Posted on 04/08/2005 11:00:44 AM PDT by churchillbuff
In March, the U.S. economy created a paltry 111,000 private sector jobs, half the expected amount. Following a well-established pattern, U.S. job growth was concentrated in domestic services: waitresses and bartenders, construction, administrative and waste services, and health care and social assistance.
In the 21st century, the U.S. economy has ceased to create jobs in knowledge industries or information technology (IT). It has been a long time since any jobs were created in export and import-competitive sectors.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts no change in the new pattern of U.S. payroll job growth. Outsourcing and offshore production have reduced the need for American engineers, scientists, designers, accountants, stock analysts and other professional skills. A college degree is no longer a ticket to upward mobility for Americans.
Nandan Nilekani is CEO of Infosys, an Indian software development firm. In a Feb. 18 interview with New Scientist, he noted that outsourcing is causing American students to "stop studying technical subjects. They are already becoming wary of going into a field which will be 'Bangalored' tomorrow."
Bangalore is India's Silicon Valley. A 21st century creation of outsourcing, Bangalore is a new R&D home for Hewlett-Packard, GE, Google, Cisco, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Motorola and Microsoft. The New Scientist reports: "The concentration of high-tech companies in the city is unparalleled almost anywhere in the world. At last count, Bangalore had more than 150,000 software engineers."
Meanwhile, American software engineers go begging for employment, with several hundred thousand unemployed. I know engineers in their 30s with excellent experience who have been out of work since their jobs were outsourced four or five years ago. One is moving to Thailand to take a job in an outsourcing operation at $875 a month.
A country that permits its manufacturing and its technical and scientific professions to wither away is a country on a path to the Third World. The mark of a Third World country is a labor force employed in domestic services.
Many Americans and almost every economist and policymaker do not see the peril. They confuse outsourcing with free trade, and they have been taught that free trade is always beneficial.
Outsourcing is labor arbitrage. Cheaper foreign labor is being substituted for more expensive First World labor. Higher productivity no longer protects the wages and salaries of First World employees from cheap foreign labor. Political change in Asia has made it easy to move First World capital and technology to cheap labor, and the Internet has made it easy to move cheap labor to First World capital and technology. When working with First World capital and technology, foreign labor is just as productive -- and a lot cheaper.
This is a new development. It is not a development covered by the case for free trade.
Outsourcing's apologists claim that it will create new jobs for Americans, but there is no sign of these jobs in the payroll jobs data. Moreover, it doesn't require much thought to see that the same incentive to outsource would apply to any such new jobs. By definition, outsourcing is the substitution of foreign labor for domestic labor. It is impossible for a process that replaces domestic employees with foreigners to create jobs for domestic labor.
Now biotech and pharmaceutical jobs and innovation itself are being moved offshore. The Boston Globe reports that Indian chemists with Ph.D. degrees work for one-fifth the pay of U.S. chemists. American chemists cannot give up 80 percent of their pay to meet the competition and still pay their bills. Rising interest rates will make it difficult enough for Americans to make their mortgage payments, and the dollar's declining exchange value will raise the prices of the goods and services that have been moved offshore.
Americans are unaware of the difficult adjustments that are coming their way. By the time Americans catch on to outsourcing, its proponents will have changed its name to "strategic sourcing" or "partnering."
Corporations, economists and politician have written off American labor. No end of the job drought is in sight.
Not as easy as you'd think. I spent 25 years in IT, finally concluded it's second career time (yep, health care).
To get thru school I've applied for menial and clerical and retail jobs. Employers are wary of 50 year olds with degrees and IT experience seeking a nearly minimum wage job. How many times did I hear "... you have all this computer experience... why do you want THIS job?"
You guys did fine when you were in charge. It's the finance guys that have run things into the ground. Their propensity for the short-term and quick fixes are at the root of a lot of what's wrong in Corporate America today.
Yer silly. There's IT jobs going begging if you have the right skills. Big bucks, too.
We suck.
We already are. I trudged from my mud-and-thatch hut the other day, down my rutted muddy dirt road, to pick up used brass from the nearby battlefield, so I could get mom a crust of moldy bread. I hate seeing her lying there in the sun with swarms of flies all over her.
Even my Indian co-worker, who is a naturalized American, hasn't lost the blame-shifting reflex. I learned, for next time, not to release a component to him without babysitting it all the way in, lest he try and blame my perfectly-working component next time.
Environmental rules had a lot to do with shutting down US chip manufacturere over CFCs. No such hindrances abroad, iirc.
33.5? Sheesh! That would be a vacation! I average 48 hours a week, and I only work 210 days per year. (But then, I'm a consultant, and get paid a day rate....)
Did I say there were NO IT jobs in the U.S.? Read carefully next time. I was commenting upon applying for jobs while in school for a career change. In my state the industry has not recovered yet. I've had offers to move several states away. I elect not to; I'd rather change careers. 25 years is enough, anyway.
Yes.
And I, for one, am sick of your continued hyperbole.
LOL
GM, et al, used to make money on every single transaction--from the original car through parts, and financing.
Now GM loses on the cars, its (former) parts-biz loses on the parts, and GM makes money only on its financing. In the car-finance portion, a noticeable percentage of their loans are "upside-down" after 4 years of a 5-year agreement.
Worse, GM is now exposed to a possible deflation in housing values through its DiTech subsidiary. If housing deflates by as little as 10%, GM is toast.
Pretty soon we won't have logging, either--the Greenies are closing it down, state by state.
Well, 33.5 is the average...I do consulting, too; when I'm on, it's 12 hours/day plus 1/2 of Saturday and/or Sunday.
But when it's cold, it's REALLY cold.
Unless the price of oil tanks, that is.
There might be the third group - people who will be scared to death by the new rules and who will cut their spending and borrowing.
Credit card companies will lose a lot of profit that way. Possibly much more than they will be able to squeeze out of the bankrupts.
In general it will send a message to avoid risk and that credit is a bad thing.
Credit isn't a bad thing. It's a null thing. It's the uses to which some puts credit that are either "good" or "bad." I would argue that consequences of making bad choices with credit will be far outweighed by billions of dollars spent in advertising to sell large screen TVs, comfortable chairs and vacations. In particular, family cruises sold using Iggy Pop's Lust for Life about the heroin addiction and male prostitution will continue to sell well for reasons too horrible to contemplate.
Quote: The Chinese are creating a lot of menial labor jobs that Americans don't want to do, so it still sounds like economic growth to me.
GM just had a closed door meeting with their 380 suppliers last week and told them to move to china. Cisco also aded they are planing on doing the same thing.
Tell your line to those factory workers. Your line needs to be added to the fr most stupid list.
Sorry if I offend you.
My 1978 Zenith console TV. is doing just fine. My parents gave it to me 20 years ago because I was desitiute just out of college.
2-3 times a month the color fades a bit for a day or two but always bounces back.
My wife bought one of those wood wall cabinets 5 years ago to place the "New" tv but the spot for the tv still sits empty. Each year we say this will be it but it keeps on going.
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