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March 21, 2008 Contact: Usery lecture will highlight growth in service jobsATLANTA—As easily-automated jobs are disappearing across the United States and highly-skilled and educated workers are more and more in demand, service jobs that require minimal training are also growing, says MIT associate economics professor David Autor. Jobs performing domestic chores, preparing and serving food, providing low-skill healthcare services and the like, are “not high paying, but stubbornly resistant to automation or outsourcing,” says Autor, who will be delivering the Fourth Annual W.J. Usery Distinguished Lecture. The lecture will begin at 2 p.m. Monday (March 24) in the 7th-floor seminar room of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, 14 Marietta St. In his paper “Inequality and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs in the United States,” with MIT colleague David Dorn, Autor discusses how technology has altered the landscape for the American worker, drying up once relatively stable areas of employment for people with moderate education levels. In addition to a loss in manufacturing sectors, there have also been declines in more routine clerical tasks. But as these workers, since the 1980s, were pushed into more service-oriented jobs, oddly, wages have also risen slightly, though there remains a tremendous earnings gap. Autor chalks the wage increase up to demand for specialized services, partly due to the aging population. The growth in service jobs, Autor says, is most apparent in areas where there is growth in highly-skilled and highly-paid work, since the consumers of service work and providers of service work must be in the same relative area. Autor, a Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Programs on Labor Studies and Education, is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. For more information, visit http://aysps.gsu.edu/Usery2008.html. What: Fourth Annual W.J. Usery Distinguished Lecture Who: MIT associate economics professor David Autor, speaker When: 2 p.m., Monday, March 24 Where: 7th-floor seminar room, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, 14 Marietta St.
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