New Jersey Nightly News; Employment in the Changing Workplace

<v Speaker>It seems the economic recovery has arrived. <v Speaker>There are fewer unemployed and more New Jerseyans than ever. <v Speaker>A record three million one hundred thirty five thousand, in fact, have jobs. <v Speaker>But the news is not all good, at least not for everybody. <v Speaker>Sandra King tonight starts a five part series, Employment in the Changing Workplace. <v Sandra King>Unemployment is down. Just one year ago the jobless rate was pushing <v Sandra King>10 percent. Now it's less than seven percent. <v Sandra King>Just one sign that things really are getting better. <v Sandra King>Combine that with a significant drop in interest rates and inflation. <v Sandra King>The decline in business failures and the dramatic rise in new ventures. <v Sandra King>It would seem to spell recovery, but how you read that word probably depends <v Sandra King>on where you stand and whether you work. <v Sandra King>This is Mahwah June 1980. <v Sandra King>And the last Ford to be built here has just rolled off the line. <v Sandra King>Mahwah three and a half years later. <v Sandra King>Minus five thousand jobs.

<v Peter Strauss>I'm going on lousy welfare. <v Peter Strauss>What the hell did I do wrong? <v Sandra King>The actor Peter Strauss, as what some experts call a superfluous worker, <v Sandra King>an exile in this case from a steel mill. <v Movie narrator>Her husband's out of work and the kids are scared. <v Movie character 1>How many times our mill closed down? <v Movie character 2>You don't think they're going to open? <v Movie narrator>It's the end of the American dream. <v Movie character 3>How come I can't help out a little bit? <v Movie character 1>Because I don't want your help. <v Sandra King>This is just a movie. <v Sandra King>This is real life. <v Joseph Cuti>So what am I gonna do? Here I am 50 some odd years old and I have to start <v Joseph Cuti>my life all over again. <v Joseph Cuti>I was too old to go to school. <v Joseph Cuti>You know, your mind is set on one thing. <v Joseph Cuti>And this is the way your life was going to be, was like <v Joseph Cuti>a lot of people have said, the rug pulled right out from underneath of us. <v Sandra King>One of 200000 U.S. <v Sandra King>auto workers who've lost their jobs in just the last three years. <v Sandra King>One of 9000 in New Jersey.

<v Sandra King>One of the men who used to work at Mahwah. <v Joseph Cuti>I said, man, this is great because I know when I'm with a company that, you know, <v Joseph Cuti>it's not going to just fold up after a couple of years. <v Joseph Cuti>I mean, Ford Motor Company happened to be number two automaker in the world. <v Joseph Cuti>And I thought I had it made. It was great. <v Bernie Jackson>The work was hard, but the pay was good. <v Bernie Jackson>And you found yourself going to work and it wasn't just going to work. <v Bernie Jackson>You'd get there early. You meet your friends, you had a life in that plant. <v Sandra King>Then came the Japanese and the oil crisis and the recession. <v Sandra King>The new technology and what economist Barry Bluestone calls deindustrialization. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>We lost major parts of our basic industries. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>And with that, we lost an enormous number of jobs. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>We now estimate that plant closings, establishment closings in general, <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>perhaps cost the economy as many as 30 million jobs during the 1970s. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>Other new jobs were founded. New companies started up. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>But the jobs we lost in many cases were jobs that will never be replaced.

<v Sandra King>On the supply side, economist Alan Reynolds calls it progress. <v Alan Reynolds>Change is unsettling. <v Alan Reynolds>Shouldn't be afraid of it because it's it's an improvement in job prospects, not <v Alan Reynolds>quantitatively, but qualitatively better jobs. <v Alan Reynolds>Each hour of our work will produce more value than it did before. <v Alan Reynolds>As a society. And that will reach down to our benefit greatly I would think. <v Alan Reynolds>You can- you're able to buy more leisure and the market pretty well takes care of that <v Alan Reynolds>on its own. <v Sandra King>But the market hasn't taken care of these men. <v Sandra King>They still meet at the bar where they used to end their workday. <v Sandra King>But now, like most of those who once worked at Mahwah, they are unemployed or <v Sandra King>underemployed. <v Tom Natchuras>Anyone that's laid off from an automobile plant is making ten, <v Tom Natchuras>ten or twelve dollars an hour unless they go to another automobile plant <v Tom Natchuras>or unless they go to another manufacturing plant <v Tom Natchuras>that has an equal wage <v Tom Natchuras>benefit is going to have to find a job that pays much

