The Frontiers of Management. Peter F. Drucker

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ based on the home market? And, as we shall presently see, economic development of these countries can also no longer be based on low labor costs.

      What “De-Industrialization” Means

      The second major change in the world economy is the uncoupling of manufacturing production from manufacturing employment. To increase manufacturing production in developed countries has actually come to mean decreasing blue-collar employment. As a consequence, labor costs are becoming less and less important as a “comparative cost” and as a factor in competition.

      There is a great deal of talk these days about the “de-industrialization” of America. But in fact, manufacturing production has gone up steadily in absolute volume and has not gone down at all as a percentage of the total economy. Ever since the end of the Korean War, that is, for more than thirty years, it has held steady at around 23 to 24 percent of America's total GNP. It has similarly remained at its traditional level in all of the major industrial countries.

      It is not even true that American industry is doing poorly as an exporter. To be sure, this country is importing far more manufactured goods than it ever did from both Japan and Germany. But it is also exporting more than ever before—despite the heavy disadvantage in 1983, 1984, and most of 1985 of a very expensive dollar, of wage increases larger than our main competitors had, and of the near-collapse of one of our main industrial markets, Latin America. In 1984, the year the dollar soared, exports of American manufactured goods rose by 8.3 percent, and they went up again in 1985. The share of U.S.–manufactured exports in world exports was 17 percent in 1978. By 1985 it had risen to 20 percent, with West Germany accounting for 18 percent and Japan for 16 (the three countries together thus accounting for more than half of the total).

      Thus it is not the American economy that is being “de-industrialized.” It is the American labor force.

      Between 1973 and 1985, manufacturing production in the United States actually rose by almost 40 percent. Yet manufacturing employment during that period went down steadily. There are now 5 million fewer people employed in blue-collar work in the American manufacturing industry than there were in 1975.

      Yet in the last twelve years total employment in the United States grew faster than at any time in the peacetime history of any country—from 82 to 110 million between 1973 and 1985, that is, by a full third. The entire growth, however, was in nonmanufacturing, and especially in non–blue-collar jobs.

      The trend itself is not new. In the 1920s, one out of every three Americans in the labor force was a blue-collar worker in manufacturing. In the 1950s, the figure was still one in every four. It now is down to one in every six—and dropping.

      But although the trend has been running for a long time, it has lately accelerated to the point where, in peacetime at least, no increase in manufacturing production, no matter how large, is likely to reverse the long-term decline in the number of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing or in their proportion of the labor force.

      And the trend is the same in all developed countries and is, indeed, even more pronounced in Japan. It is therefore highly probable that developed countries such as the United States or Japan will, by the year 2010, employ no larger a proportion of the labor force in manufacturing than developed countries now employ in farming—at most, one-tenth. Today the United States employs around 18 million people in blue-collar jobs in the manufacturing industry. Twenty-five years hence the number is likely to be 10—at most, 12—million. In some major industries the drop will be even sharper. It is quite unrealistic, for instance, to expect the American automobile industry to employ, twenty-five years hence, more than one-third of its present blue-collar force, even though production might be 50 percent higher.

      If a company, an industry, or a country does not succeed in the next quarter century in sharply increasing manufacturing production, while sharply reducing the blue-collar work force, it cannot hope to remain competitive, or even to remain “developed.” It would decline fairly fast. Great Britain has been in industrial decline these last twenty-five years, largely because the number of blue-collar workers per unit of manufacturing production went down far more slowly than in all other noncommunist developed countries. Yet Britain has the highest unemployment rate among noncommunist developed countries: more than 13 percent.

      The British example indicates a new but critical economic equation: A country, an industry, or a company that puts the preservation of blue-collar manufacturing jobs ahead of being internationally competitive (and that implies steady shrinkage of such jobs) will soon have neither production nor steady jobs. The attempt to preserve industrial blue-collar jobs is actually a prescription for unemployment.

      On the national level, this is accepted only in Japan so far. Indeed, Japanese planners, whether those of the government or those of private business, start out with the assumption of a doubling of production within fifteen or twenty years based on a cut in blue-collar employment of 25 to 40 percent. And a good many large American companies such as IBM, General Electric, or the big automobile companies forecast parallel development. Implicit in this is also the paradoxical fact that a country will have the less general unemployment the faster it shrinks blue-collar employment in manufacturing.

      But this is not a conclusion that politicians, labor leaders, or indeed the general public can easily understand or accept.

      What will confuse the issue even more is that we are experiencing several separate and different shifts in the manufacturing economy.

      One is the acceleration of the substitution of knowledge and capital for manual labor. Where we spoke of mechanization a few decades ago, we now speak of robotization or automation. This is actually more a change in terminology than a change in reality. When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1909, he cut the number of man-hours required to produce a motorcar by some 80 percent in two or three years: far more than anybody expects to happen as a result even of the most complete robotization. But there is no doubt that we are facing a new, sharp acceleration in the replacement of manual workers by machines, that is, by the products of knowledge.

      A second development—and in the long run it may be fully as important if not more important—is the shift from industries that are primarily labor-intensive to industries that, from the beginning, are primarily knowledge-intensive. The costs of the semiconductor microchip are about 70 percent knowledge and no more than 12 percent labor. Similarly, of the manufacturing costs of prescription drugs, “labor” represents no more than 10 or 15 percent, with knowledge—research, development, and clinical testing—representing almost 50 percent. By contrast, in the most fully robotized automobile plant labor would still account for 20 or 25 percent of the costs.

      Another, and highly confusing, development in manufacturing is the reversal of the dynamics of size. Since the early years of this century, the trend in all developed countries has been toward larger and ever larger manufacturing plants. The “economies of scale” greatly favored them. Perhaps equally important, what one might call the economies of management favored them. Up until recently, modern management seemed to be applicable only to fairly large units.

      This has been reversed with a vengeance the last fifteen to twenty years. The entire shrinkage in manufacturing jobs in the United States has been in large companies, beginning with the giants in steel and automobiles. Small and especially medium-size manufacturers have either held their own or actually added people. In respect to market standing, exports, and profitability too, smaller and especially middle-size businesses have done remarkably better than the big ones. The same reversal of the dynamics of size is occurring in the other developed countries as well, even in Japan, where bigger was always better and biggest meant best! The trend has reversed itself even in old industries. The most profitable automobile company these last years has not been one of the giants, but a medium-size СКАЧАТЬ