Computers and The Increase of Labor and Wage Inequality in The 1980’s

1650 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: causes and effects of college dropouts

Computers and The Increase of Labor and Wage Inequality in The 1980’s

Although computer technology dates back to at least the 1940’s, microprocessors were first introduced on a wide scale in manufacturing in the 1970’s. It has been noted that mainframe computers started to be used in business in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Computers have seemed to grow more rapidly ever since the Apple II was born in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981. PC (personal computers) spread rapidly in the 80’s and 90’s and have been upgrading ever since. It has been said that during this increase in popularity and use of computers the labor inequality and wage difference has been increasing as well. Throughout this paper we will discuss reasons why computers are to blame and why computers have had nothing to do with economic increase of skilled educated workers and a decrease in need for unskilled and uneducated workers.

Increase in the growth rate of the demand of more skilled workers due to the pace of the technological work from 1970 to the present has been one of the arguments against computers causing inequality. From the 1970’s the pace of work has been faster, the work load has been greater because demand has gone up, and many jobs have become more difficult to learn. There are no longer mills where education and much knowledge was needed to get the job done. Work has gotten much more involved and complex. The employment of high school drop outs have fallen from 64.4% in 1940 to 9.8% in 1996, and the employment of college graduates have risen from 9.3% to 41.6%. Although computers have been around that whole time there is no way they caused a 54.6% decrease in the employment of high school drop outs.

It has also been said that there has been an expansion slowdown from what the country was used to in the beginning half of this century from the 1970’s, so this has allowed companies to pay one educated worker rather than paying two of three uneducated workers that did the same job. Over the years unions have also began to disappear causing some of those unskilled workers how were once protected by contracts to a given union to become no longer demanded. Many of those unskilled workers who escaped being unneeded have noticed a dramatic pay decrease. Many people might think, “What are you talking about, in the 1940’s they were making like five to ten dollars a day.

Show More
Related

  • Luddite Fallacy Essay

    1491 Words  | 3 Pages

    of earners in the United States. This increase in inequality has grown substantially in the last forty years. Wage inequality is different than the push for equal pay. According to Fortune.com, the salaries of CEO’s compared to the average worker are 300 times more (Addady 1). One of the reasons CEO’s are profiting more money is because technological advances are replacing human labor with robots or software. This investment in technology by firms increases the bottom line and is ever more important

    Read More

  • Studs Terkel Working Summary

    728 Words  | 2 Pages

    steelworker named Mike LeFevre say that he is “a dying breed”, a laborer who’s the one who has to “build something”, doesn’t have a college degree and is a part of a “union”. Mike LeFevre, as history shows is a dying breed; during the 1980s, businesses chose to cut labor costs through globalization and providing non-union manufacturing jobs, who were paid “30% less than union workers”. Similarly, as Levinson writes in The Box, globalization and the lean corporation model was supported by the development

    Read More

  • Minimum Wage And The Wage

    2449 Words  | 5 Pages

    Introduction Minimum wage was established state wide in 1938 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt; at that time it was only 25 cents which is equivalent to 4 dollars in today’s world. It was established as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act which covered youth, government and overtime pay. Massachusetts was actually the first state before Franklin’s statewide acknowledgement, and it only covered woman and children without overtime. There are lot of issues with minimum wage now such as setting a statewide

    Read More

  • Alex de Tocqueville's Teachings on Inequality and Poverty in the United States

    2380 Words  | 5 Pages

    common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.” Through the ages, income inequality has caused class conflict, created political systems (communism), and has simultaneously promoted vast increases in wealth and technological advances. The purpose of this paper is to research and examine the benefits and detriments, or pros and cons, of income inequality and to then render my opinion regarding my findings. Because income inequality is vast in nature, this paper will

    Read More

  • Decline of Union Membership

    2292 Words  | 5 Pages

    Organized labor has seen a long and ever changing history in the United States. What began as minimal organized labor movement catapulted into astronomical union membership rates as the nation grew and developed. The intense power unions possessed only lasted so long and in the years since 1970, union membership in the United States has collapsed. This paper will examine the most significant reasons for the decline in membership. In brief, organizational redesigns, the development of technology and

    Read More

  • Shrinking Middle class

    986 Words  | 2 Pages

    class move down than up, at least temporarily. The most often cited cause of the decline of the middle class in the United States is stagnant wages. Between 1955 and 1970, real wages adjusted and inflation rose by an average of 2.5 percent per year. Between 1971 and 1994, the average growth of real wages was 0.3 percent a year. The stagnation of wages has been especially noticeable to middle-class people, who rely very much on the money they make at their jobs. Recessions seem to hit higher income

    Read More

  • Women and the American Dream: Not Successful So Far

    1240 Words  | 3 Pages

    paper will look at three key areas, 1. job types, 2. wages, and 3. entrepreneurship. JOB TYPES While poor women have always worked outside the home, it was only during WWII that the majority of American women joined the work force. After the war, most of those women returned to their pre-war lives, but women’s employment levels never dropped to pre-war levels. Since the late-1960s, women’s labor force participation has continued to increase with the exception of small declines during economic

    Read More

  • Gender and Equality in the Workforce in the USSR

    5439 Words  | 11 Pages

    and more importantly, inequality. It would be the values and traditions that both Alla and Helen believed in that allowed them to be successful and relatively unaffected by inequality. In the time period that the three women lived in the USSR, society was ruled by socialism (communists did exist, but were not the majority). Under this theory of government, everyone worked; it was believed to be a disgrace if a person simply sat at home and did not participate in the labor force. The goal was to

    Read More

  • Gender Discrimination In The Workplace Essay

    3296 Words  | 7 Pages

    ceiling prevents women from moving up in their careers, and in some cases makes it almost unbearable to get a promotion. In my opinion, female workers in the U.S. should be treated equally at work as their male coworkers. Females should be paid the same wages for the same skil... ... middle of paper ... ...g Female” by Pozener, Jennifer L. Article from Montgomery College library database. 21 June 2013. “Gender discrimination in the corporate world,” by Pratik Gandhi and Sagal Agrawal. Human discrimination

    Read More

  • Women and the Workforce

    3921 Words  | 8 Pages

    Women and the Workforce From the days of Suffragettes to the ERA amendment of the late 1970's, women have fought for equal rights in a male dominated world. During every war, from ancient times to modern, women took over the traditional male working rolls to keep the economy going as men fought on the battle front. After every war women were pushed back into the home and made to return to rolls of housewife and mother. This battle of the female to be seen and appreciated as more than just

    Read More

  • Public Education: Funding based Upon Race

    4878 Words  | 10 Pages

    between one’s right to accumulate capital and one’s duty to guarantee equality for all. As the current system stands, the right to accumulate and utilize financial resources prevails. Thus, an educational system that perpetuates the economic inequality of America’s racial groups endures. In the 1954 United States Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, school segregation was found to be unconstitutional. On behalf of the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “We conclude

    Read More

More about Computers and The Increase of Labor and Wage Inequality in The 1980’s

Open Document