<v Tom Natchuras>less than that. <v Alan Reynolds>If there's a tremendous gap between what a worker has been earning and what he can earn <v Alan Reynolds>in another industry, leaving aside specialized skills, which is <v Alan Reynolds>a separate problem, but we are assuming he's an unskilled semi-skilled person. <v Alan Reynolds>Then there's a presumption that he was overpaid. <v Bernie Jackson>It's very easy to say auto workers are overpaid. <v Bernie Jackson>Auto workers work very hard for what they earn. <v Sandra King>Jackson spent 23 years at Ford. <v Sandra King>Now he is one who isn't working. <v Sandra King>He had a job as a labor consultant. <v Bernie Jackson>The work for that firm has fallen off, as it has in so many other industry, <v Bernie Jackson>other businesses. And last week I was put on layoff. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>The typical auto worker, for instance, the auto worker at Mahwah, New Jersey, <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>who loses his job two years later, is still earning <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>40 percent less than the day he lost his job. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>Six years after he's lost his job. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>He's still earning 16 percent less. <v Sandra King>Jake Ungar was one of the lucky ones.

<v Sandra King>Ford placed him in its Edison plant. <v Sandra King>But in January of 82, the night shift here was cut out. <v Sandra King>Another thirteen hundred jobs gone for the second time in two years. <v Sandra King>Jake Unger was laid off. <v Jakob Unger>Everything went down. <v Jakob Unger>And it's been downhill ever since. <v Glenn Watts>Workers had thought they had a good job and were or were really wanted to work, <v Glenn Watts>wanted to work hard, wanted to be good producers. <v Glenn Watts>So the shock of not being able to get a job and seeing your own job disappear, as a <v Glenn Watts>matter of fact. <v Sandra King>And they're not all from the auto trade. <v David Mason>We have had really the longest running and in many respects deepest, purely cyclical <v David Mason>recession in this country since the war since 1979. <v Sandra King>In the last 18 months alone, 34 New Jersey plants have closed <v Sandra King>or said they would close more than 11000 jobs gone. <v Sandra King>Singer and Elizabeth Owens-Illinois in Bridgeton, Western Electric and <v Sandra King>Carnie Curtis Wright in Woodridge, Cessna's ARC in Booton, <v Sandra King>General Electric in Newark and an old foundry called Ebanks, the last

<v Sandra King>of the plants in a Bergen County town called Mahwah. <v Sandra King>There are plans now to revive the old Ford plant to see it reopened as a kind <v Sandra King>of international display place for heavy equipment. <v Sandra King>But that won't restore those 5000 jobs from Mahwah with its dependance <v Sandra King>on heavy industry. The recovery is still down the road and unemployment <v Sandra King>is still a problem statewide. <v Sandra King>For more than a quarter of a million workers who still have no jobs. <v Sandra King>I'm Sandra King. <v Speaker>Thank you, Sandy. Tomorrow night, part two, the changing workplace and the college <v Speaker>graduate. <v Speaker>The economy seems to be recovering, there are people left behind. <v Speaker>Last night in her series on the changing workplace, Sandra King looked at the industrial <v Speaker>workers who've been forced out. Tonight, she focuses on a group that wants in. <v Sandra King>The American dream a college education. <v Sandra King>It's been called the ticket to success. <v Sandra King>But while the price of the ticket has gone up, the return may be less sure.

