Where have all the good jobs gone?

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.

ll Ferguson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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