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• Dr. Rose's official site
• Q&A with Dr. Rose
• Excerpt from The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker

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Tavis: Mike Rose is a professor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies whose previous books include "Lives on the Boundary" and "Possible Lives." His latest book is called "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker." Professor Rose, nice to have you on the program.

Mike Rose: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: The title of this book I think begs the obvious question - are we underestimating the intelligence of the American worker?

Rose: I think we do. What comes to mind is a metaphor that you hear floating around; I know you've seen it. We talk about all the new, snazzy work - computers, electronic technology - as neck-up work, and all the other kind of work - blue collar work, old industrial work, service work - people call that neck-down work.

Think of what that implies. It implies that all of the work that goes on in factories and in restaurants and all the work our forbears did, that that didn't involve the mind at all? So that metaphor, that little saying, says it all to me. I think we have a real bias about folks who make the world go around.

Tavis: And yet the flip side of that is that those persons who you say in the book we undervalue, to the extent that business enterprise can, they're finding equipment, machines, to replace what they do anyway. So there is a different kind of intelligence that they can replicate to take the place of those workers.

Rose: Right, and of course the phrase is that you build the skill into the machine, right? But what we're finding is that while you certainly do that and a lot of industry does do that, there's still this tremendous need for somebody who has a sense of how the machines work. And furthermore what we're finding is is that people who have local knowledge, knowledge about what's going on in a particular setting, in a particular place, they're still really valued.

You can't take the mind completely out of work; you simply can't. And I think you're right that modern industry tries to do that to a degree they can, but finally I think it's just a misunderstanding of what work is about.

Tavis: And yet I'm trying to juxtapose, Professor, you're saying that we underestimate the intelligence of the American worker. With every employer friend I have, including yours truly, honestly, who I've heard say 1,001 times, it's hard to find good help.

Rose: Right, right. Well you put your finger on something that's really important there. I think we're at a time when we're getting lots of very different messages about work. So we hear exactly what you said, about how important it is to find folks who have all these skills and that this is the whole new economy, these various kinds of communicative and problem-solving skills.

And yet at the same time we're breaking work down and shipping it overseas left and right, and often breaking it down into tiny tasks to places that don't have as educated a workforce as we do. So I think we live at a really interesting time that's filled with contradictions about what work is and what it demands, what the requirements are for good workers. It's an interesting transitional time.

Tavis: This is a little bit off the subject but you're a university professor, so you can handle it. If we think that we're underestimating the intellect of the American worker today, when you look at where we are with regard to education of this generation coming along now, and they're not hitting the numbers and they're not scoring high enough on these performance evaluations, etc., etc. - you know the story - what do you make of the American worker in the future if we are to take some suggestion from the way they are performing or underperforming, as it were, on the tests they're being given in the classroom?

Rose: Right. Well - ooh, boy, this is a complicated issue you're bringing up about schooling. First of all, I think clearly we need to do such a better job with the way we educate kids, particularly poor kids, kids of color, immigrant kids. We haven't for - throughout our history, we haven't done the best job in the world of educating these kids, so the first point to make about what you said is absolutely, no doubt about it, we need to do much better than we're doing.

But the second thing, Tavis, is I'm not so sure that I put as much faith as a lot of people do in the bad news that we always get with the numbers and the test scores. This is another book, another story, but I spent some time a while back traveling around the United States going to good schools, and many of them in poor neighborhoods.

And when you get in close to schools - that is, you get away from just the abstraction of a test score or two - you see that it's a much more varied situation. There's a lot of good that goes on in our public schools that simply doesn't get into the news. So I think again, as with work, the story about schools is a very mixed picture and a complicated one, and I think we just get one side of the story.

Tavis: America would never have become the world's leading manufacturer were it not for - as you argue in the text - the everyday American worker. And yet we've long since lost that distinction in so many areas of manufacturing. Is it possible to ever get that back, or is it gone forever?

Rose: Boy, I -

Tavis: When was the last time you picked something up - I'm afraid to pick this mug up that has my name on it and read where it was made, because nothing is ever made in America?

Rose: Because it wasn't made here, right.

Tavis: Yeah, it wasn't made in America.

Rose: That's right. I'm not a labor economist so I wouldn't be good at looking into the crystal ball about that, and clearly manufacturing is - I just read in "Business Week" we're going to lose 500,000 more manufacturing jobs in the next six or seven years.