<v Sandra King>The class of eighty three was the largest class ever and with its record size <v Sandra King>came record headache's that followed graduation. <v Sandra King>A graduation and another class ready for the good life, the good job. <v Sandra King>But the supply of college graduates is up. <v Sandra King>The demand for their services, down. <v Sandra King>So these diplomas may not be the ticket that they once were. <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>Back in the 50s and 60s, companies were <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>quite willing to hire anyone. <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>And that just isn't true now and probably won't be true <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>for the foreseeable future. <v Alan Reynolds>What they found themselves in was. <v John Nease>As a buyer, as Mark. <v John Nease>Because of the excess talent. <v Sandra King>Erica Pap knows the problem firsthand. <v Erica Papp>I had a major that I personally really enjoyed, which was economics <v Erica Papp>and business, and everyone said, oh, you can get a job.

<v Erica Papp>So by the time I was a senior, I'd put my time in, I had studied, I had <v Erica Papp>good grades, and I was sure that was going to get a job. <v Sandra King>But we found Erica Rutgers, 83, behind the counter of Clifton Department <v Sandra King>store. And that was just for Christmas. <v Sandra King>She can't understand why her Phi Beta Kappa doesn't help. <v Sandra King>Neither can Gene Domowicz we found him on a Union Township demolition <v Sandra King>site. His degree is in business. <v Sandra King>He wants a job in finance. <v Gene Domowics>I sent out resumes, I- I look for leads through papers and companies, <v Gene Domowics>literature and research and write them letters and so on. <v Gene Domowics>And then I didn't I didn't find too many openings. <v Gene Domowics>I found a very tight job market. <v Gene Domowics>It's it's an employer's market. <v Gene Domowics>They have a lot to choose from. <v Sandra King>In fact, record numbers of new graduates are competing for a finite number of jobs. <v Sandra King>Northwestern University has tracked employment trends for 37 years. <v Sandra King>It's Endicott report called the job market for 83.

<v Sandra King>The worst for college graduates since the Depression. <v Sandra King>Campus recruitment has dropped, according to the study, at least 25 percent. <v Sandra King>But corporate hiring is down even more. <v Sandra King>By Northwesterners estimate, as much as 45 percent. <v Sandra King>Glen Gamble's been in the business of finding jobs for new graduates for more than 20 <v Sandra King>years. <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>This past year has been very difficult and <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>we have noticed students coming to the office <v Dr. Glenn Gamble>with, in some desperation. <v Gary Hamme>It's not like the recruiters come on campus in droves to look for <v Gary Hamme>liberal arts people. It's always been difficult for the liberal arts graduate. <v Gary Hamme>But given the fact that the economy is in a recession, it compounds <v Gary Hamme>their particular situation. <v Erica Papp>I went to an agency and they're like, well, can you type? <v Erica Papp>I'm like, well, I can type. <v Erica Papp>OK, we have this terrific job as receptionist in new work. <v Erica Papp>I'm like, I didn't go to school for four years to be a receptionist. <v Gene Domowics>At one company, I had four interviews and I thought I was, you know, four interviews is,

<v Gene Domowics>is pretty good. <v Gene Domowics>You don't normally get four interviews and not get anywhere. <v Gene Domowics>And I was hopeful about that job, but it didn't turn out. <v Gene Domowics>They went with someone with more experience. <v John Crystal>So the the catch 22 is this. <v John Crystal>If you will just go down the street and get hired down there and gain three years <v John Crystal>experience, then come back to me, maybe I'll hire you and you go down the street to the <v John Crystal>other company and they say the same thing. <v John Crystal>It's murder. <v Bing Crosby>I've seen some pretty disturbing figures lately. <v Bing Crosby>A lot of boys and girls are not going to get a college education. <v Bing Crosby>I'm through no fault of their own either. <v Bing Crosby>And that, I think, is bad for America. <v Sandra King>It wasn't only Bing Crosby who thought every kid in America needed a college education. <v Sandra King>Every parent in America probably thought so, too back in 1959. <v Alan Reynolds>I can remember when I was going to school that we were almost told that if you had a <v Alan Reynolds>bachelors degree in any subject whatsoever, that's all you needed. <v Alan Reynolds>You had a guaranteed annual income for life. <v Sandra King>But in the years since, the experts say we may have produced too many college graduates, <v Sandra King>that their degrees may not match the new technologies and that the children of the baby

