Workforce Shift Quotes

I don't have farmers I can convert into factory workers.

Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

In the 1960s, you had this booming economy, and you didn't really have enough men around to fill all the jobs. So there was this sudden demand that women come back and perform a lot of the white-collar and pink-collar roles that men had done before or that hadn't existed before.

Job displacement is so huge, I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

Many of the statistics that have been cited in the stories of sexual revolution are reflections instead of the Industrial Revolution. The entrance of women into the work force has accompanied, at a slower pace, their departure from farms. As recently as eighty years ago 36 percent of American families were engaged in agriculture; today fewer than three percent are. This shift is truly a revolution, and it has transformed the official labor statistics for women. Although these statistics show women entering the work force in record numbers, the fact is that women have always worked. Their labor on farms, however—in an array of arduous jobs beyond the hearth and cribside—;was never monitored by statisticians.

The society of organizations is new-only seventy years ago employees were a small minority in every society.

Technology has always been destroying jobs, and it has always been creating jobs.

The impact of technology on labor has become clearer and clearer by the day.

Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in employment rates.

As a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.