US President Donald Trump is still promising to bring back coal jobs, but the underlying reasons for coal employment’s decline — automation, falling electricity demand, cheap natural gas and technological progress in wind and solar — will not go away.
Meanwhile, the US Department of the Treasury last week officially — and correctly — declined to name China as a currency manipulator, making nonsense of everything Trump has said about reviving manufacturing.
Will the Trump administration ever do anything substantive to bring back mining and manufacturing jobs? Probably not.
However, let me ask a different question: Why does public discussion of job loss focus so intensely on mining and manufacturing, while virtually ignoring the big declines in some service sectors?
Over the weekend the New York Times Magazine published a photographic essay on the decline of traditional retailers in the face of Internet competition.
The pictures, contrasting “zombie malls” largely emptied of tenants with giant warehouses holding inventory for online sellers, were striking. The economic reality is pretty striking, too.
Consider what has happened to department stores. Even as Trump was boasting about saving a few hundred jobs in manufacturing here and there, Macy’s announced plans to close 68 stores and lay off 10,000 workers.
Sears, another iconic institution, has expressed “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business.
Overall, department stores employ one-third fewer people now than they did in 2001. That is 500,000 traditional jobs gone — about 18 times as many jobs as were lost in coal mining over the same period.
Retail is not the only service industry that has been hit hard by changing technology. Another prime example is newspaper publishing, where employment has declined by 270,000, almost two-thirds of the workforce, since 2000.
So why are promises to save service jobs not as much a staple of political posturing as promises to save mining and manufacturing jobs?
One answer might be that mines and factories sometimes act as anchors of local economies, so their closing can devastate a community in a way that shutting a retail outlet will not — and there is something to that argument.
However, it is not the whole truth. Closing a factory is just one way to undermine a local community. Competition from superstores and shopping malls has also devastated many small-city downtowns.
Now many small-town malls are failing too. And we should not minimize the extent to which the long decline of small newspapers has eroded the sense of local identity.
A different, less creditable reason mining and manufacturing have become political footballs, while services have not, involves the need for villains.
Demagogues can tell coal miners that liberals took away their jobs with environmental regulations. They can tell industrial workers that their jobs were taken away by nasty foreigners. And they can promise to bring the jobs back by making America polluted again, by getting tough on trade, and so on.
These are false promises, but they play well with some audiences.
By contrast, it is really hard to blame either liberals or foreigners for, say, the decline of Sears: The chain’s asset-stripping, Ayn Rand-loving owner is another story, but one that probably does not resonate in the heartland.
Finally, it is hard to escape the sense that manufacturing and especially mining get special consideration because, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie pointed out, their workers are a lot more likely to be male and significantly whiter than the workforce as a whole.
Whatever the reasons, political narratives tend to privilege some jobs and some industries over others.
It is a tendency we should fight. Laid-off retail workers and local reporters are just as much victims of economic change as laid-off coal miners.
However, you ask, what can we do to stop service sector job cuts?
Not much — but that is also true for mining and manufacturing, as working-class Trump voters will soon learn.
In an ever-changing economy, jobs are always being lost: 75,000 Americans are fired or laid off every working day. Sometimes whole sectors go away as tastes or technology change.
However, while we cannot stop job losses from happening, we can limit the human damage when they do happen.
We can guarantee healthcare and adequate retirement income for all. We can provide aid to the newly unemployed. And we can act to keep the overall economy strong — which means doing things like investing in infrastructure and education, not cutting taxes on rich people and hoping the benefits trickle down.
I do not want to sound unsympathetic to miners and industrial workers. Yes, their jobs matter; but all jobs matter. And while we cannot ensure that any particular job endures, we can and should ensure that a decent life endures even when a job does not.
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