Labor’s real crisis is not unemployment but unemployability […] Labor unions will not make a difference. It was precisely because direct labor used to be so simple, mechanical and yet critical to value creation that labor unions made sense […] Anyway, the logic behind unions may still apply to some kinds of work — fast-food servers, apparel assemblers, hospital orderlies. But, again, any job that is simple and repetitive, that requires so little individual creativity that an employee would rather join a union than negotiate an individual career path, will become a prime target for the computer-integrative technologies as the years go by.
All of this means that 10 or 20 or 30 million people — people with children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who played by rules that simply evaporated from the time they were 15 to the time they were 35 — are hard pressed to see a future. Or make sense of the past. After all, the school system we conceived, the union movements we adjusted to, the “leading” economic indicators we tracked, the Government programs we put in place — none of these things assumed that virtually every member of society would need the equivalent of college-level skill just to get a decent job.
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