Tough Choices or Tough Times

When the report of the first Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, America's Choice: high skills or low wages!, was released in 1990, the globalization of the world's economy was just getting underway. That Commission understood the threat in the straightforward terms captured in the report's subtitle. A worldwide market was developing in low-skill labor, it said, and the work requiring low-skills would go to those countries where the price of low-skill labor was the lowest. If the United States wanted to continue to compete in the market, it could look forward to a continued decline in wages and very long working hours. Alternatively, it could abandon low-skill work and concentrate on competing in the worldwide market for high-value-added products and services. To do that, it would have to adopt internationally benchmarked standards for educating it students and its workers, because only countries with highly skilled workforces could successfully compete in that market.