It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

OUT WITH THE OLD IN WITH THE NEW? Virginia Postrel (check out her blog here) argues that the new jobs in the U.S. aren't always the types of jobs noticed by the government bean counters (NYT; free registration required). Examples:

Consider the ubiquitous granite counter top. The slabs are imported, but the counter tops are made in the United States, and the shops that do the work are proliferating rapidly. ''It's an explosive trend,'' says Michael Reis, editor of the industry magazine Stone World. In 2002 alone, the magazine added 2,000 fabricators to its 20,000 subscribers. Reis estimates that there are 8,000 to 10,000 fabrication shops in the country.

Equipping a fabricating business can cost less than $30,000, thanks to relatively inexpensive machinery developed over the past decade. Sales are holding strong. Seventy-three percent of Stone World subscribers said their business was up in 2002, and nearly 60 percent of those reported an increase of more than 16 percent. The fabricators are small local shops, usually with fewer than 10 employees, which makes stone fabrication the sort of industry job prognostications tend to overlook. The Bureau of Labor Statistics survey doesn't have a separate category for this burgeoning construction craft. It is lumped under ''cutting and slicing machine setters, operators, and tenders,'' a production category dominated by people slicing paper in mills and printing plants. So losses in those fields mask the growth among stone crafters.

Or take Denise Revely, just the sort of worker that people who worry there will be no jobs in the future have in mind. She is in many ways a typical middle-class American, with skills, experience and some formal training but no college degree. Divorced with two grown daughters, she owns a house, pays her taxes, supports herself. Far from a tale of woe, Revely's resume is a good place to find the resilience of the American economy. She used to work in an electronics factory. Now she gives facials. She used to draw a paycheck from a day spa. Now she works for herself. Her business has been in the black ever since she opened last July. But as far as official statistics are concerned, she doesn't exist.

Neither do a lot of people in her rapidly growing field. In 2002, spas in the United States employed 176,000 people full time and another 106,000 part time, up from 50,000 full-time employees and 26,000 part-timers five years earlier, according to the International Spa Association. (These numbers do not include independent contractors, some of whom rent space inside spas.) Some of those spa employees show up in the bureau survey, which counts 15,580 skin-care specialists, 31,350 manicurists and 27,160 massage therapists. But a lot are still missing.

The American Massage Therapy Association counts more than 46,000 members -- nearly 20,000 more massage therapists than the bureau could locate for the profession as a whole. The association estimates that there are between 260,000 and 290,000 massage therapists in the United States, including students, compared with 120,000 to 160,000 in 1996. The bureau count thus overlooks some 200,000 massage jobs.

Similarly, the bureau has missed more than 300,000 manicurists. It puts the total at around 30,000, compared with the count of 372,000 -- up from 189,000 a decade ago -- by Nails magazine, using private survey and state licensing data. Even if not all licensed manicurists are practicing, the bureau number is off by an order of magnitude. There are 53,000 nail salons in the country, most of them with more than one manicurist. The industry supports two major trade magazines, each with about 60,000 subscribers.

This is interesting but I suspect that few people who once possessed a stable factory job with benefits, pension and all whistles and bells we associate with old school manufacturing are all that happy to be self-employed manicurists wondering about where to get health insurance.