> One might ask, though, why service jobs have to be _so_ lower-paid.
> Without the labor movement devising a way of raising the living
> standard of service workers dramatically, the labor movement is dead, and
even the
> current tight labor market (which won't last forever) can't be taken
> advantage of. (This is a gender issue as well, as you -- a femecon
> subscriber -- should know.)
I support a strong focus of the labor movement on service work, because a lot of it cannot easily be sent overseas. Unfortunately, the parts of the service sector that is not easily exported are personal services - hotel work, janitors, servants of all sorts - which inherently are lower-paid than average work. Inherently, because if they become higher priced, the work that they are supporting will itself move overseas to more congenial wage environments. Only the tourism industry in inherently immovable - and labor has put a heck of lot of effort into the industry for that very reason.
The highest paid sectors of the service sector depend strongly either on the government protection of intellectual property, so labor can be coverted into high-value legal monopolies, or in the financial sector where highly processed information can be converted into immediate financial advantage in the markets. This highlights the fact that service work qua work has a hard time gaining value purely in market exchanges-- it's dependent on other processes-- manufacturing, legal or financial -- to gain strong economic value.
Now, none of this says labor should not fight to raise service wages a good deal above where they are, but it is not pure nostalgia for the Markusen-influenced labor types to maintain that "manufacturing matters", if only because the commodity-producing nature of manufacturing gives workers a much stronger control of the means of value production in that area. They unfortunately have far less control of the conversion of labor value into legal value or in the financial sector.
However, this does suggest that the experiments with organizing in the intellectual property field - from the National Writers Union to WashTech to WorkingPartnerships in Silicon Valley - could develop both organizing models and legislative struggles for strengthening worker control of that IP value production. The Hollywood Guilds have a long history in this area and there are some useful lessons from their experience.
-- Nathan Newman