Transportation Jobs Are Good Jobs
I’ll be speaking soon on a panel about transportation investments that’s part of an EPI/Demos conference on investing in a better economy. As part of EPI’s burgeoning interest in transportation policy, they have this chart:
This is a fairly interesting finding. Relative to the economy as a whole, jobs created through transportation investments are disproportionately likely to not require a college degree. But they’re disproportionately un-likely to fall into the “low-wage” bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. So when dollars are shifted out of current consumption and into transportation investments, this has the effect of pulling people in low-wage jobs into better jobs for which many of them are perfectly well-qualified. And in the end, that should be good for the earnings potential of even those left behind in the low-wage sector.
Of course that doesn’t say anything about what kind of transportation you spend it on. Clearly, though, this works much better as economic policy if you spend it on useful transportation—fixing roads in existing core areas, building out rail transit systems, intercity high-speed rail in a few key corridors, etc.—that could help reduce the economic drag of chronic congestion.
11 Responses to “Transportation Jobs Are Good Jobs”
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April 7th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Yes! Clearly these inefficiencies must be eliminated! If we make unions illegal, transportation-investment jobs will pay lower wages, which will keep labor costs low and…allow Americans to keep more of their money.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Dominique Strauss-Kahn machte kein Geheimnis aus seiner Genugtuung über das Ergebnis des Weltfinanzgipfels in London: „Der IWF ist wieder da“, rief der geschäftsführende Direktor des Internationalen Währungsfonds (IWF) den Journalisten in der britischen Hauptstadt zu. Und er fügte hinzu: „Heute sehen Sie den Beweis dafür.“ Kurz zuvor hatten die Staats- und Regierungschefs der 20 führenden Industrie- und Schwellenländer (G 20) beschlossen, die Ressourcen, die dem IWF zur Krisenbewältigung zur Verfügung stehen, mittelfristig zu verdreifachen.
Über 750 Milliarden Dollar wird Strauss-Kahn bald verfügen können, um sie jenen Ländern aus dem Kreis der 185 Mitglieder der Institution zu leihen, die in den Sog einer Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise geraten und Zahlungsengpässe überwinden müssen.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:52 am
so the goal is to now pay the least qualified members of society the most?
April 7th, 2009 at 11:17 am
so the goal is to now pay the least qualified members of society the most?
I don’t know. How are you on the repair of the substantial electric motors used on transit cars? or the diesel-electric combinations used by railroads? All up on the repair and maintainence protocols of, say, the air brakes? the electrical systems (all electric now, no steam lines on the new stuff)? the signaling systems? You don’t need engineering degrees for this, but you need to know what you’re doing. However, you may be right: these may indeed be the “least qualified members of society”, i guess that is your call. And these are the maintainence/repair operations. The actual operators (engineers, motormen, trainmen, etc) would, one assumes, be equally “least-qualified”. Heck, I bet anyone off the street could operate a locomotive at – say – 50 mph. Wouldn’t you say?
April 7th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Pierre – here, here!
I think that points to something important: college degrees are not the only way of gaining education and training, and Americans need to stop over-valorizing college education and the college educated as inherently superior (especially as this strongly tends to overlap with the college-educated thinking themselves superior).
Those non-college educated railroad workers are generally skilled workers, who go through quite demanding apprenticeship programs (most apprenticeships last for 7 years, which is far more rigorous than the typical bachelor’s degree. For my money, they are some of the best qualified members of society in their field – just as skilled steelworkers are the best to work with steel, or construction workers to build houses.
April 7th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
so the goal is to now pay the least qualified members of society the most?
Hold on now! No one’s suggesting that anyone should start paying you for your comments here.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
It’s all warm and fuzzy to think that, but it’s belied by the fact that if it weren’t for the transit & trade unions, the number of workers would easily drive the wages through the floor. Yes….a construction worker has a lot of skill. But it’s skill that a high-school educated Mexican immigrant can do just as well for pennies on the dollar.
Unions, for all the socialist positivism they are associated with, are just another part of the marketplace. They increase the price of their product by limiting its supply.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Sounds like a win/win/win to me. Provide decent paying jobs for members of society without a college degree, build bullet trains so I don’t have to fly, and reduce consumption as percentage of our economy.
I don’t think a Nation can consume itself to greatness. I do think it can build itself to greatness.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The thing about the transportation – and in a larger sense, public sector-type – unions is that they aren’t the parts of the labor force that need unionization the most.
Unlike manufacturing, transportation cannot be provided by a factory in Fujian. Policing cannot be performed by a Polish or Hungarian employee base, like a lot of other services. And teaching, despite what people like Matt want to believe about the internet, cannot be done by a call center in Bombay.
The fact that the public sector unions are amazing at protecting their perks – and let’s not even get into the guilds that are the ABA and AMA, who work tirelessly to oppose tort and tax reform and universal health care respectively – is totally irrelevant and even counterproductive to the abilities of private sector unions to protect their members. Which, thanks to four successive administrations pimping outsourcing and unionbusting, is now pathetic.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
This also makes a sort of cosmic sense in terms of where American transit development has been and is going. In the 20th C. auto-production fueled the union movement and provided good-paying jobs to those without a lot of education (at the carmakers, steelmakers, etc.), because we chose to be a country with individual ownership of transportation infrastructure. Now it’s clear that we need to be a country where transportation infrastructure is more often shared rather individually owned, and that sector will be a way for people without a lot of education to have good-paying, steady work.
It makes sense because one way or another, people need to get around, but the provision of that getting around – whether building a car or driving a bus – is pretty boring and taxing. So people providing that service should be paid well! Even if it doesn’t require a college education to do it.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:12 am
Transport jobs have terrible working conditions, however. Ask any pilot, bus driver, trucker, locomotive crewman or mariner what their jobs do their quality of life and you’ll get an earful.
Transport wages are also very unevenly distributed in some transport modes. A pilot with 30yrs+ seniority at one airline could easily pull down 250K but pilots ten years into their careers may earn 10K or less. Other modes have more egalitarian wage distribution curves but people at the bottom of their respective seniority lists can easily be earning the equivalent to full time @ minimum wage.