Making Bad Jobs Good: Strategies for the Service Sector

The question of services and service employment and what to do about it, is a fundamental issue. For example, in the United States 78% of all low wage women in America work in services. So services are clearly important as far as the issues of low earnings and poverty are concerned. I will begin by presenting some basic facts about service employment in America and what the trends have been and I will describe what I think are the essential features or characteristics of structural change in the US labour market. I will illustrate this by giving two examples from banking and hotels about how restructuring in services is taking place. I will then turn to the question of policy and describe the US policy environment, the role of some traditional policies which I think often get overlooked in the discussion and finally discuss what I regard as a kind of the frontier or the direction of some of the more innovative policy initiatives.