Transcript
Shift Change
1892 · 1979 · 1999
Homestead, Pennsylvania · the Monongahela River
In July 1892, steelworkers fought armed Pinkerton guards on this riverbank to save their union. They lost. The mill ran without a union for forty-five years.
By 1979 the union was back, and the Homestead Works ran around the clock. A job here could pay for a house, a car and a pension.
Then the orders slowed down. In July 1986, the mill closed. By 1999, a shopping center stood where it had been.
The new stores needed people. Fewer people, and not at the old pay.
Where did the good jobs go? And who came to do the new ones?
Machine of the Year
1981–2007
While the mills slowed down, a new machine sped up.
On August 12, 1981, IBM started selling a personal computer. The basic model cost $1,565, and that didn't include a disk drive.
On January 3, 1983, Time magazine picked its Man of the Year. It picked a machine.
In Homestead, the magazine lay on kitchen tables next to the want ads. By 1983, much of the mill stood idle.
The first handheld cell phone went on sale in 1984. It cost $3,995, talked for about half an hour, and people bought it anyway.
In 1991, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee worked at a physics lab near Geneva. He opened his World Wide Web to the public on August 6.
In 1993, a student and a staff programmer at the University of Illinois released Mosaic. It was free, and it put pictures on the page.
Amazon opened on July 16, 1995, as an online bookstore. Its founder built the first desks out of doors.
Americans started shopping, banking, arguing and falling in love online. In June 2007, the phone went into their pockets.
In 1984, one home in twelve had a computer. By 2010, three in four did, and seven in ten had internet at home.
The World on the Line
1987–2001
The same wires that brought the web home carried work away from it.
For years, computers didn't seem to make offices more productive. In 1987, Robert Solow joked. You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
After 1995, the computer age showed up. Output per hour grew almost twice as fast as before.
Cables under the oceans let an American company hire far away. Engineers in India. A call center in the Philippines. A factory in China.
Fixing the Y2K bug sent piles of American programming work to Indian firms.
Trade deals opened the doors: NAFTA in 1994, with Canada and Mexico. The World Trade Organization started in 1995. China joined in 2001.
The economy grew for ten straight years, a record at the time. By April 2000, unemployment was 3.8 percent.
Investors poured money into almost any company with dot-com in its name. Pets.com went public in February 2000. That November, it announced it was closing.
Even the boom had losers. In San Francisco, a reporter wrote: Willing to pay whatever price landlords name, the dot-coms have driven up rents while displacing longtime tenants.
In 2000, President Clinton warned about Americans being left offline. That means we must close the digital divide between those who've got the tools and those who don't.
Was it good for Americans? Panos Mourdoukoutas, in Forbes, pointed to: more product choices at ever-lower prices. Grace Lee Boggs had watched Detroit's factories close for decades. The old jobs weren't coming back: because of the ability of corporations to fly all over the place and begin setting up— all this outsourcing.
The Last Shift
1979–2010
Back to the plate mill in Homestead. Why did a mill that had run since 1881 close?
Part of the answer was the machines. In 1980 a ton of American steel took about ten hours of work. By 2000, about four.
New minimills melted scrap in electric furnaces, with far fewer workers. The biggest, Nucor, started in South Carolina in 1969. None of its mills had a union.
Newer mills in Japan and South Korea often sold steel for less than mills like Homestead.
Switch between two years on the same ground. On July 25, 1986, the last two dozen men drove out the gate on Amity Street.
Across the country, factory jobs fell by eight million between 1979 and 2010. Service jobs grew by nearly 48 million. The new work was in stores, hospitals and offices.
In 2008, Pittsburgh's tallest building, built for U.S. Steel, got new letters on its roof. They spelled the name of a hospital system, the region's biggest employer.
In private companies, union membership fell by more than half.
NAFTA made it cheaper to build car parts in Mexico. Imports from China after 2001 cost about a million factory jobs. Economists still argue over trade and machines.
In January 1983, more than one worker in six around Pittsburgh was out of work. Down the Ohio, in Beaver County, more than one in four.
The Great Divergence
1973–2018
In 2006, the federal minimum wage was $5.15 an hour. It had been $5.15 since 1997.
For a generation after World War II, pay rose with productivity. Then the lines split. Since 1979, output per hour has grown almost three times as fast as typical pay.
Adjusted for prices, most workers earned a little less an hour in 2010 than in 1973.
