twentieth-century ones. What’s a path forward? Let’s begin with a question: What’s a job
that requires intensive scientific training and heavy lifting?
Nursing. I’ll bet that’s not what came to mind. When we think of nursing, we think of the
womanly art of caring, of holding the hand of the sick. Because it’s feminized, nursing is
persistently undervalued and underpaid. Indeed, nursing shortages have continued
because of hospitals’ refusal to do what’s typically done when there’s a shortage—pay
more. That’s the kind of thing that happens in a pink-collar ghetto. The solution is not to
consign working-class men to the underpaid, dead-end jobs traditionally provided to
women. The solution is to create up-skilled jobs for both men and women.
Here’s an example, again from the Markle report. The Tablet Pilot of the New York
Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute equips home health care aides with tablets that
enable them to assess client health risks and communicate with doctors and other
members of a patient’s health care team. Armed with networked tablets, the home care
workers answer 15 screening questions to monitor for documented health care risks. The
pilot materially improved the quality of health care, because it addressed a key problem:
often several days would pass before home aides’ observations were effectively
communicated to the doctor or nurse in charge. This led to false alarms and unnecessary,
and expensive, trips to the ER. The Tablet Pilot decreased unnecessary hospital visits.^218
The Tablet Pilot points the way for working-class jobs. What’s needed are networked
service jobs that allow for up-skilling of workers who, because they will be adding more
value, will be paid more.
The technology exists to generalize this model. Today most services are seen as
inherently local, but networks make that less true. Using Microsoft’s HoloLens, a reporter
called an electrician who then talked him through how to install a light switch. A Los
Angeles company called DAQRI has developed a “smart helmet” that can allow a soldier
to see a schematic drawing of a machine he needs to fix along with a step-by-step
description of how to fix it. The smart helmet and HoloLens open the way to next-gen
“doctors’ visits” that occur in the patient’s home.^219 Or to the practice of medicine in
rural areas by doctors in large cities who practice in partnership with local physician
assistants acting as the doctor’s eyes and ears.
Some of the occupations expected to grow are ones that blue-collar guys (and gals) would
likely be happy to do: wind turbine techs, cartographers, and ambulance drivers.^220 This
sort of thing has not been at the center of liberals’ social reform agenda, to say the least.
- Why Don’t Working-Class Men Just Take “Pink-Collar” Jobs?