American workers must face reality.

• Author: Reich, Robert
• Position: Need for an industrial policy

THE U.S. ECONOMY stubbornly resists conforming to its old patterns. Unemployment remains high. Many individuals who hope for full-time jobs are forced to work part time. An ever-growing number are temporary workers, with no benefits or job security. The comfortable landscape of steady, sturdy mass production and rock-solid corporations has been altered irrevocably. At the same time, two all-American growth industries have gone into decline. The paper entrepreneurialism that sustained the swelling ranks of lawyers and investment bankers throughout the 1970s and 1980s - the seemingly endless opportunities for reshuffling assets through mergers and takeovers - is a bubble that appears to have burst. Nor can the U.S. continue to dedicate much of its economy to defense spending when the communist menace has faded.

The nation's economy is undergoing a transformation of unparalleled depth and scope. Corporations are downsizing and retooling. Even among the highly skilled who serve these businesses, the changes are felt. Executive positions are becoming less and less secure today.

What of those further down the economic ladder? Secure, high-wage jobs in routine manufacturing - the traditional gateway to the middle class for those without college educations - are becoming scarcer. Americans without high skills can not command high wages when hundreds of millions around the world are able to do such jobs and willing to do them cheaper. Even if the revolutions in transportation and communications never had happened, even if the ranks of industrialized countries had not expanded enormously in the past three decades, the transformation of technology still would have set in motion pressures that squeeze aside the unskilled. Even without the tectonic shifts in trade and technology, the end of the Cold War means wrenching realignments in the nation's economic priorities.

Economic change on this scale causes pain, which, in turn, inspires resistance. What is being witnessed today is an alarming epidemic of what might be called the political pathologies of economic change. One of these is a misplaced nostalgia for the good old economy of the 1950s or 1960s - forgetting, in the haze of fond remembrance, the narrowness and insularity of a more self-sufficient national economy, the gross waste of human spirit and intellect when men and women still did the routine jobs better suited to machines, and when women and minorities had virtually no hope of acceding to...