This already happened in the early 2000s in the IT field. By the time students started graduating in 2002/2003, the job market was flooded and the busted dot com bubble made it even worse.
It’s part of the reason why I switched careers and became a librarian.
That’s you or I. Unfortunately in this perpetual employer’s market most HR departments are barely on this side of the American Idol mindset. In my short lifetime back when I was a kid you could walk into most low to middle level jobs and shoot the shit for a few minutes, shake hands and you’re hired. If they were ornery you filled out a paper job app. Now? I’ve seen the guys on Hell’s Kitchen have an easier time than people who are competing for a fast food job. What employer out there doesn’t have 100 resumes coming a day?
Forget rejecting you because you don’t match their outrageous demands. Now you can get rejected for bad credit, no credit, too old, your resume paper wasn’t the texture they like, you forgot a keyword in your resume, your cover letter didn’t carry off the expecto patronum spell correctly according to the HR wizard’s rules, you’re overqualified, your name sounds too ethnic, someone going by your name has pictures of them getting fucked in the ass on Facebook but they don’t even look like you but hey they have the same name!… ugh.
Betcha you don’t see that in countries where jobs are being outsourced to.
Welcome to prosperous America. Where if you’re laid off at age 40 you’re finished.
It’s something we used to do, but we will see less and less of in the workforce. Either you come in with top skills or you work in other, low skilled, low paying fields. That trend is happening right now.
And that’s a very bad situation to be when you’re loaded with college debt. Frankly the way you succeed now as a student is you guess. Whatever field you’ve calculated will be a good niche… rest assured, others have calculated it as well.
The sad part is… if every American had Ph D’s in three different industries, there’d still be millions without jobs. The math dictates this.
Hmmm. That’s what they told me when I said the 125% equity loans, subprimes, homes skyrocketing in price, anemic job growth and so on, could not be sustained. (It proved to be unsustainable in 2008.)
We’ve had a decade of job growth that hasn’t kept up with working class population growth. Wages not keeping up with inflation. Account deficits (trade deficits) in the hundreds of billions. Skyrocketing national debt that is looking to rise $400 billion a year even if the Republicans get their way in 2011. A shrinking middle class fueling a booming growth in the ranks of the poor and decades of rapid wealth distribution toward to top 1%.
These trends are unstoppable. If they aren’t, anyone, feel free to explain how it will stop without economic collapse… because these trends are also problems that a nation cannot sustain and remain healthy.
The key situation here is that they’re such a big exporter. I bet they protect a lot of their jobs, too.
As long as you’re the exporter.
China is HEAVILY protectionist and they roared out of their recession, too. Yet America isn’t allowed to be protectionist because capitalists want us to be everyone’s bitch.
Protectionism works. It’s working for China right now. Considering where they were 20 years ago, protectionism is an absolute miracle for that country. Considering where the middle class in America was 20 years go, globalism has been an utter disaster for us.
How much further must we fall?
Or do we just say that the debt, shrinking middle class, exploding ranks of the poor, anemic job growth and wage growth are necessary consequences of globalism (problems which China and Germany are not suffering)?*
Define one country. If you want cheap manufacturing who isn’t in China? And for low corporate taxes who isn’t headquartered in Ireland?
Seriously though, there is a such thing as trends. Wealth is trending away from America’s working class. America’s middle class is trending toward extinction - and that is putting it lightly.
Ah, from one extreme to the other.
I said there’s only a tiny handful of people who are the top of their class. The question here is where will the rest get jobs?
You accuse me of engaging in ridiculous thinking but then you turn around and engage in binary thinking yourself. “Well if they can’t get the top 1% of the class then I guess they gotta pick from the very bottom”. Do you not agree that you’re guilty of the same thing here? Where exactly did we get around to talking about “the bottom of the field”?
Unlike businesses we peons (and some of us slightly better off peons) may want only the best lawyers and doctors but we can’t afford them. And even if we could we’d be in one hell of a waiting list.
An employer’s market (combined with a few strategic mergers) makes such hard choices almost nonexistent.
In this job market I wouldn’t bet my livelihood on such thinking.
