jobs; we must do it again.
The Dish 