Great global shift to service jobs
Move over agriculture, according to the International Labor Organization, service is where the growth is.
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorand Andrew Downie | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the September 4, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
Boston; and São Paulo, Brazil - The life story of Brazilian Valdir de Santos, who has gone from farmhand to taxi driver, is in essence the career path of workers around the globe.
For the first time in human history, more people are laboring in service trades than in food production, according to data gathered by the International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency affiliated with the United Nations.
As recently as 1996, agriculture accounted for 42 percent of world employment, with another 21 percent of workers in goods-producing industries and 37 percent in services. By last year, the ILO says in a report released over the weekend, 42 percent were in services, 37 percent in agriculture, and 22 percent in industry.
It's too soon to talk about a white-collar world. Many of these newly urbanized workers aren't employed so much as they are scraping for survival on city streets. Mr. De Santos's own life has become easier, yet he recalls his father's farm as "a civilized life compared to the life the poor live today in big cities."
But if this great job shift is wrenching, the transition, if managed properly, can be as positive as it is inexorable, economists say. "The switch ... frees people from geography," says Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis. "Singapore can be as rich as Canada, even though Singapore has no land."
Technology, in fact, is opening the door to a new phase of economic competition in services – from banking to tourism and healthcare. This could expose advanced economies like the United States to new challenges, even as it presents enticing new opportunities for entrepreneurs. The Internet and air transport now make it as easy to trade many services across borders as it is to trade goods.
This migration away from farm work represents a vital phase in human progress, Mr. Clark says. In many places, it is occurring at a surprisingly slow rate. Once people make that step, they tend to live in larger communities, acquire more skills, and eventually make more money.
The trend doesn't make manufacturing unimportant. But as the world gets wealthier, a rising share of income gets spent on services. And rising factory productivity allows more people to work in services.
Now, service jobs are growing worldwide, benefiting millions. Brazil's experience typifies the broad but uneven impacts. The country is globally competitive in agriculture and aerospace, among other industries. But services are where the growth is. In São Paulo, such jobs are springing up from posh tourism and financial districts to middle-class homes in search of cooks and maids.
"Driving a taxi is much easier than working the fields, I can tell you," Mr. De Santos says in Portuguese as he plies the streets of São Paulo. As a young man, "I worked 12 hours a day and I sweated from 7 in the morning until 7 at night. It was hard work. Here you think a little and it's not hard at all."
Yet all around him he sees jobs characterized by numbing drudgery and low pay. Many people who move to São Paulo simply swap a rural struggle against poverty for an urban one.
The ILO voices similar concerns in its new report on "key indicators of the labor market," released over the US Labor Day weekend.
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