Secure Jobs, Secure Communities

The Hourglass Economy
The economy of Greater Boston has steadily shifted away from a manufacturing base towards service jobs. After decades of extremely difficult, but successful union organizing that had resulted in better pay and working conditions in many factories across the country, we began to see as early as the 1960’s many of these same unionized factories move out of the city to nearby suburbs, and later to other countries, in search of cheaper, non-unionized exploitable labor.

Today, production and manufacturing has been globalized and decentralized, but the management of production is extremely coordinated and centralized. Corporations are now looking to cities to build huge central headquarters to manage their production. Essentially, the role of cities has now shifted from the center of manufacturing and production, to the center of corporate management and services.

The result of this shift is the emergence of an 'hourglass' economy, with large numbers of low-wage jobs at one end of the spectrum and high-wage jobs at the other, but few opportunities in the middle. The service industry is the major industry in most cities now.