Posted on 04/16/2004 1:24:31 AM PDT by sarcasm
Last week, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao announced her Skills to Build America's Future" initiative. This is a "nationwide outreach and education effort designed to attract young people and transitioning workers to" the "key" occupations of the [near] future: "skilled trades."
This initiative, understandably, was proclaimed with little fanfare. While President Bush looks toward Mars, Ms. Chao can hardly be proud of her decidedly pedestrian prophecy that "construction laborers, operating engineers, carpenters, iron workers, cement masons, bricklayers, truck drivers and many other construction related crafts are among the trades expected to see the greatest demand in workers over the next 6 years." (This demand will be filled, I predict, by "guest workers," i.e., illegal aliens awarded shiny new government permits.)
Telling America's young people that the best they can hope for is careers as tradesmen certainly casts a pall over an administration given to grandiose planning and posturing. Essentially, the mathematically precocious youngsters with aptitudes for science, engineering or accounting must be yanked down to earth. Reaching for the stars in the America of the future will be the exclusive province of "American Idol" participants.
And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics latest Employment Situation Summary, Ms. Chao's future is now. For all the din sounded over the addition of 308,000 jobs to the economy in March, the government-fed news filters failed to mention which job sectors were surging. Sure enough, it transpires that employment opportunities are optimal in construction, retail trade, food services, social assistance, and (naturally) in government.
As economist Paul Craig Roberts a rare independent thinker on the issue observes: "Only labor involved in non-traded goods and services is safe from foreign substitution." In other words, young Americans had better learn to live by their hands lest their livelihoods be outsourced.
If President Bush intends to revive America's space program, engineers will be at a premium. Yet the IEEE-USA, the world's largest technical professional society representing more than 225,000 electrical electronics, computer, and software engineers reports that "American high-tech firms shed 560,000 jobs between 2001 and 2003, and expect to lose another 234,000 in 2004." This contraction cannot be dismissed as the nadir of the dot-com correction. The jobless rate for electrical and electronics engineers was in fact lower in 2002 (4.2 percent) than in 2003 (6.2 percent).
Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association's Taulbee's Survey found that total enrollment in bachelor-degree programs in computer science and computer engineering fell 19 percent in 2003, a factor it attributes to "the decline in the technology industry and the moving of jobs offshore." (Curiously omitted are the impacts of the H-1B and L-1 work visas.)
College administrators are already hip to Ms. Chao's future. For example, San Francisco State University is considering the closure of its engineering school.
Indeed, today's college graduate cannot even expect to find entry-level jobs in the hi-tech industry, warns entrepreneur Rosen Sharma. Sharma heads a Silicon Valley start-up that "could not survive without outsourcing." Nevertheless, he fears for America's future. "As a father my reaction is different than my reaction as a CEO," he admitted to Time.
Pay no attention to such Chicken Littles, high-tech-industry lobbyists counter. Outsourcing is good for America, they claim. Their studies employ the "impregnable" science of econometrics to prove that outsourcing high-tech jobs creates more jobs than it kills. One such study, commissioned by the Information Technology Association of America, predicts 317,387 such jobs will materialize by 2008. The study's premise, however, begs the question, as it assumes the new jobs are and will be as good as the old (vanished) ones.
Why, they'll be even better, brags economist and outsourcing enthusiast, Catherine Mann. Dr. Mann, who also labors under the illusion that only bottom-rung jobs are vanishing, plays Pollyanna to a doubting Thomas, Ron Hira of IEEE-USA. Professor Hira confessed to Washington Post readers that he, an industry insider, had no idea what shape the "new" putative high-value jobs would take. "Is it nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics?" Of one thing he is certain, however: "Other developing and developed countries are targeting those very same industries and jobs."
Thankfully, author Virginia Postrel has located America's burgeoning (and indubitably "dynamist") occupations. She faults the Bureau of Labor Statistics for failing to recognize the rise of spa-related personal services e.g., manicure and massage therapy for the powerhouse growth industries they are. Of course, if Ms. Postrel is to remain faithful to the central thesis of her first book that all change is always good she is obligated to remain, like Ms. Mann, a Pollyanna, despite the new employment reality. Ms. Postrel's second book, the sum of which is that all that glitters is gold, even better encapsulates her enthusiasm for the role eyebrow waxing and other crafts will play in an economic recovery.
