Posted on 07/27/2005 6:21:50 AM PDT by A. Pole
The June payroll jobs report did not receive much attention due to the July 4 holiday, but the depressing 21st century job performance of the U.S. economy continues unabated.
Only 144,000 private sector jobs were created, each one of which was in domestic services.
Fifty-six thousand jobs were created in professional and business services, about half of which are in administrative and waste services.
Thirty-eight thousand jobs were created in education and health services, almost all of which are in health care and social assistance.
Nineteen thousand jobs were created in leisure and hospitality, almost all of which are waitresses and bartenders.
Membership associations and organizations created 10,000 jobs, and repair and maintenance created 4,000 jobs.
Financial activities created 16,000 jobs.
This most certainly is not the labor market profile of a First World country, much less a superpower.
Where are the jobs for this year’s crop of engineering and science graduates?
U.S. manufacturing lost another 24,000 jobs in June. A country that doesn’t manufacture doesn’t need many engineers. And the few engineering jobs available go to foreigners.
Readers have sent me employment listings from U.S. software development firms. The listings are discriminatory against American citizens. One ad from a company in New Jersey that is a developer for many companies, including Oracle, specifies that the applicant must have a TN visa.
A TN or Trade NAFTA visa is what is given to Mexicans and Canadians who are willing to work in the United States at below prevailing wages.
Another ad from a software consulting company based in Omaha, Neb., specifies it wants software engineers who are H-1B transferees. What this means is that the firm is advertising for foreigners already in the United States who have H-1B work visas.
The reason the U.S. firms specify that they have employment opportunities only for foreigners who hold work visas is because the foreigners will work for less than the prevailing U.S. salary.
Gentle reader, when you read allegations that there is a shortage of engineers in America, necessitating the importation of foreigners to do the work, you are reading a bald-faced lie. If there were a shortage of American engineers, employers would not word their job listings to read that no American need apply and that they are offering jobs only to foreigners holding work visas.
What kind of country gives preference to foreigners over its own engineering graduates?
What kind of country destroys the job market for its own citizens?
How much longer will parents shell out $100,000 for a college education for a son or daughter who ends up employed as a bartender, waitress or temp?
It has been sold out. The business model that seems to be in vogue in recent years emphasizes short-term, quick profits, inflating share prices (which makes bonuses offered in the form of stock options pay off) by whatever means are handy and quick, avoiding risk, and avoiding long-term investment. These latter two contribute most directly to the decline in R&D activities.
I see it a lot in the field that I work in, which often involves purchase of state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation. Time was there were companies competing for these niche markets and they did so by innovating and offering improved products and services to customers. What we've seen lately is not so much innovation and building better products as companies gathering enough capital to buy out their competitors and thus avoid having to innovate and build better products. They simply buy out the competition and take their (often better) products off the market.
And, for the free marketeers out there, no, I can't start my own business and offer those better products and services to the market. You're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars just in startup costs alone to develop these products. Not the kind of thing you do in your garage. But time was companies like Hewlett-Packard and Bell Labs used to, but not anymore (sold out).
Ah!
A shoot the messenger type chimes in with the blame the victim crowd!
Yeah, that's why we could find only one little shop to put extra armor on the vehicles we're sending to Iraq.
> From my experience, H1Bs are generally not math or science whizzes.
Same here. The companies posting this kind of ad are not a place you'd want to work, and are headed down.
The relentless drive for efficiency has been fueled by astronomical costs for workers in this country -- particularly in the area of medical benefits.
This proves nothing other than that (at least, up until recently) there wasn't much of a market for armor upgrades to vehicles. So, it's not surprising that there are few businesses with the tools and skills to do that type of thing.
Anyone who assumes that a loss of manufacturing jobs is automatically an indicator of a decline in manufacturing has a serious credibility problem.
How much longer will parents shell out $100,000 for a college education for a son or daughter who ends up employed as a bartender, waitress or temp?
This is an excellent point. I've said for a long time now that a substantial portion of today's college students are not really cut out for the rigors of higher education.
In many foreign countries (India is a prime example) education is the only way to success (unless you are one of the lucky few born into it). In this country, sad to say, many kids today are born into success and consider it a birthright -- while kids not born into success are often not taught at home that education is the best means of advancing yourself.
Many American kids don't work hard because they don't have to.
Spot-on article.
Fair enough. GM is near bankruptcy these days because of its massive employee pension and health costs.
Robots and computers don't get sick and they don't retire. It is not surprising that employers would rather automate than hire more employees.
I don't really see a solution to this. A few generations back, mechanization wiped out millions of agricultural jobs in this country, but the long-term effects for the workers that were displaced were positive.
Reading all posts with interest.
You've got two big points there.
I'm sure you're right. As soon as we get our society back to a level of Asian squalor, our kids will have a great deal more incentive to give up their diversified life of fun, prosperity, worship and all the other cherished traditions of this great country. Bring on sewage in the streets!
Your other big point is on top of your head!
Did those Indian engineers mention which companies are paying $30,000 U.S. dollars per year for directly employed engineers in Bangalore?
Do you have something intelligent to say in response to cold, hard facts ? Do we need more brainless cheerleading from you ?
Gad, you ass-covering Bushbots have an alibi for everything! ;-)
They weren't when I was in the hard sciences back in the 70's. Back then, the main influx was a lot of Indians and Pakistanis (before China). They got preferred treatment (grants, scholarships and school jobs) and got free rides while we had to work our butts off at Summer jobs etc. to stay in school and avoid the student-loan trap. They often could not speak an intelligible form of english, and they were often not any brighter or harder working than many of my classmates at the University of Minnesota. Some of these graduate Teaching Assts. could not even fathom the undergraduate lesson plans. (I am speaking of Physics, Chemistry, Math, and as they called it then, Computer Science). They were a measurable impediment to the average student in their classes. But PC, even then, prohibited any direct action to cure the problem, and grumbling in the classroom was effectively neutralized, as the U.S. displacement machine ground on.
I think it fair to say, a healthy proportion of my classmates assumed these folks were being given PC grade inflation.
I also noticed that many of them seemed to gravitate into nuclear phsyics and wanted to learn how to enrich uranium, and build atom bombs.
My own son flunked out of an engineering program and he was taught from day 1 the value of education. He was also taught to work hard and was pushed throughout high school, but alas, when he went away to college he chose the opposite road. He is now hanging drywall when he can find work. It is his choice. What also burns me is the education fund we established for him when he was an infant is now legally his to squander. Parents can have only so much influence, the rest is left to peers and various media outlets.
I doubt this is correct. The reason universities like foreign students is because they are generally a cash cow for the school. Unless one is a permanent resident, they do not qualify for government-backed scholarships, grants and loans. So, these students from Pakistan and India were probably either paying their own way or they received scholarships from their own governments.
Correction: That is not my post you attribute to me.
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