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Where Have All The Good Jobs Gone?
By Bill Ferguson Knight Ridder Newspaperws
May 10, 2004
Twenty years ago I was 17 years old and puzzling over what kind of career I wanted to have. High on my list of priorities was finding a job in a field that offered high salaries and good prospects for long-term employment growth.
So even though I always got better grades in English class than in math and science, I decided to pursue a technical degree. I was quite the misfit in the engineering department at college, having scored higher on the verbal section of the SAT than the math section. But the prospect of a good-paying job in a field with unlimited growth potential called to me like a siren song, and I labored on for four years (OK maybe it was a little more than four) and eventually emerged with a degree in computer science.
Even though I graduated in the midst of the late ‘80s recession, I found a job within a few weeks of receiving my diploma. For the next 20 years the high-tech industry was good to me, and I slept well at night secure in the knowledge that I had made a sound decision career-wise.
But now there is a huge dark cloud on my job horizon, and the name of that cloud is “outsourcing.”
Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon. The shipping of U.S. jobs to overseas locations where cheap labor is plentiful has already decimated most of our manufacturing industries.
Manufacturing workers in places like Mexico and China make mere pennies on the dollar compared to their American counterparts, and it didn’t take long for American business owners to realize that they could drastically increase their profits by shipping those jobs to other countries. So that’s just what they did.
When that was going on, the government told the displaced American workers that they needed to adapt, to retrain themselves for the high-tech jobs that were being created by the “new economy.” Many of them did just that. And people like me, searching for a career path as college freshmen, got the message as well and we prepared ourselves for the jobs that would take us into the 21st century.
Well, we’re just a few years into that new century now and guess what’s happening? American businesses are finding that there are qualified engineers and computer scientists in places like India and China, and they are willing to work for a fraction of the cost of their American counterparts.
I’m sure you can guess the rest. The notoriously low unemployment rate for engineers has begun to creep up. It increased by 50 percent, up to 6.2 percent, in just one year between 2002 and 2003. And it only figures to get worse as outsourcing continues to beef up the profit margins of the high-tech companies that exploit its benefits.
And so, at age 37 I find myself facing the same prospect that textile workers faced 20 years ago _ a shriveling job base in the career field that I’ve devoted my entire working life to. However, retraining myself for a better-paying, high-tech job is not an option this time. The high-tech jobs are going away too. What are we supposed to do now?
I fear that one day soon the only jobs available in this country will involve wearing hairnets and plastic name tags or the blue Wal-Mart vest.
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