Posted on 11/11/2010 9:33:02 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The well-paying, predominantly white-collar jobs that once sustained many American communities are disappearing at an alarming rate, keeping the unemployment rate stubbornly high despite the end of the Great Recession.
More troubling, these jobs in accounting, financial analysis, commercial printing and a broad array of other mostly white-collar occupations are unlikely to come back, experts predict.
Although unemployment is high in South Florida -- 12.8 percent -- the trend isn't as pronounced here partly because there weren't as many professional jobs to begin with.
There isn't a single cause to the national trend. Some of it is explained by changing technology, some of it is the result of automation. Sending well-paying jobs to low-cost centers abroad is another big part of the story. So is global competition from emerging economies such as China and India.
The result is the same in all cases, however. Jobs that paid well, required skills and produced vital communities are going away and aren't being replaced by anything comparable.
``Unfortunately, the evidence is that you see a form of downward mobility of workers who are displaced from middle-skilled, stable career occupations,'' said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview.
Autor published a much-discussed paper in April, suggesting that the U.S. labor market has become polarized, with employment growth in the high-skill, high-wage end, and the low-skill, low-wage end. The vast middle, he concluded, is shrinking.
``The Great Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the direction of the U.S. labor market,'' Autor concluded, pointing to an accelerating trend that he said has been under way for more than a decade.
As it stands, 14.8 million Americans were unemployed in September, 6.1 million of them for six months or longer....
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
There were huge disruptions in the way people earned their livings with the mechanization of agriculture and with the introduction of assembly line manufacturing. Anyone who didn’t think similar things would happen with similarly disruptive technologies like the personal computer and the Internet simply couldn’t combine a basic knowledge of history with the least bit of forward-thinking.
The question is, do we give up and give everyone protected union or government jobs and go broke a la Europe, or do we figure out how to become individually productive again in new ways?
Smoots-Hawley Protectionism and/or Neo-Luddism aren’t the answer.
I would rather see American making the products also. Tariffs are the solution then?
Don’t forget the evil German capitalists. BMW has a large plant near Greenville, and Mercedes has one near Tuscaloosa. Siemans also has large U.S. manufacturing operations. Just for a few examples.
I remember all that bull. The Perot/Gore debate on TV encapsulated it
The people who told these lies got rich off consulting for the whole off-shoring process. The process of sending vital industry to Asia under the lie of free trade. If I could make a million dollars per year telling lies I would probably do it too. Check out the scum named Robert Zoellick. He has been in and out of government for years pimping these free trade policies. His reward is head of the World Bank today. I'm sure that when he leaves he will parlay this job into making more millions on consulting deals with foreigners
The biggest problems with unions these days are with public-sector unions, not the old-school kind. But yes, I’m all for RTW as well.
How can you say that?
Obammie the Commie just told India that they don’t take jobs from America, they create jobs in America.
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The headlines very well sums up what has been the penultimate goal of the communists and global elitists since the mid-19th century.
Their ultimate goal is to subject the world to a feudal state with only the over lords and the serfs.
America’s liberty and ideology created that great freedom of mobility in the middle class that undermined the feudal state. That is why their primary goal has been the destruction of America to eliminate the freedom of mobility that is the middle class.
So far the only plan that isn’t working well for the assclown DIMs is the recent election. The DIMs want the middle class destroyed, want capitalism brought to its knees and want you dependent on them. Great job, DIMs...you smug moonbats.
The middle class has been getting hurt for 10-15 years. As others have said...GLOBALISM. The US is being knocked down a few pegs while other countries are being brought up. Soon all countries will be about the same..basically 2nd world status.
Voice of reason. Thank you.
Our trade imbalance has nothing to do with “Free Trade”. Some jobs might result from erection of a strong tariff barrier against imports, but the public would go into collective cardiac arrest at the huge ensuing price rises.
In point of fact, our manufacturing miseries are not solely the result of labor costs (although that is an absolutely legitimate component); manufacturing efforts in this country face wide array of burdens and disincentives - egregiously high corporate taxes, needlessly burdensome government regulation, an education system inadequate for modern industry needs, ridiculous product liability exposures, and an obsolescent national infrastructure.
We can now add to the above 0bama’s destruction of confidence among the investment community.
The US workforce is the most highly trained in the world. I know people with certifications stacked upon certifications and qualifications out the yazoo who were laid off.
</sarcasm>
“The situation is quite simple, really. “
Really? You mean the lobbyists representing foreign countries have nothing to do with it? You mean the laws encouraging companies to offshore have nothing to do with it? The laws making it nearly more difficult to operate a business here in the US have nothing to do with it?
There’s nothing simple about it. Its not a free market.
It is fashionable to call economic/financial stuff a bubble.
We are experiencing the deflation of the jobs bubble. The jobs were unsustainable in a competitive world economy.
Unfortunately it was the Bush admin that banned them......
This is one of many reasons why I refer to Bush as Obama-lite.....
Elect real conservatives!
Seems to be a new theme by the msm. Last evening on NBC, ole Brian was touting the “downsizing” of American Families.
Welcome to the Dark Ages.
Housing and banking debacle? Unbridled immigration? Behemoth government along with an ever increasing welfare state?
It's not that simple. You also have extremely low wages, virtually no EPA etc and China subsidizes much of their industry. That is why our US solar panel manufactures are going belly up. The SP industry in China is highly subsidizes by their gov't.
The ranters are the kids who raised their lemonade-stand pricing to a dollar a cup, forcing their families to pay more, but then couldn't understand why all the neighbors stopped buying from them and went to the neighbor kid who was still selling at 5 cents.
They have no concept of there being a globe whether or not there are Globalists, and seem to think that we have some sort of mind-control device that can force consumers around the world to buy from us, even if we ignore the global market and charge far above market price.
The problem isn't Globalism, but the problem is the higher costs of operating in the US. All other things equal, if Americans want worker protections, they have to take lower wages in order to have a competitive labor cost, for example, but suggesting such actual math is a no-no. And if Americans aren't willing to work for the wages of Indians or Chinese, then they'd better be doing something to make up for that ... higher productivity, ingenuity, quality, etc. But as it stands now, even if they're better, it's not enough to sustain the high wages Americans expect.
So, unless Americans are going to own companies that take advantage of cheap labor, they're going to see themselves losing opportunity for wealth.
Wages are only a component of higher operating costs in the US. Massive regulations is a more significant portion.
Blaming workers for accepting high wages is silly. Blame the employers for offering them.
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