Tavis: I guess what I'm getting at here is how we ever regain our position. For these persons who aren't going to go to college who back in the day used to do manufacturing, but we're shipping those manufacturing jobs to points around the globe to people who you say live in societies who have less academic rigor than we have. And yet for some reason, they can do these jobs and we can't.

Now I'm not naïve; it's really about money. It costs less to do it there than it does here, and I think that's the bottom line. I'm not sure we ever, then, get back to a point where anything is ever made in America, which means that a whole bunch of Americans will never have a chance at those jobs as long as they can be done more cheaply someplace else. Does that make sense now?

Rose: Well absolutely, and you put your finger on it, and that's what's going on, right? Clearly. But what that does not mean is that we should not abandon the notion that we are still a powerful manufacturing nation. We're still a nation comprised of many, many people and many powerful industries that do the kind of work that I write about in here.

Service work, manufacturing jobs. And while some of those jobs can be broken down and shipped overseas, many can't. Look at all the kinds of service work that can't be shipped out because you need that presence of another human being in front of you. Whether it's your drain that's clogged up or your hair that needs done or you want a meal in a restaurant.

That's not exportable, right? So there's all sorts of jobs, of course, that are still going to remain here. The bigger question, I think, is - and this maybe gets to the heart of one of the issues in "The Mind at Work" is how are we in the future going to think about all this work? Are we simply going to try and think of how we break it down and export it, or are we going to continue to think about how we make it better, how we organize work so that people can really develop themselves, so that the jobs have meaning?

These are the kinds of questions that I think a lot of people wrestle with and I think that get to the heart of what this book's about, which is that we don't value enough all that it takes to do everything from make a table to make a good meal in a restaurant. And if we would, perhaps we would organize work differently, perhaps we would think of ways to help workers develop more fully and create better conditions (inaudible).

Tavis: Give me a few examples, then, to the heart of the text, of what we can do in the workplace to show our appreciation and value for the American worker. What are we not doing that we could do?

Rose: Right. Well, I think in a general way what we can do is think of how you organize work so that you maximize the intellectual capacity of the workers that you have. And that's what a lot of - maybe a quarter to a third of larger industries are trying to do in the country. How do you - you read about this all the time.

They're trying to think of how do you get the front line worker in a position where she or he is making more decisions or giving you more feedback on how processes are going. How do you organize work in that way? What's interesting, though, is that when you - there've been these studies done where folks go into some of these organizations that have restructured in this way, and what they find is that if the organization restructures, tries to create conditions so that workers are doing - they have more chance on the front line to make decisions and give feedback about what's going right or wrong.

But if the organization culture doesn't change - that is, the attitudes that management has about what workers can do - if that doesn't change, then all that structural stuff just goes by the wayside.

Tavis: I wonder whether or not you think we live in a society that puts maybe not too much - well, it's the same thing. Either too much or an over-emphasis on going to college. That college is the end-all, be-all; if you don't go to college you're a failure, if you don't go to college you're not going to make it, and there isn't the attention that there used to be on vocational training and other sorts of technical assistance that we ought to provide young people.

But the message everywhere you go is college, college, college, college, and here you got a guy on the front who's obviously working at a kitchen here. He may have three college degrees, for all I know. But I wonder whether or not you think the emphasis on college is so great that that, in and of itself, devalues the skill sets that a whole lot of other folk can bring to the table. Does that make sense?

Rose: Oh, it makes a lot of sense, and you're putting your finger on a really, I think, compelling topic. Look, I come from a working class family. I'm the first in the family to go to college. College meant an immense amount to me, and we know - we've got all the statistics that show that on average the person that goes to college is going to make a lot more money, have many more benefits, and somewhat of an easier life than a person who does not.

So there's no doubt about that. On the other hand, it is also true that there's a range of kinds of jobs out there that go unfilled or under-filled that don't require a traditional college degree. Now, they may require, and probably do require, some kind of post-high school work, some kind of specialized training, for example.

So I think the thrust now, maybe the best way to think about this is - and a lot of smart people are thinking about it this way - how do you create the conditions in high school so that if a kid wants to pursue mechanics or electronics or any of these sorts of tasks and trades, how do you create the condition so that kid then has the choice to go to some kind of post-high school training - maybe a four-year college, maybe not - and yet also has the choice to move right into a trade where he may be able to make quite a good living.

Tavis: The book is called "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker" as we celebrate laborers on this Labor Day. "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker" by Mike Rose, UCLA professor. Nice to have you here.

Rose: Thank you.

Tavis: Thanks for your work.