<v Sandra King>boom may be crowding them out. <v commercial narrator>Babies of America you have a lot to learn. <v commercial narrator>And you have to learn it all if you are to help solve the problems of this precious, <v commercial narrator>crowded planet. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>One of the problems we're going to face and we're already beginning to face it, is <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>that for the longest period of time, at least since World War Two, we <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>built a society in which every year we expected to do a little bit better. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>We built a society of what some people have called rising expectations. <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>While I don't recommend recession as a lesson for <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>social behavior, certainly we have learned something out of this period that <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>we've been through and I think people's aspirations are becoming more realistic, <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>not less, but more realistic. <v Erica Papp>If you were intelligent, you graduate with a good major. <v Erica Papp>You were more or less assured a job. <v Erica Papp>I think right now to get a halfway decent job for anyone, you'd better have a college <v Erica Papp>education behind you.

<v Gene Domowics>Well, when I first graduated, I thought maybe by the end of the summer- if I don't have a <v Gene Domowics>job by the end of the summer, I'll be, I'll be worried and I push that up to the end of <v Gene Domowics>the year. Well, now I'm pushing it up to April or so. <v Gene Domowics>You know, I just have to be optimistic. <v Gene Domowics>I think it will come eventually. <v Sandra King>Economic recovery should mean better prospects for the Erica's and the Gene's, <v Sandra King>but maybe not right away. A study at Michigan State University predicts corporate <v Sandra King>hiring will rise in eighty four by five percent. <v Sandra King>But that's not even close to prerecession levels. <v Sandra King>I'm Sandra King. <v Speaker>Thank you, Sandy. And tomorrow night, Sandy will look at another group having trouble in <v Speaker>the workplace. The displaced homemaker. <v Speaker>And paying taxes might seem like a pain, but it means one thing. <v Speaker>You have a job. In part three of our series on the changing workplace. <v Speaker>Sandra King looks at people who thought they had a job for life. <v Sandra King>Where did you last work? What are your skills? <v Sandra King>Can't you operate a word processor? <v Sandra King>And what about your work record? <v Sandra King>All questions that strike fear in the hearts of the displaced homemakers, the <v Sandra King>women who after 20 years find they must return to the workplace.

<v Sandra King>The family shopping, traditional women's work unpaid. <v Sandra King>But American tradition and American women have been having it tough lately. <v Sandra King>Divorce is epidemic. <v Sandra King>Families spreading out all over the country. <v Sandra King>Widowhood is lonelier and financially scarier than ever. <v Sandra King>So more and more women today look to the paid women's work, their <v Sandra King>side of the checkout counter. <v Sandra King>Not in an age when technology is supposed to make our lives <v Sandra King>easier. Leisure time has become a burden for people like Susan Carstens of <v Sandra King>Parlin, divorced. <v Sandra King>For people like Helene Chaleff of Cranbury, a widow. <v Sandra King>After a long search, Carstens found work in an East Brunswick toy store. <v Sandra King>It's not full time and it's not enough money, but it is a job. <v Susan Carstens>It's the most difficult thing I've ever done is to do this, to <v Susan Carstens>leave the house as they called the housework and

<v Susan Carstens>try to find a job that would bring me sufficient amount <v Susan Carstens>of money. <v Susan Carstens>It's really struggling. <v Sandra King>Helene Chaleff found a publishing job just nine weeks after her husband died two years <v Sandra King>ago, but her employer began cutting staff. <v Sandra King>She was last hired, first fired. <v Sandra King>She's been looking for other work since February. <v Helene Chaleff>It makes me very angry filling out these two, three, four page applications <v Helene Chaleff>with silly questions. What? <v Helene Chaleff>What was your best subject in school or what would you, what did you take up? <v Helene Chaleff>What did you excel in? Come on. <v Helene Chaleff>Just take me for what I am. I'm a woman in her 50s and I must work and give me <v Helene Chaleff>the chance. I can prove to you I'm serious. <v Helene Chaleff>I'm not going to take off because I came home late last night from a date. <v Dr. Donald Scarry>A Homemaker returning to the labor force has to learn a current and up to date skill <v Dr. Donald Scarry>which might have been acquired on the job had they stayed working for those 20 years. <v Dr. Donald Scarry>Plus, they have to demonstrate their employability.