Meanwhile, the richest one percent's share of the nation's income more than doubled. By 2007 it was right back where it had been in 1928.
Some people called it a second Gilded Age.
Economists still argue about why. Most name technology that paid more for a degree, competition from abroad, weaker unions, and tax and wage policy.
Families kept up by working more hours, adding a second paycheck, and borrowing.
It wasn't all loss. In the late 1990s boom, pay rose at every level. TVs, clothes and computers kept getting cheaper.
Still, from 1980 to 2018, the top fifth's share of income grew, and every other fifth's shrank.
South and West
1980–2010
The jobs that did grow kept heading one direction on the map.
In 1980, about half of Americans lived in the South and the West. By 2010, six in ten did.
The reasons went back to the years after World War II. Cheap land, low taxes, weak unions, military bases, and air conditioning.
Japanese and German carmakers built their American plants in Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina and Alabama. Their workers mostly stayed out of unions.
In 1971 a trade newspaper popularized a name for the orchards south of San Francisco. Silicon Valley.
Atlanta became a capital of Black business and music. So So Def Records started there in 1993. In the late 1990s, the South gained about 350,000 Black Americans from other regions, reversing the Great Migration.
Gilbert, Arizona, once called itself the hay shipping capital of the world. In 1980, about 5,700 people lived there. By 2010, about 208,000. Some of its water came by canal from the Colorado River, across the desert.
Every census moved seats in Congress south and west. Between the 1980 and 2020 elections, Texas and Florida each gained twelve electoral votes. New York lost twelve.
Every president elected from 1964 through 2004 came from Texas, California, Georgia or Arkansas. And the once-Democratic South became the base of the Republican Party.
The Sun Belt changed the country. The people moving there changed the Sun Belt.
New Neighbors
1965–2012
Someone had to do the new work.
The 1965 law ended quotas that favored Europe, and put families first. Fifty years later, most new immigrants came from Asia and Latin America.
By 2010, one American in eight had been born abroad. That was the highest share since the 1920s.
In 1986 Congress gave legal status to about 2.7 million people, and fined employers who hired without papers. a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows Forged papers were cheap. The hiring went on.
In the 1990s, immigrants moved to towns far from the border. Most of those towns had never seen many immigrants.
In November 1990, IBP opened a beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska. It stood where a combine factory had closed.
In the mid-1990s, the Border Patrol walled off the busiest crossings, near San Diego and El Paso. So people crossed the Arizona desert instead. Deaths rose from 241 in 1999 to 472 in 2005. Men, women, and children, on foot.
In 1994, California voters barred undocumented immigrants from public schools and clinics. Supporters said the state couldn't afford them. Courts blocked the law. In 1996, Congress made deportation faster and easier. Families were split.
By 2007, about twelve million people lived here without legal status. Congress failed to pass a reform. In 2012 a policy shielded people brought here as children.
Refugees came from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Engineers came from India, China, and Taiwan. By 2010, more new immigrants came from Asia than from Latin America. More than half of Silicon Valley's new tech companies had an immigrant founder.
In 1987, Time's cover read, Those Asian-American Whiz Kids. The model minority label hid families, many of them refugees, who were struggling.
Immigrants changed what Americans ate, watched, and read. In 1991, Americans spent more on salsa than on ketchup. My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America.
¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? was the first bilingual sitcom, made in Miami from 1977 to 1980. Federal education money paid for it, and stations reran it for years. In one episode, the family argues about becoming citizens. The father thinks it would betray Cuba. It shows what its makers thought Cuban families in Miami would recognize. It can't show you a Nebraska meatpacking town in 2000.
Two Forums
1980 · 2016
In April 1980, two Republican candidates were asked about Texas schools. They answered by talking about workers from Mexico. These are good people, strong people. make it possible for them to come here legally with work permit And when they want to go back, they can go back.
In August 2016, at a rally in Phoenix, a crowd chanted, Build that wall!
What changed? The 1986 bargain didn't stop the hiring. The numbers grew. After 2001, the border became a security question. Workers whose pay had stalled blamed the newcomers. Economists still disagree about how much immigration held wages down.
Here is where the work went. Into machines and down digital lines. Out of the mills and the union halls. South and west. And to new neighbors who took jobs at both ends of the new economy.
Reader: a young wife, Lexington, early 1990s We like this town and as long as he can physically hold out, we plan to be here.