01.14.12
Career Bilker
You’d want to shoot yourself if you had to write stories like this one, at Career Bilker, every week. In examining trends from the economy that makes zip you must come up with fake-enthusiastic crap about where up-and-comers need to go.
The answer, to everyone’s misfortune, is into services.
And the hardest services are the worst for compensation, so to make a list which dresses this up, there must be a comparison with other jobs based on expressing their annual gains relative to themselves — by percentage.
3. Customer account representative: Manages orders primarily for large and repeat customers. Provides service and support to customers, providing information on products, orders in process and other information.
Annual salary: $25,000
Increase: 7 percent
9. Customer service adviser: Handles and resolves complex customer queries, complaints, special orders or in-store returns via email, telephone and/or in-person contact.
Annual salary: $26,000
Increase: 6 percent
12. Home health aide: Assists in providing simple or uncomplicated patient care in caring for elderly, convalescent or disabled people in a patient’s home.
Annual salary: $25,000
Increase: 5 percent
The piece is odious on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin in the castigation of it.
For example, just above the “home health aide’s” gain of 5 percent in earnings is “top information technology officer” with a net annual gain, 6 percent, deemed comparable.
The latter makes over six times the former, at $160,000.
Only a moron could make such a list/comparison. Or an entity that’s part of the rip-off services economy turning out worthless content packaged as career guidance.
The list of jobs — twenty deep — is evidence of a broken economy, one that produces nothing of any substantial worth to most of its members. It’s also intelligence-insulting deceit using trivial statistics.
The highest paid jobs are in insurance, process management, finance or degree’d shoeshining in maintenance of computer networks and software for the 1 percent.
The lowest paid jobs are those that provide much more in terms of basic human needs — home health aides and physical therapists.
During my friend Don’s final days he relied on hospice care. And home health aides and physical therapists are part of that. They did the finest work daily and, in this country, they are not paid nearly enough.
“Justin Thompson is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz,” reads the tagline. “He researches and writes about job search strategy …” in the rentier capitalist economy*.
* — Marxism joke.
The President’s weekly address and a tacit admission: ” … we’ll be able to rebuild an economy that’s not known for paper profits and financial speculation, but for making products like these, products made in America.”
A good speech but having more American businessmen to the Whitehouse to discuss how to make stuff here rather than in ha ha ha China won’t fix it. The pickings, on display, are too slim: “a padlock, a pair of boots, a candle and a pair of socks … “
The work would take a decade, at least.
And in case you missed it — the Mitt Romney Blues — one from the album you damn well better rush out and buy right now: Vulture Capitalism — the Greatest Hits.
Chuck said,
January 14, 2012 at 10:56 am
A sign of the times:
There’s a small group in the UK whose objective was to produce a very inexpensive (ca. $25) single-board bare-bones computer that would run Linux. The market target for this thing appears to be schools and hobbyists.
One of their objectives was to have the device produced in the UK. They failed to find a manufacturer who could produce the board and meet their pricing and delivery goals:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
It’s remarkably easy to get things produced in China. You send a firm your Gerber files and the Bill of Materials and in about 2 weeks, they’ll ship back an assembled prototype for your approval and testing. No big deal and minimal cash up front.
Try to do that with any US “manufacturer”. Many of the US firms here that specialize in prototype runs contract to Chinese firms to do the actual work.
We’ve not only lost a competitive edge–it would appear that we no longer know *how* to compete.
Long gone are the days when Steve Jobs said that all Macintosh computers would come out of their manufacturing plant in Fremont. I wonder if one could even produce a Mac in the US today in quantity at a competitive price.
George Smith said,
January 14, 2012 at 11:31 am
Obviously not.
No, the US de-industrialized in the better part of my lifetime. One can’t put it back together by just having a few businessmen in for an afternoon of beverages, sandwiches and discussion. In fact, I’d think consulting businessmen incubated in the ways of this economy for the last twenty years would be the last people to consult on fixing things as they’ve been trained and conditioned to think in the ways that have led to this. That is, you can’t just find someone who was always a lowest common denominator guy for twenty years but who has now started to make small runs of, laughably, candles or duck wading boots, and even remotely expect to get a future.
