Once, agriculture employed 95% of all workers. As ever-larger tractors pulled ever-wider attachments, the number of agricultural workers dropped to a current 2% of all employed people.
Those displaced moved rapidly into manufacturing. Manufacturing industries, in turn, were first automated, and later outsourced. As a result, far fewer manufacturing employees were needed.
Those jobs were replaced with work in various “service industries”. Today, in Great Britain, about 22% of the people are employed in “financial services”.
Tall skyscrapers full of people pushing paper and electrons have replaced huge, horizontal buildings that were once full of bustling workers who moved, changed, and fastened metals, plastics, wood, sand, and stone. Today, the “service jobs” are being automated and outsourced.
New interests will absorb the increasing number of “excess” service workers. The newest “growth industry” is fear. The fastest growing sections of medicine, law, accounting, diet, chemistry, energy, transportation, education, communications, and the environment are those devoted to making people so afraid of one thing or another that money can be gotten from them.
Every country, at every stage of its development, has workers being moved from old occupations to new ones. “I just don’t know where it will all end.”, say the easily depressed. They say it often, and often grow attached to such emotions.
Catholic Fundamentalists have a more cheerful point of view. We see every shift in employment as an opportunity to be grateful to He Who Programmed All for giving us the opportunity to grow closer to Him.
