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.
Why did you leave?
I think the point is that (a) America will need engineers, both hard engineers like Aerospace and EE, and "soft" engineers like IT workers, (b) College students will not go into debt, and Parents of college students will not spend a good portion of their retirement dollars on their kids education, if they cannot get a job in the discipline they study, and (c) given the status queue, American will experience one heck of a reverse "brain drain". Many of the wonderful high-tech tools that have transformed the trades in the last 30 years won't be there tomorrow, or at least the innovation that created them will be gone from America.
I'm not too lazy to "get a job". I worked a dozen "trade" jobs while putting myself through college in the 80s. Then I gave blood and sweat in the Navy for four years after I got my degree, picking up experience (while serving my Country) for my first civilian job. Then I worked 80 hours a week at nearly minimum wage for 3-4 years, until I became useful enough to merit a higher salary, and some years later, higher billing rate as a contractor.
In the 20 years I've been in the IT business, I have "reinvented" my career at least 5 times. Each time, it cost me money for training, and a pay cut for experience. Now, isn't it a bit arrogant for "tradesmen" to be telling folks like me to "get a job", as if we were lazy, and sitting on our butts on welfare. There are people I know in their 40's, one Naval Academy and Marine Corps vet. in particular, whose lives have been turned upside down. They've trying to "reinvent" themselves multiple times, to meet the changes of industry, but they couldnt' do it quick enough to keep their house, keep their kids in a good school, and save any of their retirement investments.
They've worked hard and lost everything, because, in my opinion, the U.S. government has been wholesaling IT and Engineering careers out the "off-shoring" door for 30 years. "Free traders" who love outsourcing miss the fact that it has not occurred in a vacume. These countries, including India, China, the Philippines, Ireland, and etc. haven't developed their High Tech industrial base from "whole cloth". Their engineers are American trained, at subsidized rates at U.S. Universities. The managers gained experence as Foreign Nationals working in the U.S.. Their designers have lifted innovation developed with American capital and yes, even American minds, and "cloned" the technology for their own country's benefit. The U.S. government has for years "sold" American jobs to the lowest bidder, i.e. by encouraging H1B, L1, and NAFTA VISA's by the millions.
If you see nothing wrong with this situation, i.e. that it's just the "nerds" getting their comeuptance, so be it. I suppose I cannot dissuade you from your religious "class-warfare" beliefs. I think the cost to the USA will be devestating over the next 20 years. There will be FEWER BUYERS for the trademen's products in the US, which translates into lower pay and fewer tradesmen opportunities.
Five years ago, my (now) 16 year old son was intent in following in my foot steps. Because of my background, he was half-way trained toward being a professional WEB designer and programmer. He was doing amazing things for an 11 year old. Today, I can't keep him mind focused on "college prep" high school studies, because he sees college as a huge expense with zero pay off. He's seen my own career problems (and I've been fairly successful), and some of his friends college and technically educated parents go broke. Why would he want to study hard in High School? Why study a foreign language, or higher math? For what?
His plan now is to become an auto mechanic, and eventually own his own shop. If he's happy doing this, it's fine by me. But what if he changes his mind in 5-10 years?
From looking at my kids peers, this pattern appears to be occuring nationwide. Kids who used to "automatically" head towards college now want nothing to do with it. Their goals are lower, because they just don't see the payoff of higher education. They've seen their own parents lose careers, houses, fortunes, and dissolve marriages, because this Country has sold their careers to the lowest bidder. Why should they join in?
SFS
"The U.S. government has for years "sold" American jobs to the lowest bidder, i.e. by encouraging H1B, L1, and NAFTA VISA's by the millions."
MNJohnnie, NAFTA and the WTO have designed a world where the next coffee maker for your home will be engineered in India, designed in Pakistan and manufactured in China or Europe. Americans will step into the picture unloading the ships, trucking or railing it to central warehouses and then to retail stores.
Twenty years ago, the engineering, designing and maufacture of our coffee pots was done 100% in the US. Some basic raw materials were imported from other countries and EVERYTHING else was done here.
Want to build a brand new home? Look on the Internet, snag your blueprints take them into a local architect for a two hour touch up, this used to be 40 to 60 hour job for the architect, then take them down to the city office for approval to an engineer trained in India.
Where all of the construction materials once came from North America now the World Trade Organization and NAFTA have decided that the world should share in the profits and jobs of manufacturing everything.
The steel plants that used to make the rebar for the foundation are now offshore. The copper mines are now offshore. The gypsum plants are now working at 1/10 the speed they used to because the gypsum is pre-prepared for the papering. The hardwoods now come from South America. Paint chemicals come from South America. LABORERS COME FROM MEXICO and South America!!! These men are willing to work harder and put in more hours each week than you would for three days pay.
Wages have been falling backwards even with inflation taken into account. So, if you are feeling comfortable with your nice clean office job, be damned careful that your boss doesn't hire three more employees for less than you are currently demanding from him.
I do hope you are earning and saving hard cash faster than you are spending it because not too far down the calendar you will be up to your neck in bills that you can't afford to pay UNLESS you make drastic changes in your lifestyle.
Five years from now all of us are going to be in trouble as international corporations who have forgetton about nationalism and only interested in world wide profit gains put the screws to every American looking for a well paying profession.
If you think I'm full of hot air, print this and file it in your file cabinet under BS. Then look at it every April 16th and determine whether you went forward or backward the past year. Determine just what it was that caused you to make gains or suffer losses and engineer the necessary corrections.
Good Luck to you and your family.
Sounds about right ping.
Also most of the biulding trades is done by illegals at a wage that an American could barely survive on. Ain't massive illegal imagration great? We are being sold out by both parties. Everyone is getting rich by selling every damn asset this nation has and we do nothing. Makes me sick.
You're right - it's exactly that way. And fewer still are going to graduate school.
The foreign students that our universities train used to stay in the US - now, they return to their native lands.
And what will we do when China gets a bit stronger, militarily and economically? What will we do when we no longer lead the world in technology?
I think we will pay a terrible price for those cheap trinkets we bought at Great Wall Mart.
From the article: College administrators are already hip to Ms. Chao's future. For example, San Francisco State University is considering the closure of its engineering school.
Behold the first fruits of the free traitors path!
If you want on or off my offshoring ping list, please FReepmail me!
I hear you. What the outsourcers don't realize (or maybe they do?) is that a country without a certain critical mass of technically trained people is a country *ripe* for a takeover. Maybe not in the next five years, but certainly within a few decades. Dumb it down too much, and we're the plum ripe for the picking.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. President Bush has been pushing for "amnesty" for illegals. Illegals can give massages and manicures cheaper than native workers.
Half or more of US engineering grad students are from foreign countries. They study here, go back to jihadi countries, and in some cases are involved in terrorism or shilling for terrorism.
I guess that Americans won't want those jobs either.
Bilge.
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