<v Susan Carstens>That's what I would do anything, I would go for training. <v Susan Carstens>I would learn another language, I would I would work my heart out if I <v Susan Carstens>got the opportunity to a good job. <v Constance Woodruff>When we talk about upgrading skills, she doesn't have any to upgrade. <v Constance Woodruff>Most of those women are in that new category called feminization <v Constance Woodruff>of poverty. <v Helene Chaleff>I must have an income. I have no income. <v Helene Chaleff>I have my sole support, but I'm very frightened. <v Helene Chaleff>I don't know what's going to happen to me. <v Helene Chaleff>As I said, I don't want to lose this house and everything, <v Helene Chaleff>that my husband and I worked so hard to get. <v Dr. Barbara Harris>Now, the problem for such a woman is she's probably very ill equipped to really earn an <v Dr. Barbara Harris>adequate living, when she goes out to look for a job. <v Sandra King>Employment opportunities for the Susan Carstens and Helene Chaleffs have never <v Sandra King>been plentiful. But there is some evidence that the situation may be getting worse, <v Sandra King>that the low paying entry level job is getting harder to find.

<v Sol Chaikin>You take the textile, apparel and clothing industry. <v Sol Chaikin>It used to employ two and a half million workers. <v Sol Chaikin>It now employs a million 850000. It costs 16 cents <v Sol Chaikin>an hour to keep a worker employed in red China. <v Sol Chaikin>It cost the dollar eight cents an hour to keep a worker employed in Hong Kong. <v Sol Chaikin>How do you compete? <v Sandra King>And how do you compete with machines, machines that have reduced the number of phone <v Sandra King>operators by one third since just 1970, machines that now <v Sandra King>do the work of bank tellers, stenographers, librarians, cashiers, <v Sandra King>bookkeepers. All this at a time when the number of women who need to draw salaries <v Sandra King>is dramatically on the rise. <v Sandra King>There are six hundred fifty thousand displaced homemakers in New Jersey today. <v Constance Woodruff>Unfortunately, maybe 20 years ago, that kind of woman would have been able <v Constance Woodruff>to find another husband. <v Constance Woodruff>But people, including men, are not getting married so easily these days. <v Helene Chaleff>My husband always made me feel so-. He said I was so witty and I was so smart.

<v Helene Chaleff>And I decorated the house some nights and I cook so good. <v Helene Chaleff>He made me feel like I was on <v Helene Chaleff>such a pedestal with him. <v Helene Chaleff>I'm frightened to be alone and I'm frightened with no money. <v Dr. Barbara Harris>I think if a society has any sense of itself as humane <v Dr. Barbara Harris>and decent, it certainly can't take the position that if women are suddenly <v Dr. Barbara Harris>faced with broken homes at the age of 45 or 50 or 55, that the society <v Dr. Barbara Harris>can just say, oh, well, they're over the hill. <v Susan Carstens>At times I get a like a hopeless feeling. <v Susan Carstens>But somehow I just can't give up. I can't. <v Sandra King>The plight of the displaced homemaker as a relatively recent phenomenon, and programs <v Sandra King>to help these women adjust to their new status and the new workplace are being <v Sandra King>developed around the state by women's groups and by the State Commission on Women. <v Sandra King>Still, the prospects aren't great.