Every job that isn’t nailed down.
Tell that to all the unemployed college grads out there.
Uh, correction: stay the f$%k out of biotech unless you just WANT to be outsourced.
That is all.
And yet companies still hire. New startups continue to form. Explain.
Le Jacquelope, you do seem to be viewing everything through the lens of outsourcing.
America currently has high unemployment…must be because of the outsourced jobs. China’s doing well…because of protectionism. Germany’s doing well…it must be because they are protecting their labour market.
None of this is borne out by the data.
Most estimates put the number of outsourced US jobs at around 300-500 thousand – far less than could account for the recent change in employment, let alone the absolute unemployment figure.
This also requires that we assume every outsourced job has the net and permanent effect of removing a job from the American market. Economic theory suggests otherwise.
China’s success could hardly be attributed to protectionism – sure, holding the Yuan down has helped (though is a bad idea in the long term), but ultimately it was due to extremely cheap labour and the right investment. I’m not sure what your point is on this one; that China would be a net importer if they had a completely open market? Clearly that is not going to happen while salaries are so low there.
Finally I used the example of Germany to show that globalisation brings opportunities. I suspect that Germany does protect its labour market, as you suggest, but my point was how can a country really protect manufacturing jobs? The answer, in Germany’s case, is to make the kind of high-value precision items that it is difficult for developing countries to emulate.
Oh really? What data is this?
Carly Fiorina at HP kicked out 30,000 workers. She put those jobs in China. What data contradicts this? That’s 30,000 jobs right there that got lost to offshoring. Those jobs absolutely would not have gone away if they could not go overseas and we had China-level import tariffs in place to keep overseas companies from undercutting HP. (Hmmm… Why is it always ok for China to do this but not us?)
The US Chamber of Commerce says we’ve lost a MINIMUM of 2 million jobs. That was their best case scenario. What data contradicts them?
Then they need to have a talk with the US Chamber of Commerce, for one.
Talk about the data, how about this. Plenty of companies have laid off tons of Americans and then created those same jobs out of the country. Whirlpool just did this. I mean, it’s right there in your face, these companies are out there laying people off and creating the same positions overseas… Do you deny this?
How can you deny that a sudden layoff of x,000 jobs and the appearance of the same type of job in another country, is not a case of people losing jobs to offshoring?
Economic theory has performed quite woefully several times in history - like back when they said that stagflation could not exist.
Economic theory is not the be all and end all of the world. In fact, it is often lacking both in accurate predictability AND morality. Hell, if you start with the foundation of social Darwinism you can predict any coming twist and turn of economic theory.
“If you curb human greed this unintended and awful consequence will occur.”
“If you let the rich people prey like hawks on the working class everything will be juuuust fine.”
Economic theory follows those rules like clockwork.
I for one want nothing to do with any so-called SOCIAL science that throws morality to the wind. It will not come to a good end. Most of all, it’s not adapting to the rapid changes in fundamental conditions going on in the world today. Economic theory still clings to the virtues of austerity even while austerity has a long and currently ongoing pattern of failure. (See: Greece and Ireland.)
Cheap labor is part of their protectionist policy. It is kept cheap by the pegging tactic. Then you forgot their import tariffs.
They had a brief import/export deficit this last year. It didn’t last long, though.
A country can protect manufacturing jobs by doing what China does - raising tariffs. You guys say Smoot-Hawley is so bad but China does exactly that - they have tariffs against everyone. And it is working absolutely fantabulously for them.
Also, it is foolish to assume that Germany can never be matched by China. China can learn to produce high-precision stuff. Look at what the “lowly” Japanese did to us in the auto market. Remember when people made fun of Datsuns? They ain’t laughin’ anymore after that big bailout of GM. There’s only so long that Germany can hold the line. And what other modernized nation has been able to hold out against the blood tide of cheap labor?
I want to get back to something. You said you do not believe in the doom and gloom. What side were you on when the Chicken Littles predicted this current economic disaster as a result of the real estate subprime bubble? How long do you think we as a country can sustain a national debt that cannot grow slower than $400 billion a year, a perpetually shrinking middle class, the swelling ranks of the poor, and continued anemic job growth and wage growth?
