By YVONNE FRENCH
The present debate about welfare reform is not productive, according to social commentator William Julius Wilson, who spoke recently at the Library.
"The current public debate around the question of welfare reform seeks to assign blame rather than recognize and deal with the complex and changing realities that have led to economic distress for so many Americans," said Dr. Wilson in delivering the third annual Joanna Jackson Goldman Lecture March 30 to about 100 people in the Montpelier Room.
The Goldman lecture series was established in memory of Mrs. Goldman by a gift from the estate of her husband, Eric Goldman, a Princeton University professor.
Dr. Wilson is a sociology and public policy professor and director of the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality at the University of Chicago. He wrote The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
In his lecture, "The 'New Poverty': Social Policy and the Growing Inequality in Industrial Democracies," Dr. Wilson said the "new poverty" is the result of the decline in the number of blue- collar jobs and the lack of work for those with limited education.
He asserted that the post-industrial economic restructuring toward a more service-oriented economy has reduced well-paying jobs worldwide.
"In the highly integrated global marketplace of today, economies can grow, stock markets can rise, corporate profits can soar, and yet many workers can be unemployed or underemployed. ... In short, economic growth today does not necessarily produce good jobs," he said.
The lowest-paid workers have it the worst, he said. "If you arrange all wages into five groups from highest to lowest, you see that men in the bottom ... of this income distribution experienced more than a 30 percent drop in real wages between 1970 and 1989," Dr. Wilson said.
The decline in wages for the lowest-paid workers is exacerbated by the fact that growth has not kept pace in blue- collar jobs, he said.
The shrinking number of jobs for blue-collar workers is not unique to the United States, but U.S. companies deal with the problem differently than do companies overseas, Dr. Wilson said.
During the 1980s, the wages for low-income U.S. workers who lacked any college education dropped 15 percent when adjusted for inflation, whereas those for comparable workers in Europe increased 15 to 20 percent, Dr. Wilson said.
U.S. companies opt to slash wages to compete globally, while European companies pay high wages but strive to improve productivity and quality, Dr. Wilson claimed.
"To encourage Western European and Japanese companies to follow high-wage strategies ... governments [created] a political and regulatory environment that included adjustment processes to shift resources from low- to high-productivity activities," Dr. Wilson said. They also have wage regulation, favorable trade and industrial policies, generous family support systems, unemployment compensation and universal national health care, Dr. Wilson said.
"Disadvantaged groups in America suffer the most," Dr. Wilson said. As evidence, he cited a recent study he made of joblessness, poverty and family structure for which he interviewed a representative sample of black and white Chicago-area employers. A majority of them said they were reluctant to hire black males from the ghetto, Dr. Wilson said.
He concluded: "It would be shortsighted to continue to address the problems associated with the disappearance of work as if they were not part of the larger range of economic and social dislocations that have accompanied rapid changes in the global economy."