<v Sandra King>There is evidence to prove that when a middle aged woman finds herself on her own, <v Sandra King>even if she does find a job, she will never again live as well as she did <v Sandra King>when her husband was in the picture. <v Sandra King>I'm Sandra King. <v Speaker>Thank you, Sandy. Tomorrow night, in part four of our series, we'll look at another group <v Speaker>for whom there are few opportunities in the new workplace, new Jersey's black teenagers. <v Speaker>Tonight in the fourth part of our special report on the changing workplace. <v Speaker>We look at a special segment of those unemployed, the hard core unemployed. <v Speaker>Sandra King is here with her story. <v Speaker>Sandy? <v Sandra King>Mark, they are called hard core because their job problems are not fleeting <v Sandra King>or easily fixed or even much affected by the upturn in the economy. <v Fred Murphy>Majority of us are not working, you know, we just out here statistic. <v Sandra King>The statistics are grim, despite the overall drop in unemployment, the <v Sandra King>rate for young people remains high, close to 20 percent. <v Sandra King>And for young black men in a place like Newark, the numbers are staggering.

<v Sandra King>At least one of every two with no job and few prospects. <v Don Young>Right around the projects out of work. <v Don Young>I would say about 85 percent, any other percentage would be underemployed. <v Fred Murphy>When I go to interview, I dress very neatly. <v Fred Murphy>I carry myself in a respectful manner. <v Fred Murphy>And I do. I think I do everything that's needed to get a job. <v Fred Murphy>I don't know why I don't get it. <v Sandra King>Fred Murphy has been asking why since his high school graduation more than three years <v Sandra King>ago, there he'd been a success. <v Sandra King>Football, class president, good grades, hopes of getting out of the poverty <v Sandra King>pocket called Hayes Homes. <v Sandra King>But the only work he's found is back here in the projects, and that is only part time. <v Fred Murphy>That they take out one hundred thirty eight dollars every two weeks. <v Fred Murphy>Give my mother some money. <v Fred Murphy>She's my backbone, and hope I have enough money to buy me a pair pants and <v Fred Murphy>wait till the next payday.

<v Fred Murphy>That's it. <v Julian Bond>The Unemployment among this group is frighteningly high. <v Julian Bond>There are people who simply don't want to hire a black person, particularly a black <v Julian Bond>youth. It happens because this group of people tend to be semi <v Julian Bond>or unskilled. They're not able to perform some of the tasks that industry is demanding <v Julian Bond>them to perform. And some of them come to the market with very, very poor educational <v Julian Bond>skills. <v Dr. Donald Scarry>Most of the jobs that become available in our urban areas are not jobs <v Dr. Donald Scarry>with long run future growth linkages. <v Dr. Donald Scarry>Some of them tend to be dead end jobs so that the <v Dr. Donald Scarry>urban youth have to be even more flexible. <v Alan Reynolds>It isn't the case that 40 percent of the 60 or whatever the number <v Alan Reynolds>is, are unemployed for their entire teenage period. <v Alan Reynolds>They have job experiences. They don't have a stable job experiences, and in some cases <v Alan Reynolds>they don't want them. In many cases, it's it's a fairly voluntary lifestyle. <v Sandra King>But Anthony Brown insists there's nothing voluntary about his lifestyle. <v Sandra King>He, too, lives in the Hayes Homes project, and he, too, still has no full

<v Sandra King>time job. More than four years after his graduation. <v Anthony Brown>That makes me think that I'm a bad individual. <v Anthony Brown>I did something bad, but I know I haven't. <v Anthony Brown>I look at myself in the mirror and I say, hey, it's time to get something together. <v Anthony Brown>I want a little money in my pocket for I can spend on certain things, buy me some nice <v Anthony Brown>clothes. Go out when I want to. <v Anthony Brown>Give things to people who give to me. <v Sandra King>Anthony's mother does work, but only five hours a day at less than five <v Sandra King>dollars an hour. It's all that she can find to support her family <v Sandra King>while she worries about her son. <v Dolores Brown>I don't know whether he's just given up or what, because at one point he <v Dolores Brown>really was trying. He'd be up in the morning. <v Dolores Brown>Sometimes he'd pack a little sandwich and put in his pocket and go and <v Dolores Brown>he's not lazy. That's what I, you know, he's not lazy. <v Dolores Brown>If he had a job, he would work at it. <v Anthony Brown>Eventually, something good is gonna come along, and when it does I'll be happy to stay

