How to Get a Job. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, May 28, 2013.
Friedman on Jobs. Video. Meet the Press. NBC News, June 2, 2013.
Video transcript:
FRIEDMAN:
Well, that’s the tragedy for him. It’s a tragedy for all of us. Because we are
in the middle, I would argue, David, of a huge inflection where two points I
would make about this moment. One is that the – the thing that sustained the American
middle class for 50 years was something called high wage middle skill jobs. There
is no such thing anymore as a high wage middle skill job. There’s only going to
be a high wage high skill job. So every decent middle class job today is
actually being pulled in three directions at once. It’s being pulled higher. It
takes more skill to have. It’s being pulled out. More software, robots,
automation and people around the world can compete for it. And it’s being
pulled down. It’s being outsourced to history, to the past, being made obsolete
faster.
I had
an experience a couple of weeks ago. I had to deal with Hertz for a pretty
complicated change in reservation. For the first time I did the entire
transaction with Hertz without any human interaction. This was a complicated
interaction I had. It really made a point of that. So what’s been happening to
blue collar jobs, that kind of Pac-man of automation outsourcing and
digitization is now coming after white collar jobs as well. This requires a
huge strategic response from the country.
