Posted on 02/15/2004 7:37:16 AM PST by akron
My company laid off three people on my floor last week as part of a 3 percent domestic layoff of systems workers. The one that hit me the hardest was the competent, 50-year-old Vietnam veteran with decades of tenure just five years shy of getting medical retirement benefits. His son is currently serving in Iraq.
We are told that this is the first of an unspecified amount (but rumored to be two-thirds) of offshoring of computer work. Offshoring replaces Americans with overseas workers earning three-fourths to five-sixths less. Estimates are that millions of upper-middle-class, educated American systems workers -- the people who helped make the personal computer and Internet revolutions -- are going to lose our jobs.
Most of the systems folks I know are free-market and free-trade oriented. It was freedom to innovate and trade, after all, that fueled the information revolution we benefited by over the last two decades. It was overseas manufacturing of computer components that drove down the costs of the hardware we use in our jobs every day. We realize that the falling prices at Wal-Mart are the benefits of globalization.
As a systems guy, I was pretty smug about globalization. I saw what I considered to be old-fashioned and less-educated manufacturing folks losing their jobs and consoled myself that they could change jobs to something more lucrative and more fun, like computers. The numbers proved it. While American manufacturing workers lost their jobs, employment and income statistics rose and people shifted into cool service sectors.
We in systems are flexible and always learning to stay one step ahead. (I have survived lay-offs from oil service, a space job when the Challenger crashed and a previous systems job.) But we are not prepared for this massive evaporation of jobs ahead. We believed the promise that working to educate ourselves would ensure that we could handle change. After all, we were the agents who changed other people's lives, not vice-versa.
It's ironic that the very Internet that we created is creating the demise of the American systems profession.
How will we react politically? Certainly, the Democrats are already claiming to feel our pain. Should we abandon the Republicans, who matched our more dynamic, market-oriented vision of our future?
I think most of us are sophisticated enough to realize that not only will attempts by government to stop corporations from moving jobs overseas not work, they will end up harming more than helping. Just as railroads and the telegraph fundamentally changed the way people earned a living in the 19th century, the Internet and its ability to connect us globally is changing radically the way we work in the 21st.
This fundamental change is different from before, though. At least in the 19th century, American small shop operators could get jobs by moving to work for big corporations. Now, the jobs being created by the Internet transformation are in other countries. Even new jobs created by the demand from foreign workers' rising salaries will translate primarily into low-wage manufacturing jobs overseas.
Most of us do not begrudge people in other countries the opportunity to benefit themselves. We realize that in the long run, as foreign economies improve, we can all get wealthier together in a global trading system. But that won't make the short run any less painful. And the "short run" may last a rocky decade or two. Offshoring is causing this "no-job" recovery.
A co-worker cynically posted this quote from President Bush: "As technology transforms the way almost every job in America is done, America must become more productive and workers need new skills." This outrageous quote assumes that re-training (and even worse, government-funded training) is a solution. We did get trained! But learning as fast or faster than other professions is now irrelevant. Will any training guarantee that equally trained foreign workers won't underbid our labor price?
Educated workers seemingly now have to compete on price globally. The person willing to work for the lowest wage wins. If that is the game, I want government to squeeze every bit of the costs it imposes so that I can maintain a decent living at low rates required by global competition. If we can suffer layoff after layoff, so should government.
U.S. government -- at all levels -- is headed in the wrong direction. In its last session, The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature could not even bring itself to cap growth of property taxes to 5 percent. And I laughed in disgust when I heard President Bush talking proudly about a goal of slowing the rate of growth of spending to only 4 percent. We need drastic cuts, not slowed growth while our incomes plummet.
But we systems folks are adaptable and innovative. Maybe we can find ways to create new jobs with new technologies. Nanotechnology holds tremendous promise, although it may be slow to arrive. Because we need to get to market with innovations as rapidly as we can, government needs to remove regulations.
Historically, Americans dominated economically because of our low governmental burden. Now, other countries have discovered that secret, and are creating smaller government drags than our ever growing monster.
I doubt that we systems folks are going to support Democrats who promise to eliminate our pain by giving us handouts. But the Republicans had better start delivering lower spending, taxes and regulations. Or we will find others who will.
Glass has 20 years' experience working with computers in Houston.
That says it all and everybody in Washington better pay attention or come the day after Election Day, they will be saying "What happened?"
I hate to tell this guy, but most companies don’t offer retiree medical benefits. It’s something you’re going to have to pay for out of your pension check – which you should be vested in with “decades of tenure.” You are eligible for MediCare at 65 though. I guess he’s worried about coverage between 55 and 65.
And those companies that do offer retiree health benefits usually have a lifetime cap. But the notion that you’re going to retire and get off scott-free on healthcare is a fallacy, mostly. Always has been, unless you were grandfathered in somehow.
Nah, this won't happen. The reverse is the future. Remember that half of the population has a less than median IQ. The idiot population, a clear voting majority, believes in Government, and expects politicians to come to their rescue when they cannot pay their bills. Some rough times are coming.
Bottom line is that you and I are not going to get a laissez faire government, but the reverse.
And what did they do to reward him?
Sent him to the slammer, they did!
How about the policy of allowing people to retire, and then remain on the county payroll as consultants? Wesley Friese "retired" from the toll road authority where he was making 150K. Now he collects his pension and is a consultant making 210K.
It hasn't hit the papers because the County stays under the radar but the budget director Raycraft got a 70K raise. Most of the other appointees also have received 30-50K raises. Maybe you should read court agenda now and then.
Paul Bettencourt always rags on the city of Houston for spending money but is silent about the County. Did you notice when the "Comical" ran the story about the County have a 270million surplus, Bettencourt "wasn't available" to comment on whether or not taxes should be cut.
Republicans for small government, look in your own backyard to see that's not true.
Yes, China is getting ready.
I remind you that no clever person is ever without options and without hope. During the big layoff days immediately post-Y2k Houston was a hotspot of new business formation as systems guys and gals took their severance packages and founded new businesses--still the ultimate of the American dream.
Hey, they are not idiots (it would be well below 70 IQ). This "idiot" majority is intelligent enough to know that they cannot compete with 100 million of Indian and Chinese with IQ higher than 125.
Why free traders think that it is OK to use government to protect their profits but it is not OK to help their compatriots?
AKA: "The jobs Americans won't do..."
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