Slashdot Mirror
Down and Out in White-Collar America
XorNand writes "Fortune has a pretty sobering article on the employment situation for white-collar workers. By many accounts, we've never had it harder--the slump in the 80's primarily hit blue-collar workers. While bleak, things might be inching towards the light; as my econ professor says, jobs are the last thing to recover after a recession."
American economy has been hit hard. Enron, etc, and september 11 couldn't have come at a worse time. Not trying to be flamebait, but the usual 'let's start a war or 2 to fix up the economy' hasn't worked :-(
According to the Debt clock, each Citizen's share of this debt is $22,684.87.
he National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.47 billion per day since September 30, 2002!
The Fix? I don't know. Welcome to Globaliziation.
I'm not Seth.
I'm an EE major, and the teacher keeps saying, "If you graduated two year earlier, companies would literally fight for every one of you... But now...".
My wife who like me is a GenX'r is now a manager in charge of hiring programmers, etc.
Well when the topic of GenX's who cannot get work came up in SlashDot I talked this over with my wife. She yeah she hires young programmers. I asked how come? She said that they learn quicker and are more flexible.
I looked at her with amazement and said HUH? Are you bs'ing me? I said you are just as bad as those other managers. Promptly I pointed out that I can learn very quickly, etc, etc. She said, but fine that is you, but not me. I have problems learning these days in contrast to previous years. And GenX's demand too much.
What I learned from this is as follows:
1) Managers suck! They look at their own perspective and think the rest of world must be like that.
2) People like to validate sterotypes. ONLY young people can learn new technologies and are flexible.
3) GenX's are screwed!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I've noticed that lots of people who were highly paid during the dotcom boom are not recovering well, despite the existence of jobs, only requiring a little bit of creativity to find them. I wouldn't say that things are in the overinflated state they were, with people being paid $100K for basic system administration, but jobs can be found. I think that the problem is that most of the people who were making the insane dollars they were don't want to take on a $30K-$40K job, even if basic administration or technician work will pay the bills. They can't forget the lavish lifestyles that they lived.
I was affected by it too, for I managed to get out of field techin' to start doing Quality Assurance Engineering. That job lasted a year. When it ended, I looked for other QA jobs, basic IS admin jobs, and the like, and I ended having to go back to what I knew very well, which was field tech. It's not the most fun, the most glamourous, but it does pay the rent, gets me away from a desk all day, and doesn't leave me sitting at home feeling dejected for myself for being unemployed for months and months.
If the market picks up, and QA positions become available in the money and stability that I want, I may leave my current job for one. Until that time arrives, I'm going to be happy where I am. It's not perfect, but life isn't fair, and those that get off their asses and try to make something for themselves will be a lot happier than those who give up.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I know it's not glamorous, but think about it...
All of my computer-industry related friends bemoan the state of the industry, in general. Those of us who have jobs face lower pay, longer hours, and general harassment by management, as management knows if we don't, there's 10 others out there that will. Talk about bum luck.
However, most of my friends who are skilled "trademen" of some sort are all working. They may not make the big bucks (although most of them still make in the $12-15 range locally, which is a decent sum), they're working. And when there's no work, well, it's time to kick back and relax. Isn't this what life's supposed to be about? (fortunately, there's never been a prolonged period of no-work for them, I can imagine a long spout would trigger the same anxieties we've faced: How are we gonna pay the rent? Food? Utilities? Of course, most of them fall into the "Fuck the rent, I'm getting a tattoo" category, but that's another story). What do they do?
Plumbers. People still shit and piss and pipes still get clogged.
HVAC. Gotta have A/C in the summer and heat in the winter around here (your mileage may vary depending upon your locale).
Welders.
Construction workers (ever see Office Space?)
Painters
Tilesetters
Manual Laborers.