<v Anthony Brown>with it for the rest of my life. <v Sandra King>You're still looking? <v Anthony Brown>Oh, yes. <v Sandra King>Anthony did pass through a job training course. <v Sandra King>They taught him painting, what they didn't supply was job placement and he passed <v Sandra King>the firemen's exam. But in Newark, they are not hiring firefighters. <v Sandra King>They're laying them off. <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>You find young people, 40, 50 percent of unemployed, can't get <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>jobs, want to work. <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>You can't tell that if you live in some parts of New Jersey that there are any problems. <v Sandra King>But in parts like Camden, youth unemployment is a brutal fact of life. <v Sandra King>It comes with the territory, the slums, the boarded up buildings are the ones <v Sandra King>active plants long since abandoned. <v Melvin Primus>They're not finding those entry level positions. <v Melvin Primus>Those labor positions and basically the blue collar positions that once <v Melvin Primus>was Camden's fame. <v Melvin Primus>This has always been a blue collar town with a number of production jobs. <v Melvin Primus>They just don't exist anymore. <v Sandra King>And not just in Camden. <v Sandra King>The state's worst unemployment is in Cumberland County.

<v Sandra King>Jobs there are hard to find. <v Sandra King>But business is always booming on the Vineland unemployment line. <v Sandra King>The jobless problem there is not down. <v Sandra King>It comes in all colors. <v Sandra King>And just like in Newark, it is highest among kids. <v Sandra King>But the numbers for young whites, even in Vineland, don't come close to those for young <v Sandra King>blacks in Camden or Newark. <v Sandra King>So at Hayes Homes, there's a new kind of no frills program in the works. <v Sandra King>The plan is to match unemployed youngsters like Michael and Fred with a menial jobs <v Sandra King>that no one else wants. A bad job, say counselors, beats no job at all. <v Speaker>And Sandy, where the jobs will be both good and bad, is the focus for tomorrow night <v Speaker>when Sandy wraps up her series on the changing workplace. <v Speaker>For the last four nights we've examined the people affected by changes going on in the <v Speaker>workplace. Tonight, in the final part of her special report, Sandra King <v Speaker>looks at the workplace of the future. <v Sandra King>All week we've been looking at people who are unemployed or underemployed, people

<v Sandra King>who are finding that they just don't fit into the workplace, that the American dream <v Sandra King>seems beyond their reach. But this is not just a series of hard luck stories. <v Sandra King>The autoworker, unemployed, college graduate, underemployed, <v Sandra King>the displaced homemaker did some basic contrast <v Sandra King>in race and sex and education and age. <v Sandra King>But they have in common a basic problem how to fit in, how not <v Sandra King>to be left out, how to adjust to what is increasingly a new kind <v Sandra King>of workplace. <v Malcolm Forbes>We are in a new age. It's been given a lot of names and the right one <v Malcolm Forbes>isn't here yet. But high tech probably sums up what we're talking about. <v Malcolm Forbes>We have shifted in a revolution almost as total as the industrial. <v Sandra King>From a capitalist Malcolm Forbes to the economist Barry Bluestone. <v Sandra King>There is an acknowledgment that the change is profound. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>Took four generations to move from an agricultural society to a full fledged advanced

<v Dr. Barry Bluestone>manufacturing economy. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>What we're seeing now is a fundamental transformation, just as great as the transition <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>from agriculture to manufacturing. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>But it's taking place within a single generation. <v Robert Fredrick>We've had a dynamic economy ever since the invention of the steam engine <v Robert Fredrick>and things do move along. I think the thing is noteworthy is our technology <v Robert Fredrick>base seems to be accelerating more rapidly. <v announcer>Today we dedicate five of the old thermal vacuum satellite test chamber <v announcer>in the world. <v Gov. Thomas Kean>And the opening of this facility affirms New Jersey's role in the space age. <v Gov. Thomas Kean>We have to make sure in New Jersey is two things. <v Gov. Thomas Kean>First of all, that we get not only our share, but I think more than our share of the new <v Gov. Thomas Kean>industry. And that's what our programs are designed to do to attract these people, to <v Gov. Thomas Kean>enable them to prosper here and to expand. <v Sara Kuhn>I see all kinds of states, every state across this nation pinning <v Sara Kuhn>their hopes for economic revitalization and growth on high tech. <v Sara Kuhn>High tech is just not that large part of the economy.

