...”These jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back” …

Bruce Springsteen penned that line about his hometown in the song, “My Hometown.”  It was the closing of a textile mill, something that would never make today’s news — they’ve been gone for years.  And so have the steel mills, a large number of the auto plants, the TV assembly plants, the machine shops, the silicon foundries, etc.  The list is too long and the point has already been made: we are no longer a manufacturing country.  And so what?  At first blush it doesn’t seem to matter, we’ve moved on, unless it’s personal, unless you know someone whose manufacturing job “ain’t coming back.”  Maybe it’s an uncle in Pittsburgh, a former steel worker, who fills his days watching TV or hanging out with his buddies at a local bar.  All across the country people who once made a good wage are now WalMart greeters or flipping burgers with no health benefits, collateral damage from the tectonic shift to cheaper labor and the belief that just like the buggy whip maker, you will find another good job.

Now, as we look for signs that the recession is easing, maybe over, the prevalent expectation is that unemployment will drop as the economy recovers and new jobs are created.  Prosperity will spread across the economic landscape like kudzu, and historians and op-ed writers will tell us why it happened and why it is thankfully over.  For the unemployed scanning the want ads, the relevant question is: what specific job?   Is it your old job, maybe something you were trained for, or is it a job that takes you down the economic food chain, toward minimum wage and no healthcare? In the halls of Washington and the back rooms of economic think tanks it will be concluded that it really doesn’t matter, it’s recovery pure and simple: a job is a job. 

To examine what new jobs will be created and ones that won’t, it is first necessary to look at a two decade-long trend that been underway, operating well below the national consciousness. Long before bundled mortgages, derivatives, and plain old greed decimated our economy, the slow and inexorable off-shore movement of our economic “treasure” has been underway.  Hard won American technical know-how is being sold on-the-cheap to third world countries in exchange for short term market opportunities.  China is learning how to make airplanes, thanks to joint ventures with Boeing.  Chinese engineers, educated at our best universities, are back home designing our next computers and data storage systems (that they will manufacture).  American companies are farming-out design work to China to save the cost of expensive Silicon Valley engineers.  In India, software engineers are writing new code for our complex products.  American managers are setting their alarm clocks to conference with their design teams in China and India.

Ironically, third-world countries that were once exploited by colonialist American and European companies for their natural resources, are now “mining“ our country for intellectual and technical knowledge, in a form of reverse colonialism.  Not surprisingly, there are people and corporations here who are promoting this type of export as an opportunity to gain a short term, but unsustainable advantage.  It appears to be a win-win for everyone:  industry, government, and stockholders.  So, who looses?

It’s not rocket science; the American worker looses.  If this loss of livelihood was due to a natural disaster, forces would be mobilized and our call to action would be loud, but it’s not.  It’s a slow, town-by-town, city-by-city closing of the doors and turning off the lights, first in factories and now in engineering labs.  Some economist would have you believe it’s a healthy re-allocation, re-direction of our economic strength.  Another Goggle, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple will emerge to revitalize our economy and maintain our economic leadership.  It may not happen. The cadre of qualified folks to do this re-inventing is diminishing by the day and will continue as more and more of our intellectual capital shifts to other countries.

The most telling indicator of gloom is revealed by a simple question posed to my co-workers, engineers and scientists who had entered the profession when it was a lifelong ticket to employment and prosperity.  “Would you recommend a career in engineering and science for your son and daughter?”  The answer was swift and unequivocal, “no.” Can a country lead the economic parade without leadership in manufacturing and technology?  Somewhere an economist or politician is pondering that question and puzzling how to say yes.  That’s what we want to hear.

Retiredman 

September 15, 2009