Like I said, it's not glamorous, but you may actually find you enjoy doing such work. And it adds to your skillset in general (Ever see those Carlton Sheets ads? Buy property, fix it up yourself, sell for profit. In today's economy, the interest rates are spot on and lots of property is available on the cheap). And it gets you out of the house. Your parents will be proud.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
All the outsourcing examples given share one common requirement - the need for reliable, high-speed Internet connections between central HQ and the workhou^H^H^H^Hsatellite offices. While a lot of network management can be done remotely, there is still a need for a physical presence - even if only to check that the cables haven't come loose...
Yes..and quite a few of those blue collar workers, some of them my friends morgaged their homes and went back to school to get degrees so that they wouldn't have to go through that again. Guess what ..every industry that goes really strong in the U.S. seems to eventually get shipped overseas.
..it's ok. It saves money. They don't lower taxes because of it..they just shove the savings into another pork barrel.
I read an article on CNN's website about 19 of 50 states have outsourced their call centres to India. So if an unemployed person calls about their check they are talking to someone in India. Sorry buddy but I don't like that use of tax dollars when someone here could do that job. But I guess since they do it at $200 a month instead of $2000 a month
I was never quite happy with U.S. companies be able to send blue collar jobs out of country and this doesn't set well with me either.
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
I'm not an economist, but this is how I understand it:
International inbalance in supply and demand is mostly solved through exchange rate fluctuations. When jobs and investment are move out of the US, the American exchange rate is drops. This is because the things Americans make are too expensive compared to equivalents offered by other economies. But as the exchange rate gets lower, things become more affordable to other countries. And as it lowers, at some point the exchange rate will drop to a level where things are as affordable as they used to be. Trading will resume at the same level it used to in US dollars, even though people outside the US will be paying less for the same goods and services. Ignoring worker efficiency improvements, at this point the economy will return to normal.
However, the great tech boom of the 90s did a lot to improve worker efficiency. Now that corporate revenues are lower, companies are finally starting to implement systems for their cost savings. Software such as Enterprise Resource Management and Customer Relationship Management tools reduce the need for workers, while the Internet allows workers to be moved to more affordable locations. These technologies are causing the recovery to take longer, but at some time the supply and demand will be rebalanced.
my blog
Well, in this area (Washington DC metropolitan) depending upon the type of construction work you do, you can be just as screwed as the white-collar types. The late 90s saw a huge commercial construction boom, but with the current economic bust, there are huge buildings that either (a) have never been finished, (b) have never been occupied, or (c) are now standing empty because all of the tenents went bankrupt. That means no new commercial construction. In Loudoun county alone (home of AOL & MCI/Worldcom), 16% of the office space is empty, and if MCI/Worldcom is forced to close their offices here (more than one million square feet), that figure would double.
Residential construction is still hot, but "used" home sales are starting to outstrip new home sales, and new residential construction is moving farther away from the metro area, simply because most of the inner metro areas are already built to zoning capacity, and "smart growth" advocates (you know, the sorts who have a $1m+ house on 5+ acres of land, and want everyone else to live in apartments near metro stops) have squashed new local development.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
The problem is that blue colar folks can take some night school classes and bump their skills up to white collar. What happens when there aren't enough white collar jobs? Then those blue collar folks are shit out of luck along with a lot of the white colalr folks because there is no place to go. You can't have every American as middle management. How do you make the leap from flipping burgers to managing 10,000 employees in India without anything available in the middle? The way things are going only the lowest shit jobs and the highest rolling in the dough jobs are going to be left in this country. You could raise the taxes for the wealthy to support the lower classes but then they'll just move their assets out of the country to. Then what happens to the US? Nothing good.
Remember all those sci fi books where machines, ultra-cheap foreign labor, and the affordablity of shipping stuff around turned the USA into a flat broke smoking hole in the ground? Welcome to the future. Maybe if I get some bitchin swords I can deliver pizza.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Prophetic words from potter George Ohr. What we are seeing is a cycle we are doomed to until we get over this mass consumerist mindset. Sure, you can go to wallyworld and buy tons of crap you couldn't afford before - but for what? I'm willing to bet 70% of everything that comes out of that place ends up in a landfill within three years.
