Where Are Tomorrow’s Jobs?
By Jim E. Reames (05/20/03)
It just happens that I’m old enough to remember the sweet aroma of burning sawdust from the lumber mills in the town where I grew up, at a time when the United States was still a major producer of lumber products; and also of raw steel; and also the king-pen of automobile production. Back then, anyone who wanted a job and was willing to work had employment.
Taxes were low. He price of a gallon of gas was twenty-cents, even lower if there was a gas war on. A haircut was fifty-cents and most mothers were full time housewives. America did not work on Sundays and it was considered wise to not have financial debt for anything except one’s home and the family car. The use of narcotics was practically unheard of and the things we now see on television would have been called from the pulpit, “An abomination in the eyes of the Lord!” For a few brief decades “America the Beautiful” was standard grade school teaching. Our public school glee clubs were permitted to sing Christian hymns. America, it seemed, was “One nation, under God.”
It was sometime in the early 1960s that we Americans began opening our retail stores on Sundays, and the workweek went to 24/7. Wanting more and more materialism we went into debt. Housewives went to work and, suddenly, men discovered themselves competing with women who were willing to work and produce for less. Men’s salaries even fell as the result of women’s liberation.
As I later learned in school, the great city of Chicago had capitalized on the low cost of coal production to generate enough heat to create steel. Thus at the beginning of the Twentieth-Century Chicago and other towns became magnets for low cost labor, much of which was black African Americans. Then as the years went by and as Japan began to realize the fruits of its blossoming post-war reconstruction we began to witness death of American steel production. The manufacture of household appliances, radios, televisions, toys, and other goods went off shore, too. Soon, too, we saw the production of cotton goods being exported. And environmentalists, along with poor forest management, brought death to our once thriving timber industry. America lost its first war during the same period President Johnson declared war on poverty.
What I remember about birth of the personal computing industry is that when it arrived it gave birth to companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Micron. And it brought death to popular operating systems like PICK. Even I.B.M. felt the sting from a man they misjudged, the stone from his dry creek bed a blow to that giant’s head.
The excitement among the labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s was that electronic data processing (especially personal computing) represented strong career opportunities of the future. It was more prestigious to be seen wearing those blue anti-static jackets of the electronics era vs. the bloodstained smocks that communicated to all viewers you worked in the hamburger processing plant, or the other clothing that identified you to the cheese or dairy industry.
Those hard working individuals who helped give birth to the personal computing industry gave it their all! With baited ear we listened and clung onto the motivation speeches of the Chief Executive Officers, who encouraged us to purchase company stock. We were told to “work harder” to be “more productive” and to “sacrifice more” for the benefit of the company. In retrospect, it was like we were being told that “our hard work would set us free!” so to speak. The promise of better wages and larger bonuses was always somewhere in the future, like a carrot just ahead of our grasp if we would only “sacrifice more, work harder, and become lean and mean.”
All the while though, these same CEOs became millionaires before many of us got laid off and dumped like the dirty unwanted coal of Chicago, in our own “right to work state” where labor still has no rights.
What I find to be so totally ironic is the Democratic Party, backed and supported by a Democratically driven news media, still wants to lay claim for having created jobs and wealth during the Clinton years when, in reality, the 1990s was a crescendo of market place forces that all came together regardless of who would have been in the White House at the time. One arrogant fool even laid false claim for being the inventor of the Internet…, all by himself he did!
What those electronic industry workers of the 1980s and 1990s failed to see was they were producing nothing! Instead, we were assembling parts that had been produced abroad and shipped in bulk to the United States of America. Thus all the hype from the CEOs and the leadership of Corporate America was just that, it was hype. Meanwhile Corporate America was “cooking the books” and today the Democrats try to remind us of just how rich we all were.
The dream of there being fruitful careers was, in part, a gigantic lie. Rather, it was a greatly misunderstood truth. What many Americans, no different than the poor blacks that fled to Chicago for careers in the steel industry, failed to understand is that in its purest form capitalism can be just as cruel as socialism. In truth, it’s a damned hard world out there. And most elected officials who come out of the private sector have very short memories of just how hard it can be at times. But I would much rather vote for a politician who has earned it, rather than for the politician whose parents or grandparents earned it. (Have you ever worked for a successful mom & pop company after it has been passed to the son and grandchildren….only to be told to work harder, to sacrifice more, and to see the company mismanaged to death?)
Instead of being producers of things originally built here in the United States the Baby Boomer generation and our children have transformed into being providers of service. Trapped in cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, and more recently Modesto, Bakersfield, and Sacramento…a whole sector of our population has became welfare recipients, after their labor became outdated no different than black coal is outdated. And, now, from every state roughly half of the working force is co-dependent upon tax supported economic redistribution in one form or another.
So whether we Republicans like it or not, economic redistribution has become a way of life in America and it is going to be here for a very long time.
The question for the Republican Party should not be “Where are tomorrow’s jobs?” but, rather, “Where are tomorrow’s careers?” How long will we Americans be satisfied with full time work reduced to temp-labor positions in order that the company can remain “In the black” to satisfy Wallstreet?