Although preliminary even tentative the Bureau's Employment Situation Summary suggests that high-value knowledge jobs are being replaced with low-value service and manual-labor jobs. The ensuing loss of income to American workers will surely outweigh the lower prices outsourcing engenders.
If I refuse to genuflect to this brave new world, it's because the idea of living in communities where applied scientists are unemployed while colonic hydrotherapists thrive isn't particularly enthralling. I'll leave it to the motion obsessed, ever-evolving Ms. Postrel to celebrate that kind of future.
The owner(s) of a public company are the shareholders. Unfortunately, many of the true owners - the people who's money is invested and at risk, don't get to vote!.
That's a great idea to create jobs in America. Make all hiring decisions thru the vote.
That's a nice misdirection.
I'm sorry, where's the misdirection?
I'm a pragmatist,I don't expect the impossible from my presidential choices,and I do know history and understand politics.
Engineering is a buggy whip thing bump.
Every professional who follows these companies know what earnings were bought and how much they paid. They also follow cash from continuing operations, so they know if the old business is growing or declining.
Of course, they do. I also follow the stocks and trades of certain high tech companies. That's why the one I mentioned is still at 13, yet they just posted a nice gain over last year. The gain also includes the revenue from the companies they recently bought for $3.65 billion.
When the company was over $120 a share, management was telling everyone that they were immune to the worldwide recession and at the same time dumping their stock as fast as possible. The head of the company at the time was just named ambassador to Ireland and he claimed that was why he was unloading his stock. Many small stockholders were suckered into keeping their stock. It's still at the price of $13 a share.
I doubt if most stock holders realize how bad morale is. I have been keeping track of other high tech companies, especially the ones that are outsourcing to see how they are faring.
Dell has been faring pretty well, even though they outsource, but that's because they have gotten into the lucrative storage market and don't really care about the little guy who has to go through someone in India to get support. Dell was also outsourcing their high end support for their large business customers, but they brought this back to the USA when the complaints started rolling in.
They ignore the complaints from the little guy and that's why I quit buying Dell computers. We have had nothing but problems with their customer support. Finding one who speaks English well enough to understand on the phone is just the first hurdle.
I recently purchased plane tickets from one of the airlines and I bet I was routed through India. Both agents I talked to had Indian accents. The first was hard to understand, the second was understandable.
Go personally to some of these 3rd world countries, learn the language, and live with the people and see just how accurate this PPP is.
When a malaria threatens this idyllic paradise, which of the local witch doctors is going to invent antibiotics in time to save himself and the others?
When a hurricane threatens, who is going to build the concrete storm shelters?
When a socialist dictator in a nearby country decides to expand his empire, whose guns are going to keep his thugs from raping and murdering the entire village?
Your post exemplifies the worst instincts in human nature - run and hide and let someone else solve the big problems.
Engineering is a buggy whip thing bump.
Hey, if its what the free market tells us, who are we to argue, being the slavish devotees to it that we are. To h*ll with innovation and discoveries and the manufacturing base and military capability, money and profits are all that matter.
Probably not many here will recognize the name Pierre-André Couffinhal. He was an attorney and friend of Robespierre during the French Revolution and became one of many infamous Tribunal judges who sent many people to the gallows. Couffinhal was not the brightest bulb on the porch, because when the chemist Lavoisier, who was being indicted (and ended up losing his head) was brought before him, pronounced the judgement The Republic doesnt need scientists! Needless to say, justice has a way. The mobs eventually turned against Robespierre and his cronies, including Couffinhal, who met the same fate he condemned others to.
Just tell me, is the better quality of Asian education the reason or maybe the lower wages/cost/standard of living?
This is the elephant-in-the-living-room that so many slavish addicts to outsourcing and "free trade" won't acknowledge. We're literally selling out our technological future, consuming the seed corn from which future generations of scientists and engineers would have otherwise sprouted). Because if our own children have no interest in studying the sciences (because they see those as dead-end careers made "obsolete" by offshoring and outsourcing), who will be left to teach it if we suddenly come to our senses and decide that, yes, it is in our interest to maintain/rebuild our technological and industrial infrastructure? I suppose they think that we could import the necessary cadre of instructors to re-educate our future generations, but what if those countries who would be the source of these teachers decide that it isn't in their interest to do so? I guess then we have to go back to square one and re-invent all of the technology that we worked so hard to develop and build on our own but then sold out for short-term "profits". Better learn how to make fire from rubbing two sticks together. Hey, Chuck Noland did it...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.