If you look around you'll see some people still doing just fine - or even better than last year. $40,000 cars still sell and automakers are coming out with $100,000 cars. People I know who make high end home entertainment systems are still doing just fine. Why? Because the people who can afford that stuff aren't the ones whose jobs are being shipped overseas.
I hate how this sounds, but it all comes down to values. Not family values but simple common sense values - like spending twice as much on an article that will last five times as long. Like buying something that represents craftsmanship and community instead of a cheap chinese trinket you had to get in order to keep up with the neighbor.
It's everywhere - even on those "home improvment" type shows. Every week I laugh in disgust as Steve Thomas and the boys tell us how great this new styrafoam and plastic POS they are gluing to the front of their project of the month is when compared to the old, outdated plaster and woodwork that it's replacing - never mind it's a hundred fucking years old and just now in need of replacment - this new same-as-ten-thousand-others piece of crap is "just as good"... yeah, right.
You don't have to be a millionaire to buy good shit - you just have to learn to not drive yourself into debt buying truckloads of cheap crap. Until the people of the US can accept this most basic bit of common sense, it's all downhill.
But don't worry... all that infrastructure - the roads, the abandoned factories, the empty offices - will still be here, and all those jobs will come back... in twenty years, when the US economy has finally and completely hit the shitter and the people of the US will once again willingly work 12 hour days in sweatshops for peanuts - producing cheap american trinkets for the up-and-coming EU market and all those freshly minted eurotrash capitalists from the FSU.
Like $20,000 of consumer debt provides tremendous liquidity to Visa and MasterCard? No way; the national debt is simply a means of passing the buck to the next generation. If the U.S. wasn't selling debt, then that $7 trillion that U.S. common stocks lost since 1999 would likely still be in people's pension and college funds.
It wasn't too long ago that our leaders in the U.S. prided themselves that "the buck stops here." It wasn't too long ago that we had a budget surplus. These days, we have neither.
A good thing for who? Osama bin Laden? Every dollar Uncle Sam pays off the debt is several cents per year saved in interest.
You can say that again. Next time, please try it without the pathetic rationalizations.
You have two programmers. One is just out of college, and costs you $x per year. One has been working in the industry for fifteen years, and costs you lets say $3x per year.
You give both programmers the same assignment.
Most managers look at stupid metrics like number of lines of code produced, number of bugs fixed, that kind of thing. Younger programmers can crank crap out by the dumptruck, resulting in bugs by the dumptruck. And all that for a lower cost per year. But we all know that the more experienced programmer is the way to go, because he is actually completing more projects -- even though that metric cannot be accurately measured (since you practically never give the same assignment to two separate teams).
Managers hate this kind of reality, because it is impossible to graph on a powerpoint slide. They may not even know it intellectually, because all the metrics they measure are pointing to the wrong conclusion -- but as they do what the metrics encourage them to do, they wonder if there is a better way than having all these kids grinding all these hours producing all this crap.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I KNOW you couldn't care less about public housing. I have to live next to it while it rots. And riots. And robs. And mugs. And reproduces. You are saying that "OK, we fucked up urban planning. Artificial ghettos suck, we put them in the wrong place, oh well. Tough shit. NOW we're after health care and social security". And I'm supposed to think that the liberals will do a better job with health care than they did with welfare? Tell you what, you liberals fix the messes you have made already, and figure out how to the criminals to do what you tell them (like turn in all those guns they have illegally) and THEN maybe the country will give you another shot at fixing things. Voters, like myself, are concerned about issues. You should address those issues, even if that "it's politcally incorrect" thing in your brain starts to protest. And no, I'm not a Republican, I'm a libertarian.
Just a little Irony...I was sitting with our onshore reps from India and discussing a project that was to be offshored to Manila that another company was doing - and cheaper than India by half.
With a straight face, mind you, the Indian consultant looked at me and said..."But you won't get the same quality"