White Collar Work Is Almost Dead
What does that mean for the rest of us?
White collar work was always looked at as a step up and a way out for blue collar Americans. I remember when I worked in a warehouse, I fantasized about sitting at a desk in an air conditioned office, doing half the work while making three times as much money. It was something to aim for. The idea of transitioning from physical labor to the cushy corporate office life is one of the reasons why just under 43 million Americans have student loan debt.
I was lucky enough to get an office job without a degree and without the accompanying student loan debt. But my luck, and the luck of every single person who spends their days doing excel spreadsheets and custom Salesforce filters may be coming to an end.
In the late 1970’s, Milton Friedman redefined the philosophy of the American corporation. This new treatise on American business stated that the sole social responsibility of business was to increase its profits. That was it. Beyond philosophical musings, this ideology manifested in many different ways. The first was the practice of already profitable companies strategically using mass layoffs as a way to maximize profit potential.
There were also legislative initiatives that completely changed America’s relationship with world trade. In 1981, Ronald Reagan normalized trading relations with China. This outsourced millions of blue collar jobs to China, and allowed not only America, but all of its allies to freely trade with them. This had massive consequences, that we still haven’t felt the full repercussions of yet.
Thirteen years later, under the Clinton Administration, the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA went into effect. This trade policy further burdened blue collar manufacturing job workers in America who were already losing jobs to cheap Chinese labor by also opening the labor market to cheap Mexican and Canadian labor.
While American workers were being devalued by this, white collar workers with college degrees were for the most part unscathed. For every rust belt worker in the Midwest who had lost their job, it seemed white collar workers in coastal cities were thriving. Even during times of economic uncertainty, college-educated white collar workers faired significantly better than their high school educated, blue collar counterparts.
However, in recent years, with the introduction of artificial intelligence, white collar work has never looked so insecure.
What does that mean for the cities? Will New York, LA, SF and other cities whose entire economy are built upon the white collar workforce being forced into office be hollowed out like the industrial cities of the heartland?
We saw what the Pandemic did to places like San Francisco, and how the city responded with the embrace of right wing policies to lure back what little money is left.
Will this be the standard for every city facing economic restructuring while bearing the burden of economic uncertainty? Will AI bring in a renaissance of efficiency or open the door for new type of fascism?
I’m scared that it will. Economic uncertainty and perceived victimhood are the foundations of every fascism, and that foundation seems stronger than ever…
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