How many more companies have to close down factories here and open them elsewhere before these patterns reverse?
From today’s Mercury News: Silicon Valley jobless rate drops in October, best jobs report in 18 months:
Bad times never last forever.
Nope. It’s true that CF eliminated about 30,000 jobs primarily due to the merger of Compaq and HP, but not all of those jobs were outsourced. Job elimination is almost always the result of a merger. Economy of scale is one of the main reasons for doing the merger in the first place. Get your facts straight.
Besides, how does that dispute the fact you were responding to-- ie, the total number of jobs lost due to outsourcing.
And please don’t go off on a tangent about the evils of corporate mergers…
Economic theory is simply tangential to morality. You may as well say Where is the morality in vector space mathematics?
Obviously you’ve got cause and effect mixed up here.
You missed my point. Tariffs don’t help your export market, unless Germany could somehow persuade everyone to put tariffs on Chinese goods.
Incidentally, I seem to have been wrong in my earlier assertion of the German market – they are quite open to outsourcing jobs, and like many countries they have outsourced jobs to the U.S.
The OP still hasn’t answered my question. I look on Careerbuilder and Ladders.com and still see job ads. Inc magazinestill lists THOUSANDS of “fastest growing companies”. In fact, I’ve just received a lucrative job offer this past week. So how does this all reconcile with the notion that all jobs are disappearing?
Untrue. Bad times killed the Roman Empire; wiped it clean off the map, no less. What makes you think America is somehow inherently immune to this repeated trend in human history? Sure, we can beat it and establish ourselves a “thousand year empire” (and you better believe I would hate to see that), but in your opinion how likely is that?
And… best job report in 18 months? How many people are now fighting for every available job in America? 1.5 during the Bush BOOM years; what is it now, 4? 5 applicants per every job anywhere in this country? You’re looking at a job market sucker’s rally.
You can question my arguments all day but I make you a prediction on this. If you are a college student starting out and you take this as a major right now AND IF JOHN MACE IS CORRECT!!! (I cannot possibly emphasize this too much because for some reason this stuff doesn’t get read) … you’re gonna be shit out of luck when you graduate because If John Mace Is Correct[tm], this field will be heavily impacted in just 4 years. They’ll be throwing resumes on a forgotten pile and facing ruinous student debt. Again.
I didn’t say they were disappearing. I said that the number of applicants is growing faster than the number of jobs. Count 'em: 1.5 applicants per job (all industries averaged) during the last decade. It was that bad even during the Bush boom years.
Fastest growing, great! I’ll accept your point there without contest. It’s not that tech jobs are disappearing: it’s that we lack the work experience infrastructure to produce qualified applicants for these “growing” fields. These jobs will also hit a plateau less than 4 years from now if John Mace is correct about the number of people going into the industry: it will be overly impacted. That’s the nature of things nowadays, job fields don’t boom here like they do in Asia.
Also, did you know that middle-range skill jobs are in fact disappearing? We’re quickly trending toward extreme high-paying and extremely low-paying jobs, in general. Tech is no exception.
Ah, you’re likening economics to a hard science. That, sir, is woefully inaccurate.
You can predict with certainty what will happen in vector calculus (I am assuming this is what you meant?), when it comes to electromagnetic fields and all that. Vector calculus is an exact science; economics is absolutely not any such thing. Economics is highly dependent upon whimsical human nature, and as a result both affects and is affected by morality. It practically depends on morality, particularly the (im?)moral element of greed. Assume the lack of the greed (im?)moral element and all economic theory collapses on its face: without taking morals into account it cannot predict much of anything with any semblance of certainty. Even taking morals into account the “science” of economics is laughably uncertain compared to vector calculus.
It is absolutely wrong in a large number of ways to compare economics with any hard science. Calling it a science at all is questionable.
Shovel-ready programs put a lot of out-of-work Americans back to work during the Great Depression. Austerity programs happened in 1937 and the recovery that was roaring at the time came to a dead halt.
