🚀 go-pugleaf

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It seems to me that the sort of fear that we are talking about here is
based on the combination of two factors:  (1) a threatened change in
the status quo, and (2) a reasonable expectation that the change in
the status quo will be harmful to one's self.  In the cases people
have been discussing, the threatened change is losing one's job.  But
this leads to what I think is a critical question:  Why is losing
one's job considered so harmful?  Of course, there are the usual costs
and bothers of finding another job.  But an economist would expect
that one could always find another job that pays as much as the
present one -- otherwise your present employer would cut your pay!

I think that the real truth of the situation is that many people,
*especially* in low-skill manufacturing industries, are currently in
jobs that they could not replace.

In the case of managers, this is because many companies promote from
within; if you lose a job as a department manager, you can't simply
get another job as a department manager somewhere else, you have to
start at the bottom again.

In the case of workers, it is more because of the dramatic
restructuring of manufacturing work.  But if you look at much of the
"restructuring", it is really a movement of work to geographic areas
or situations where wages are lower.  That is, many manufacturing
workers are being paid more than their open-market wage because their
wages are not moving down with the economic situation, either due to
unionization or due to the social difficulty of cutting someone's pay.

Dale

Dale Worley             Dept. of Math., MIT             drw@math.mit.edu
--
PC is both antiwar and pro-veteran, in which casee the Gulf War was
ideal, producing more veterans (well, American veterans, anyway) per
war-hour than any other war.    -- Ian Colrain