<v Dr. Barry Bluestone>The total number of jobs in high technology, the manufacturing end, is a trivial number <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>of jobs at best, perhaps by nineteen ninety. <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>We're talking about five percent of total employment in high technology, just ain't <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>enough jobs there. <v Sandra King>Then where will the jobs be? <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>But there's a shift to service. There's no question about that. <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>We start off with the agricultural society and now we're in the information <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>era. Now it just doesn't suggest that everybody's gonna be sitting in an office <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>someplace, operating a computer terminals. <v Sandra King>Or that they'll be doing the jobs they once did. <v Julian Bond>There are some people, most of the men in their late 40s and early 50s <v Julian Bond>who are never again, never again going to do the kind <v Julian Bond>of work they were doing two, three, four years ago. <v Sandra King>In the auto industry, two hundred thousand jobs have been lost nationally since <v Sandra King>1981, and the UAW warned. <v Sandra King>It's another 40000 by 1990. <v narrator>The puma never gets bored with endless repetition, working shift <v narrator>after shift around the clock.

<v Sandra King>There are now about six thousand robots in the workplace, and that number is expected to <v Sandra King>multiply 16 times by the end of the decade. <v Glenn Watts>I'm apprehensive because the increase in productivity is so <v Glenn Watts>very great when you use high technology that you can have a <v Glenn Watts>tremendous growth in the industry without the need for additional jobs. <v Alan Reynolds>We just wanted to maximize employment. <v Alan Reynolds>We could, for example, destroy the machines. <v Alan Reynolds>Instead of using typewriters, we could use pencils. <v Alan Reynolds>The function of society is not to maximize employment. <v Alan Reynolds>It's to minimize employment in the sense of getting the most you can with the least <v Alan Reynolds>amount of work. <v Sol Chaikin>Well, that scares the devil out of me because that seems <v Sol Chaikin>to be an acceptance of unemployment. <v Sol Chaikin>You know, as a useful thing in the American society. <v Malcolm Forbes>Technological progress has never in this country cost the country <v Malcolm Forbes>jobs. The lack of it would cost us jobs, thanks to high tech <v Malcolm Forbes>jobs are coming back.

<v Dr. Barry Bluestone>That's the good news. The bad news is many of those <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>new jobs we're creating are not going to be the kind of jobs on which a family <v Dr. Barry Bluestone>can, can and have a decent standard of living. <v Sandra King>Service jobs are on the rise. <v Sandra King>One study predicts that by 1990, they'll account for 72 percent of the workforce. <v Sandra King>But that same study claims that the greatest growth will be in areas like retail sales <v Sandra King>and fast food. Areas with high turnover and low pay. <v Sandra King>And even with unemployment at a three year low, there are millions with no job at <v Sandra King>all. Two hundred twenty seven thousand of them in New Jersey. <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>What I see is a lot of people <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>ultimately running the risk of being left out of the workforce and any kind of a serious <v Sen. Frank Lautenberg>way. <v Joseph Cuti>I'm managing to stay above water. <v Joseph Cuti>Nothing elaborate. <v Erica Papp>You know, if I have to hold out. I'll hold out till I get the job that I want. <v Fred Murphy>I'm not. I'm not that discouraged to the point I'm gonna to give up. <v Fred Murphy>No, I can't see myself giving up at all.

<v Susan Carstens>The longer I'm having no luck, the harder it is to go back and look. <v Susan Carstens>The, the less confident I am. <v Sandra King>Some experts say better training is an answer. <v Sandra King>Others call for government programs or restraints on foreign imports or controls <v Sandra King>on foreign investment or shortened workweek or more part time work. <v Sandra King>The prescriptions do differ. But there is agreement on the problem that the workplace has <v Sandra King>changed, that the change and that with it comes a real difference <v Sandra King>in the number and the nature of American jobs. <v Sandra King>I'm Sandra King. <v Speaker>Thank you, Sandy.