You can argue about the chicken and the egg all day long but then you can also take notice when a fox wanders into a hen house and when he leaves all that’s left is chicken bones. That’s what happens when austerity enters a place full of starving hens: it precipitates a rapid deterioration until only bones are left.
They’ll keep low price labor from poaching on your domestic market.
Hmmm, according to your cite…
“Today’s events represent a significant milestone for BMW, emphasizing both BMW’s commitment to the US market and its confidence in the future…”
Do they sell those cars back to Germany or are they primarily sold in the U.S. market? I know #1.5 million got sold to someone in Hong Kong, but again that’s not the German domestic market.
Offshoring by its most popular definition means country A producing goods in a country B (usually far across the pond) to sell in country A.
Is it offshoring if Country A is producing goods in Country B to sell to Country B?
Still, however, I am willing to concede that Germany DOES produce some goods in the US to sell to the German market; my gut feeling about their economy suggests our labor is cheaper. European-to-US outsourcing trends have the feel of being much more equitable than (nonAsian)-to-Asian outsourcing trends. This is why I am on record on the SDMB for being in favor of ending trade barriers between the US and Europe / Canada.
I don’t know what kind of news it would take to make you a little bit optimistic. That’s all I can say. I mean, I understand your pessimism when the news is all bad, but you complain even when the news is good.
I’m not a college student just starting out. I have many years of experience, and my job is fairly secure. Nothing certain of course, but I’m working on a mission-critical project for the company.
That’s because optimism in this economy, with regards to the trends in the job market, is tantamount to delusion and denial.
You’re asking me to believe a lie. Just like those guys who fooled all of America into believing the consumer debt bubble that fueled the Bush growth years.
I guess if you’re burning in hell then you should be glad when one drop of water hits your head. I suppose.*
The good news is only temporary and it does not even come close to negating the horrible job market trends that have been in place since at least 2001.
Ok, and I started this thread saying that the tech market favors people with tons of work experience. You’re not disproving my “chicken little pessimism”.
Good for you! Things are going well for you, so nobody has reason to be pessimistic about the job market.
Just one thing - how does this benefit the upstarts who are just now getting into IT?
“My job is fairly secure”… famous last words.
I’m sure some high-up guy in General Motors said that to a Toyota worker at one time…
No, I just said that economics is not moral or immoral. It doesn’t tell you to be greedy, or that you shouldn’t give your money to charity.
In fact it doesn’t dictate any behaviour; it’s just the study of the distribution of goods and services.
It would be like saying that the study of genetic drift tells one to go out and father lots of children.
Incidentally, you have made many economic claims in this thread. If it’s not a science, and it’s a waste of time, blah blah, why should we listen to you?
True. But Ireland and Greece are a different story. In Greece in particular social security is exceedingly generous compared to other countries and there is a high rate of non-payment of taxes.
Greece’s state finances were a house of cards and it only took a gentle push to topple it, let alone the global recession. It makes absolute sense that Greece and Ireland should rein in their spending, among other measures.
But your export market will die because other countries can buy from cheaper exporters. I mean, that’s if your theory is true.
The example of Germany is quite hard to fit in this picture however.
I’m not sure of what proportion are sold in Germany. I think it would count as outsourcing however, as prior to the building of that factory all of BMW’s large factories were in Germany.
It’s not like they had to build a factory in America to sell there, they had been doing so without an american presence for many years.
Why are they more “equitable”?
Le Jacquelope, why don’t you provide some cites or statistics for your claims. And I don’t mean cherry picking articles about this company or that company laying off x workers. Because for every 10,000 workers laid off in a plant closing, you may have 10,000 being hired in 1s, 2s and 3s in small companies that don’t make the paper.
I’ve already posted the US Chamber of Commerce’s claim that they “only” sent 2 million jobs overseas.
And the damage goes Globalization and American Wages: Today and Tomorrow | Economic Policy Institute]way beyond that: for instance, as a result, median households lost an average of $2,000 a year in income due to globalization in 2006.
