Bosses join the unemployment line

[bigbadwolf]

In the Akron Beacon Journal:

Today more jobs of bosses — from chief executives to supervisors on the shop floor — have been wiped out than those of any other occupational group, according to a Beacon Journal analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The promise of advanced-technology jobs failed to materialize: Employment in high-tech industries has declined substantially, both in Ohio and nationwide, since 2000.

Challenger said more companies today consider economic slowdowns as opportunities ''to delayer their organization — to cut the number of layers of management from top to bottom.''

The national job numbers support Challenger's judgment: Since 2000, total management positions in the U.S. have fallen by 1.6 million — a nearly 12 percent decline, according to the Beacon Journal analysis.

''We're seeing large numbers of managers who become self-employed consultants of one kind or another,'' Challenger said. ''When they don't find a job at another company — perhaps because of this delayering — more people become consultants today . . . either by working for one of the growing consulting firms or becoming self-employed.

''Inevitably, they've stopped managing.''

The loss of high-tech jobs isn't limited to Rust Belt states like Ohio. Nationwide over the same years, more than 700,000 jobs disappeared — a 6 percent drop — in sectors identified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Science Foundation as ''high-technology industries.''

Tonelson argues in his book, Race to the Bottom, that no amount of labor-saving technology can offset the low wages, huge pools of workers and lower overall capital costs in China, India and other Third World nations.

''We will never be able to compete with them simply by cost-cutting,'' he said.
Tonelson said his research shows that in the past decade, imports have gained a larger share of the U.S. home market, even in high-tech and capital-intensive industries such as computers, aircraft and large-machinery manufacturing, where the United States is supposed to have an advantage.

Free trade agreements, beginning with NAFTA in 1994, have fueled the surge in imports, Tonelson said, by ''sending jobs, production and, increasingly, research and development overseas.''

''The middle class will be gutted,'' he said. ''The division of the country into a relatively small number of high-income earners and a much larger pool of working poor will greatly accelerate.

''In other words, the social profile of the United States will start to resemble that of Third World countries.''

 

[DominiConnor]

Being an old git, I'm used to this sort of arts graduate rubbish. I guess it's about the 5th wave of this crap that I've been exposed to.

The central problem with having an arts "education" is that any form of creativity or imagination is crushed out of you. Instead you must regurgitate what your betters tell you to think.
Also, nearly all artsgrads are ignorant of history, and especially those who have "studied" it.

A huge % of the jobs we see today simply did not exist when I was born, or were absurdly obscure. When I first programmed a computer, not only did people not believe I had access to one, most had not even seen a computer on TV.
When I was a kid the mean time between failure of a TV was about 8 weeks. Think about how many people were employed to drive to homes, diagnose and fix faults. That job is almost extinct, from mass market employment to bizzarre obscurity in one generation.

Quant finance is of course younger than most people who do it for a living.
Many occupations existing in (say) 1945, but were pretty rare (electronic engineers, heart surgeons). Dentists are vastly greater in number, as are lawyers. The number of horses is now easily the highest in history and growing, pushing up demand for blacksmiths, specialist vets etc. People are richer, horses are expensive, go figure.

My dad cut down the largest tree that ever was felled in England during WWII. I guess that makes him some sort of war criminal now. The trees had their revenge, and he nearly died until they used him as a lab rat for antibiotics. Before 1900 there were basically no drugs that actually worked at anything. Now their production and use is a decent % of all employment on Earth.
Call centre supervisors are scum, but it's an occupation only a decade old in terms of significant employment numbers.
Britain used to make 17% of everything made by the human race from food to weapons.
Now it's such a small figure it can't be reliably measured.
Yet Britain is the 5th largest economy, and richer per person than 97% of the human race.

China makes loads and loads of things, is one place higher in the GDP stakes, but with 20 times the population, nearly everyone in China would qualify for state poverty handouts in a European country.
What arts grads simply lack is any historical perspective.

The thing that is fucking America is creationism. It doesn't matter if the evangelical filling shelves at WalMart thinks intelligent design is correct, what matters is that the USA has been the largest importer of talent on Earth for 200 years. Creationist success in blocking increasing numbers of smart foreigners will cause vastly more harm than cutting off foreign oil.
The success or failure of a country is determined only by the quality of the people in it. Pushing out smart people is all the way dumb.

 

[Dmytro]

100% agree. barring dramatic immigration reforms after Nov' 08, America risks ending up being what mike judge described in his 'idiocracy' (working title "united states of uh-merica").

i'm tired of any mentioning of H1B change being automatically linked to illegal fence-hopping south of the border.
even such a relatively minor from public perspective (albeit extremely helpful to MFE graduates) thing as extending OPT from 12 to 29 months took so much pain and effort from multiple involved parties...
we're still riding on previous accomplishments, but without help, and with other countries stepping up their competition, the inertia is bound to end at some point.
i really hope things will change

 

[bigbadwolf]

Another opinion:

Look around. The evidence of a withering economy is everywhere. In "good times" consumers shun the canned meat aisle altogether, but no more. Today, Spam sales are soaring; grocery stores can't keep it on the shelves. Everyone is looking for cheaper ways to feed their families .... The bottom line is that more and more people in "the richest country on earth" are now surviving on processed pig-meat. That says it all.

In Santa Barbara parking lots are being converted into hostels so that families that lost their homes in the subprime fiasco can sleep in their cars and not be hassled by the cops. The same is true in LA where tent cities have sprung up around the railroad yards to accommodate the growing number of people who've lost their jobs or can't afford to rent a room on service-industry wages.

The economy is on life-support. The rest of the world would be doing us all a favor if they decided to chuck the dollar and boycott US financial products altogether. That would put an end to Wall Street's chicanery once and for all. Foreign investors should be demanding restitution and impounding American assets to compensate for the trillions of dollars they lost in the subprime/securitization swindle. Litigate, litigate, litigate; that's the only way to make the guilty parties pay for their crimes. Either that or set up a gallows on Wall Street and get down to business.

Hmmm, maybe something like the French Revolution (which was a real revolution, unlike the American Revolution, where a bunch of plump bourgeoisie decided they'd be better off not getting taxed on their swag by the British)? You a quant? Right, mates, off with his head.