Related to this process, jobs in the United States have been perceived as migrating over the years, to low-wage Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, to low-wage Mexico in the 1990s, and most recently to low-wage China. Japan, of course, is no longer characterized by a low-wage workforce, and many in Mexico are now complaining of job losses to low-wage China.
In the United States, conceptual jobs, fostered by cutting-edge technologies, especially information technologies, are occupying an ever increasing share of the workforce and are gradually replacing work requiring manual skills. Those industries in which labor costs are a significant part of overall costs have been under increasing competition from foreign producers with labor costs, adjusted for productivity, less than ours.