George Rebane
Yesterday we lost manufacturing jobs, tomorrow will we lose service jobs? The fate of the American worker has been a longstanding concern in these pages. For various reasons our political leadership (both sides) is blind to what is in store for our workers, or they simply want to keep us all docile for as long as possible (at least until they are out of office). I want to take another opportunity to dissipate some of the mist surrounding jobs from recent news reports that may not have wide purview. Full disclosure: what follows may be detrimental to the cardiovascular health of the firmly entrenched progressive reader – take no chances.
First and foremost, we have to get over the absolute bullcrap that the US is going to remake its workplaces in the image of Gaia soothing green tech, or cleantech, or whatever new moniker the progressives use to sell their big government control of the American job market. The alternative energy technologies that some day may become economically feasible will, in all likelihood, be developed overseas and their offspring products manufactured there as well. Oh, we will have a share of the market, but that will mainly consist of installing the imported stuff into our homes and infrastructure.
One of the left’s biggest lies in selling the cap and tax AB32 (with the defeat of Prop23) to California’s semi-literates was hawking all the astute investment going into a new generation of Silicon Valley cleantech firms, investments coming out of Sand Hill Rd (home of west coast venture capitalists) to fund California’s resurgence as the tech development capital of America. Well, it didn’t happen, and it ain’t gonna happen – technology companies and workers are still leaving California. A no holds commentary on this was recently given by Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and Silicon Valley tech pioneer, in the 10feb11 WSJ (here).
About the resurgence of green tech jobs in California, McNealy says, “I’m skeptical that the green jobs are going to drive the recovery. So far the track record’s been terrible. That’s going to be a challenge for the people here who stuck their neck out to go green.” And to put a bow on it, McNealy goes on to say –
I see a migration from the early days of the Valley. We aren’t doing manufacturing; we aren’t doing design; we aren’t doing computers. It’s all moving to Asia and other places where there are lots of technical engineers who are willing to work at a more reasonable salary because they don’t have to spend $3.5 million on a home and pay half of it to taxes.
I think every new transition has created less job opportunity as technology has become very leveraged. I don’t think our education system, our regulations, our government policies have kept pace with the changes that technology is driving. (emphasis mine)
Two factors add to this overall assessment – the level of unemployed engineers, and the polarization of students with critical job skills. The 11feb11 American Thinker reports (here, H/T Russ Steele for link) that as recently as 2009 the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 29,000 engineers out of work. At that peak, unemployment for electronics engineers was at 8.6% and software engineers at 5.7%. It wasn’t supposed to be like that in the high tech field, but then refer back to what Scott McNealy pointed out above.
(Here I have to add that engineers come in two major flavors – application engineers and research engineers. Application engineers work on designs and solutions to problems that have already been solved and need a particular solution again for a new configuration or situation. This is the lower and larger tier of engineering that is required to implement developed technologies whether it be to build a new bridge or design a chip. Research engineers extend human knowledge by identifying and solving problems that have never been solved before. They are essentially scientists tasked with developing and reducing new knowledge into forms that can be used by society to build the next medical scanner or to precisely control magnetic fields to suspend super-heated plasma in a fusion power plant.)
The next generation of engineers, scientists, and medical practitioners are in high school preparing for college. A disturbing trend today is that our high school students are dividing into to two distinct groups – those that are smart and motivated enough to take the advanced placement (AP) classes in math and sciences and place well in AP tests, and the larger more rapidly growing mass of unqualified students who are being shoved into AP classes by what appear to be politically correct and desperate teachers attempting to demonstrate their suspect teaching skills. Even though more students pass AP tests, a rapidly growing percentage is failing them. (more here and College Boards report here) And, of course, no one wants to talk about the larger mass of students in our schools who aren’t even qualifying on simple grade-level literacy tests. Either way, they will quit school or be graduated into the ranks of reliable Pauls and form a solid voting block for leftwing politicians. They literally will have very little choice in the matter. (For redress, see the Peter/Paul Principle and contact your nearest teachers union.)
So where does that leave hope for our future? Joseph Sternberg of WSJ’s Asia bureau reports on a on a two-edged glimmer in ‘Now Comes the Global Revolution in Services’.
Imagine a Malaysian architect sketching a new office tower for London and a Chinese engineer assessing the soundness of the designs. … Service supply chains derive a new principle—that you no longer need to be geographically near the person providing you a business service—from modern communications technologies.
This supports the notion of widely separating where specification, design, manufacturing, installation, and after-sales servicing may be done. The point here is that it can be done anywhere with talented people, good communications, and competitive costs. So where’s the benefit to the American worker?
The benefit in all this is a trend toward bringing jobs back home, jobs that require contact with American customers – this is called ‘homesourcing’. For example, Americans have become more and more frustrated dealing with foreign call centers to buy their computers or repair their washing machines. And corporations, foreign and domestic, that want to sell and service American customers are getting the message that we want to speak about our problems with people who are from our own culture, people who understand our colloquialisms, and people share our values. This is creating a resurgence of hiring Americans of all ages to be on the other end of the phone when you call.
The other part of homesourcing is reducing the cost of hiring American talent by letting them work from their homes to provide information intensive services like technical design, program administration, and medical diagnostics. These jobs can also be construed as consulting engagements where the trained worker requires little or no overhead costs from the customer in order to buy his work product. This will allow Americans to compete more favorably with overseas workers where from home they can take advantage of facile communication skills that often give Americans a leg up on the foreign worker. All that is required is a good broadband communication channel from the worker’s home into the global internet cloud.
The advantage of such broadband communications to smaller, more remote communities should be clear. America’s ability to generate jobs and compete in world markets comes down more and more to first making people smart, and then getting them connected to the world through affordable powerful computers and communication media that make where they work moot.
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