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Wraith
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Austin, Texas, USA
Aug 1999
time: 23:31
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--"It doesn't mean that it created them right away."
Doesn't mean they stayed there, either. I know Dell has several times tried to move various groups overseas, only to have to give up and re-establish them in the US after they failed dismally.
It also fails to take into account the importance of the small business in the US economy.
--"Do y'all just want to be upset?"
Shh! You found out their secret!
--"could just be me."
In my experience, you are not correct. I recently had to deal with some incompetent and heavily accented tier-1 tech support in India that was horrible. When he finally bumped me up to tier-2, it took me less than a minute to convice the guy I knew what I was talking about, talk to a tier-3 tech, and fix the problem.
It was the first half hour that was trying.
--"but those workers will never enjoy the high wages that American workers have enjoyed because they don't enjoy the same constraints."
You're forgetting to take relative cost of living into account. By the standards of the countries these jobs are moving to, they are high paying. Which will enable more people to move to middle- and upper-middle-class. This will help drive local economies upward (people still buy groceries and things down the block, ne?) and eventually raise the economic standards for the entire country. At some points jobs there will start costing just as much as jobs here (plus the expense of distance, of course), at which point they will be moved elsewhere. Lather, rinse, repeat.
--"Most of the benefits enjoyed by American workers today come about in spite of big business."
Why try to ignore the fact that it takes two people to have a contract? Businesses will try to drive costs down, employees will try to drive wages up. They'll meet where it works.
On the other hand, if you want to go back to the standard of living of Marx's time, feel free.
--"Americans don't want jobs?"
Depends which Americans and which jobs, ne? I know a lot of people who would absolutly refuse to do anything "menial", like janitoral work, even if it would pay the bills.
Wraith
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
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JohnT
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Capitalist
Mar 1999
time: 00:31
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Here's a timely article, found today at CNN.com
Creative destruction
quote:
Many U.S. jobs may be gone forever. But others are beginning to take their place.
November 6, 2003: 8:42 AM EST
By Justin Lahart, CNN/Money Senior Writer
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Although economists are hopeful that the U.S. employment picture is beginning to improve, there is an abiding worry that many of the jobs lost over the past few years simply are not coming back.
But painful as the current situation is, the end product may be an economy, and a labor market, that is stronger in the future.
It does appear that there is something different about the job climate in this economic recovery. Where in the past the economy started adding workers to the rolls shortly after recovery began, here we are, nearly two years after the recession ended, and job creation has only just begun. When the October employment report gets released Friday, economists expect it will show an increase of 65,000 jobs. At the same point in the "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, the economy had seen three months in a row where payrolls increased by over 200,000.
What's going on? Many manufacturers have taken to blaming overseas competitors (particularly China) for stealing U.S. jobs. Technology professionals grouse about how outsourcing abroad (India) is taking away jobs in this country. Others point to increased productivity at home -- companies' better use of technology means they can do more with less.
Meanwhile, an oft-cited New York Federal Reserve paper has pointed out that many industries appear to be seeing permanent job losses. These are structural changes, and cry though we may about what may have wrought them, they're unlikely to get undone.
The structural displacement of workers is hardly a new phenomenon in the United States, and many give credit to the speed with which the country reallocates labor for its economic success over the past 20 years. The 1.9 million jobs lost by manufacturers in the 1980s, for instance, were more than made up for by the 20.4 million jobs created elsewhere.
"Change is a constant of the U.S. employment picture," said Morgan Stanley chief U.S. economist Richard Berner. "New technology keeps changing the nature of work and the nature jobs. I can't tell you what new technology will have spawned new jobs five years from now, but my guess is there will be one."
Maybe the shift has already begun. Even as the overall job picture has deteriorated, the ranks of the self-employed have swollen -- since February of last year 1.1 million more people are working for themselves rather than kowtowing to the Man.
Not that all of these self-employed folks hung out their shingles because they wanted to. Many are white-collar types who were cut loose and now work on a contract basis for their old companies and clients.
"Those are all economists," said Northern Trust chief U.S. economist Paul Kasriel. "They used to be employed by Wall Street, and now they're consultants."
Spiraling benefits costs may mean the trend toward hiring workers on a contract basis may continue, thinks Kasriel, as companies try to move pension and health insurance costs off their books. Meanwhile, many workers -- particularly those caring for children at home -- want the increased flexibility they can get working on a contractual basis. Kasriel can even see companies coming to rely on something like a just-in-time labor force, quickly taking on and letting go contract workers as they need them.
Another possibility is that small companies take up more of the economy's pie. Just as the proliferation of technology has made it easier for people to work from home and for companies to take on contract workers (many of whom don't even work from the United States), it has taken away many of the economies of scale inherent in larger companies.
Lehman Brothers chief U.S. economist Ethan Harris points out that on Wall Street, for example, he's seeing a lot of small hedge funds that farm out all their back-office operations. Do that and you remove a lot of layers of management -- a great way to increase efficiency in the workplace. And then there are all the little things that can make smaller companies more efficient, like the owner who knows everybody's name.
Let ourselves get a little wide-eyed about what the future might bring, and we might think about how recent advances in information technology have been major decentralizing forces -- how the PC and then the Internet mothballed the old mainframe-dominated systems of the past. Maybe these forces are now at place in the American workplace. In many industries, maybe big companies are on their way to becoming anachronisms. |
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Rufus T. Firefly
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is one way of saying it, though I prefer "mensch"
Sep 2000
time: 07:31
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I'm coming late to this, so ignore me if this point's been made (or, hell, just ignore me anyway). But it seems to me that the chief concern here is not economic but political.
I have no problem with US companies creating jobs in the Third World. What worries me is this: a healthy democracy of the sort America either has or desires to be (depends on your perspective) requires a fluid class system; the poor need a way to become working-class, the working class needs a way to become middle-class, etc. The availability of Good Union Jobs used to be one way this happened; the availability of entry-level positions in a corporation that had plenty of room for advancement was another.
I think the concern here is that we've been slowly sawing off the middle rungs of the ladder; we'll create more jobs at the top and the bottom, but there may no longer be a way to get from one to the other. That is very, very bad for American democracy, and we don't seem to care enough about it to either stop it or compensate for it (through a greater social investment in education, for example). The fear of the US turning into a large, stratified, class-bound society, not unlike Brazil, is very real in those circumstances.
Interestingly, the way societies have dealt with this in the past is through emigration; people pick up and go to the place where the jobs are, which is of course how a lot of our families ended up in the US. It's hard to imagine that poor Americans may someday be scraping together enough money to send their oldest sons to India, the Land of Opportunity. But maybe that's where we're headed.
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06-11-2003 06:57
and I used meth 
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