I harbor this turnabout’s-fair-play fiction in my head where the US military is compelled to become “efficient” — just for the sake of fairness — and have its budget cut so drastically that it would have to encourage Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and such to outsource even the last of the heavy gear and airframe production to China.
George Smith said,
January 14, 2012 at 11:43 am
The Raspberrypi page was interesting. It’s a plight and they seemed genuinely perturbed by it.
This was worth viewing today for the sadly comic graphic:
http://www.pineviewfarm.net/weblog/?p=32065
George Smith said,
January 14, 2012 at 12:28 pm
More, on “insourcing” and “reshoring,” obviously driven by a p.r effort tied to the president’s speech and Whitehouse meeting of businessmen:
http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/14/10156162-made-in-america-trend-against-outsourcing-brings-jobs-back-from-china
I referenced the Boston Consulting Group earlier this year. You can use the search function on the side to find it. But the gist is they put together some minor statistics, still meaningless in terms of the big picture of US employment.
What they do describe, and this is clearly attached to the President’s advertised meet-up, is a kind of boost to artisan manufacturing, that is small factories making stuff for the well-to-do.
Here:
“The U.S. is already seeing examples of this – starting in Lincolnton, North Carolina.
“Rock Center has been following Bruce Cochrane of Lincolnton Furniture as he brings his family business back to the U.S. and re-opens the family furniture plant. Cochrane was invited to the White House last week for a forum on job creation with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
“Now, you don’t have be a big manufacturer to insource jobs,??? Obama said. “Bruce Cochrane’s family had manufactured furniture in North Carolina for five generations. But in 1996, as jobs began shifting to Asia, the family sold their business, and Bruce spent time in China and Vietnam as a consultant for American furniture makers. But while he was there, he noticed something he didn’t expect: their consumers actually wanted to buy things made in America. So he came home and started a new company, Lincolnton Furniture, which operates out of the old family factories. He’s even re-hired many of the former workers from his family business. “
“According to BCG, another manufacturer, Sleek Audio, moved production of its headphones from Chinese suppliers to a plant in Florida. Ford Motor Company is bringing back 2,000 jobs from China after striking an agreement with the United Auto Workers. Sirkin says it’s good news for the economy even though wages will be lower in those jobs than they were previously.”
One notes it’s not manufacturing in the old American sense, union jobs at big factories in places like Bethlehem, PA, jobs that paid well enough to afford a good middle class living and guarantee a decent education for the kids.
Oh no, this is quite different. It’s premium furniture for those rising in China. Or jobs in small factories for inconsequential goods, like headphones, where the workers are squeezed for concessions, creating a lower tier of wage earner.
So once again the President is stuck with words that sound good coming against a starker reality that doesn’t get explained. No meeting of businessmen from these types of shops will produce much usable in terms of advice that helps hundreds of millions.
It’s hard to imagine “we have to pay people less” and “we will manufacture small run goods for the upscale markets of the world” making anything interesting.
Which exposes the Boston Consulting Group as just another agency dressing up a bleak picture, peddling a bit of not so hot lemonade from lemons.
Christoph Hechl said,
January 16, 2012 at 6:31 am
There was an article several years ago (3-6), where a british study calculated the overall benefit for (british) society of certain jobs compared to the typical wages.
The result was that typical public service jobs like busdriver, health care and so on returned between 2.7 and 6.3 times to what the workers were paid, while society had to pay another 16 pounds for every pound an investment banker earned.
Unfortunately i can’t find a link to that anymore.
I think there is an easy way to get jobs back from China: Try to avoid plastic in, on and around the products you buy as much as possible.
It’s a good advice anyway, but just think a bit about it and you will find quite a number of reasons, why that will bring jobs back to you.