The future of service jobs

As the economy recovers and Americans get back to work, the wage gap between white- and blue-collar work is expected to grow. According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60 million people—46 percent of the American workforce—in 2009 worked in the service sector as cashiers, office clerks, cooks, nurses, retail salespeople, or customer-service representatives.

But rather than consign nearly half of the nation's workers to relatively low-paying jobs, why not use the recession as an opportunity to make over service work into something fulfilling and analytical, hopefully with higher wages? So asks Richard Florida, professor, social scientist, and author of the bestselling book "The Rise of the Creative Class." Following the release of his latest tome,"The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity," Newsweek's Nancy Cook asked Florida about his vision for "upgrading" the service economy.

Cook: Why are service jobs so prevalent now?
Florida: For the past couple of decades, we've seen a drastic transformation in service jobs. This comes from someone whose father worked in factory. After my father came back from World War II, not only had the economy improved but the manufacturing industry had become higher paying. My father was able to able to buy a house and put both of us in Catholic school. My mom worked a little bit part time, but our expenses were basically covered by his salary. That kind of work has now declined. Now, just 23 percent of all jobs are blue collar—from transportation to manufacturing to construction.

Meanwhile, two other types of jobs have grown. Government, education, media, science, and technology have been adding to what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls business and professional-employment jobs—work that I have previously dubbed the creative class. About 35 million Americans, or a third of our workforce, do those kinds of jobs. But, we've also been generating much lower-wage, lower-skill jobs in what we typically call the service arena: home health-care aids or landscaping. These jobs pay half of what a manufacturing job pays and a third of what a professional job pays. More than 40 percent of Americans are toiling in these jobs, which, in a way, look something like the way my dad's Italian immigrant family had to work multiple jobs in the 1920s.

We owe it to ourselves to make a national effort to improve these jobs. We will never generate enough manufacturing jobs to fill in the gaps, and not everyone can work in the creative class. It's very hard to offshore the person who cuts your hair or takes care of an elderly parent. Those are the jobs we should make an effort to make better. No one in our national political dialogue is talking about this. People just say these are bad jobs. We can't give up on the work lives of 60 million Americans.

Cook: How could the country improve low-skill, low-wage jobs? And, are any companies already doing this?
Florida: Companies need to try to engage workers and ask them to think innovatively about their work processes. Four Seasons, for instance, pays its workers pretty well. They provide bonuses and incentives for workers to be really engaged. Whole Foods is another example. If you think about most grocery stores, they treat employees as the enemy. Whole Foods started to treat workers like human beings and provide them with a decent wage. When I look at lists of the best places to work, it's usually a lot of high-tech and consulting companies. But, there's no shortage of service companies such as Best Buy or the Container Store that also treat employees well.

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