Famous economist: 40 million jobs at risk

Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder says the current one million jobs lost from offshoring is the "tip of the iceberg". In a page 1 Wall Street Journal article this week, Blinder says as many as 40 million American jobs could be shipped overseas in the next decade or two.

"A New Industrial Revolution" is the scale of change this nation faces, analogous to when workers left farms en masse and migrated to cities. This change set off massive shifts in "how and where people lived, how they educated their children, the organization of businesses, the form and practices of governments."

The changes we face in the coming generation are of this scale. We must recognize the dimensions of the problem and begin to prepare ourselves for it.

He says the most important divide is not, as commonly argued, between jobs that require a lot of education and those that don't. It's not simply that skilled jobs stay in the US and lesser-skilled jobs go to India or China. The important distinction is between services that must be done in the U.S. and those that can -- or will someday -- be delivered electronically with little degradation in quality. The more personal work of divorce lawyers isn't likely to go overseas, for instance, while some of the work of tax lawyers could be. Civil engineers, who have to be on site, could be in great demand in the U.S.; computer engineers might not be.

Our educational system must adapt. A college degree will not offer a worker protection if they have worked hard only to master a skill that is easily outsourced offshore.

Bottom line: jobs with person-to-person contact will survive; many others will not. The janitor's job is safe. But all you computer programmers...oh, well.

Still standing

It's been a long week. Just waiting for the East Coast head honcho to arrive, probably to lay people off. After all, she had said all "affected Associates" would be notified by end of February, and she was to be here the 27th and 28th. And with our unit being potentially redundant after the last internal organization, things weren't looking good.

But she has come and gone and I am still standing. I was sick yesterday and working from home, and spent the whole day checking voicemail every half hour. With each call I waited anxiously to see if a "summons" was on my voicemail; fortunately I always heard "no new messages" awaited me.

They have taken a new quiet policy and are not announcing layoffs, but I know something was supposed to happen yesterday. Of course word always gets around when people are let go, so our minds will not be eased just because a formal announcement is withheld.

Or maybe it's just not a big deal any longer. What a great topic for our internal corporate web site: "Click here for the latest layoff news!" "Check back often to see if your name is on the list."

Sometime ahead they will be analyzing in detail redundant positions after this reorganization is complete. That may be a hard exercise to survive. But for now I'm still here.

But each layoff round leaves one battered and bruised. How much can someone take without becoming perennially demotivated?