You want to know what the benefits of offshoring are? $1.14 to America for every $1.00 of work sent overseas. But where do those benefits go? Only 47 cents goes to the workers. 58 cents goes to the corporation. Workers lost a dollar and gained less than half. Truth and consequences of offshoring: Recent studies overstate the benefits and ignore the costs to | Economic Policy Institute
For every 10,000 workers laid off in a plant closing do you have cites on where they’re getting jobs elsewhere? We’ve lost something like 40,000 factories in the U.S. and manufacturing wages are being replaced with lower-paying jobs. We’re facing a bifurcation situation here where mid-level jobs are going away and service jobs are taking over - extremely high paying jobs and extremely low paying jobs. Manufacturing is a mid-type job.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_698351.html
Furthermore, if we had not allowed manufacturing to go overseas, what makes you think those jobs would have disappeared anyway? Those jobs still need to be done. They haven’t been made obsolete. Automation isn’t taking away jobs - if they were it would be far cheaper to build automated factories here than to build non-automated factories in China.
Now, in sticking with the thread topic… I can tell you where all those mid-level IT jobs are that we need in order to produce the number of system designers companies say they need. Hint: they aren’t in America.
I don’t think you are correct about that. When they are talking about mid-level jobs disappearing, they mean mostly manufacturing and skilled laborer jobs. But otherwise I think you are correct. We are becoming an economy of high and low skilled labor. Lawyers, bankers, consultants, systems analysts, marketers, etc on one end and McJobs on the low end. Most of the middle jobs are being outsourced or automated. IOW, jobs that used to require enough skill that they could command a reasonable wage but not complex enough that you need to be a genius to do them.
There is a lot of automation in American factories. Not all jobs have been automated or are even candidates for automation however.
I felt daft typing the preceding sentence, but it needs to be said because your way of thinking seems to be that there is a best way to do all work, and a best place to do it, and all jobs will eventually gravitate that way.
And the implication that automation takes away jobs is simplistic. For one thing, automation allows us to do more work now than the entire labour force used to be capable of. If every machine that does a man-day’s work per day, costs 1 american job, then the number of employed people in America today should be a negative number.
Your reasoning with outsourcing is similarly wrong-headed, but common.
Okay, about mid-level tech jobs…
How do you, as a college student starting out today, acquire the work experience you need in order to fulfill the requirements to become one of those “in-demand” systems designers? How many companies (as in, their HR departments) do you think will hire some new graduate who “learned this in college” but have no corporate experience? Yes, I know it’s irrational to screen out EVERYONE with work experience, but I’ve worked with these HR people: they do that. It’s become Catch-22 out there for this “in-demand” field… unless there are in fact mid-level tech work experience jobs out there… do you know of any swelling demand for mid-level tech work?*
Why isn’t there an equal amount of automation in Chinese factories that produce the same thing?
My reasoning with outsourcing is that for the last ten years we have not produced any major jobs-producing industry while cheap labor nations are seeing a boom in jobs in emerging industries such as biotech and solar cell manufacturing. This cannot be denied. There are absolutely booming job markets out there and America is missing out on them… but India and China are not.
Now how is that wrong-headed?
The fact is that while offshoring may arguably have been beneficial in the past, it no longer is. If it was we would be seeing a boom in new jobs created by offshoring: that is not happening. Nor will it from this point on. Things have changed.
I would imagine you start out as most people in technology start out after college. You look at companies like Accenture or Microsoft or Google or any of the myriad of other tech companies in New York, California and Boston that are looking to hire groups of smart, entry level analysts.
Also, no one with any sense works with HR people. You network with hiring managers, alumni and other people on the inside.
Because Chinese labor is cheap relative to capital used for automation.
…
If you can reach them behind their ivory castles. Granted in some colleges they come and recruit.
But to address both your points here, the problem is that I sincerely doubt that these companies offer enough jobs for all the qualified entry-level people out there right now. Plus there are out of work experienced people competing, too.
I wouldn’t say don’t get in the gold rush (well, I wouldn’t call something this small a “gold rush”) now, but I would say don’t be surprised if you start for a tech degree now and in 4 years find that it’s heavily impacted.
EVERY field is heavily impacted when unemployment is as bad as it is now. Such is the nature of high unemployment.
Wait… robots work for $0/hour wages… Right?