For the time being most Americans and the working class seems to be satisfied with the hard work and dedication of President George W. Bush. For many of us it is refreshing to have maturity and humility back in the White House instead of a lying womanizer who turned his presidency into a tax-supported gangbang. But if the Democrats are right about anything it is this. The election of 2004 will be as much about America’s economic future as it about anything else. Patriotism alone does not pay the bills. It cannot put food on our tables. There are nations coming to surface that want to truly compete with the United States and they have the means to do it with. This is called competition and the willing to compete is what truly separates we Americans from the rest of the world.
Hopefully, President George W. Bush realizes this to its finality. Even though he is humble, even though he is sincere, even though he is honorable: George W. Bush cannot lay claim to having lost his job to the cruelness of corporate greed. He has never been forced to seek employment from some temporary job placement service. It is doubtful that he has ever once been forced to decide between paying for new tires on his car, or necessary car insurance, or a dentist bill, and using those same few dollars to pay for food to feed hungry mouths under his roof. It is doubtful that he has ever once walked aimlessly up and down back country roads thanking God for the honor to breath air for months on end, for lack of gasoline money to look for a job, willing to settle for work cleaning toilets or to work inside a slaughter house…while in possession of a college degree. It is doubtful that most members of Congress or the Senate have ever once contemplated putting a gun to the sides of their own heads because they were unable to financially support their families. (I remember the recession of 1982 very well, being unemployed for 18 months and of walking past busy golf courses where on the other side of the fence other men had money to burn, but no concern for their fellow man. Some of them even called themselves “Christians!” who were more interested in fairway yardage than to offer a caring ear, or to even extend a warm smile.)
What our political leaders must come to understand is that a military victory on Iraqi soil and maturity in the White House does not answer the fundamental question about the future of America’s employment because we now have far too many K-Mart and Wal-Mart type jobs that are 50% dependant upon goods produced abroad. What America needs is an array of new career paths for millions of individuals vs. temporary employment?
The ugliness of pure capitalism is Wall Street ownership of companies has made the employer a phantom ghost to be greatly feared by today’s labor.
Personally, I’d rather sale hotdogs and potato chips on some street corner than work for a greedy CEO ever again. The events of ENRON were a big eye-opener for all of us. But individual business start-ups are seldom easy when made by men and women who have no venture capitol to start with, and on top of that a mortgage payment, along with everyday cost of living bills.
In our capitalistic, free enterprise, society what America truly needs is more cash equity, less debt, and new industry opportunity. The bottom line is we have a lot going against us while at the same time China and other SE Asian and/or European countries want to be our next decade competition for global markets. My fear is they will be willing to go to war to achieve market place parity. My belief is that under Bill Clinton too many of our TOP SECRET military secrets were either sold, or just given away because there are many Americans who do not want for us to remain the sole super power on earth.
What we Americans, and the Republican Party, must successfully communicate to year 2004 voters….and especially to America’s Democrats…is “The Great Society” of Lyndon B. Johnson is a failure because socialism is a failure. But like it or not the United States of America is over 50% socialistic. Until convinced to vote otherwise Democratically controlled states like New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington are all going to vote against George W. Bush and they will be swinging hard with their possession of Electoral College Power. This represents an enormous challenge to not only George W. Bush, but also to anyone who trusts in and wants to see the fruition of private property rights and owner’s equity. I, for one, have never seen our nation more deeply divided than it is going to be, come November 2004.
More things the Republican Party needs to communicate are:
First, America’s welfare systems are pretty much a waste of taxpayer’s dollars. Those who benefit most from them are the bureaucrats that administer them and the politicians who grant them birth.
Second, and according to Sherman (1996), there are billions (I repeat “Billions”) of taxpayer’s dollars being spent, annually, on programs in criminal justice that simply do not work. That spending represents a huge waste of taxpayer’s dollars, in short, to help finance the Criminal Justice Administration industrial complex that is a growing phenomenon similar to what the Industrial Military Complex was in the 1960s.
It would seem to me that the Republican Party and President Bush in particular might be well served to bring certain truths to the surface, namely we Americans are flushing a lot of money down the toilet in the name of social welfare and also in the name of criminal justice. Those same dollars might be better spent if the money is used to help start new companies, rebuild our infrastructure, and promote the industrial weaning of fossil fuel dependence. I would think it far better to invest in America’s infrastructure than in social welfare, mainly because a strong and healthy infrastructure will ultimately create jobs and better prepare America for its next generation of inhabitants, whereas social welfare programs merely create greater social dependence. For some, it is called “Pork Barrel Spending” but that’s not all bad when the right projects to finance are selected, like grants to stimulate the buying of first-time home ownership or grants that help the young start up a first time company venture similar to the way Bill Clinton did it a few years back. What is bad is the continued spending of those same tax dollars on programs that have been proven a failure, as the result of sound empirical research. Visit the web site: http://www.ncjrs.org/works
This is nothing new as it was observed more than two and a half centuries ago. Alcaeus, the Greek poet of 600 B. C., wrote:
Not houses finely roofed, nor stones of walls well built, nor canals, nor dockyards, make the city, but men able to use their opportunity.
Part Two of this series will discuss the innovative use of America’s opportunities because there are new careers to be had! The future can be brighter because there are billions of dollars to be earned in the upcoming years. Opportunity is out there. I can hardly wait to tell you where.
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