The grand challenge of employment
Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California—Berkeley, contends, “We need 125,000 new jobs per month simply to keep up with the growth of the American population seeking jobs.”
Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- EDN, August 26, 2010
| View as PDF |
The employment situation in the United States took another
hit in July, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting a
drop of 131,000 in nonfarm-payroll employment. The Bureau
reported that 6.6 million have been jobless for 27 weeks or
more, and 8.5 million are working part-time despite wanting
full-time employment. If there is good news, it’s that much of
the employment decline represented the layoff of temporary government
census workers. Private-sector payroll employment increased 71,000 over
the month, with 36,000 of that number representing manufacturing jobs.As Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California— Berkeley, notes, however, “We need 125,000 new jobs per month simply to keep up with the growth of the American population seeking jobs.” Clearly, a new golden age of manufacturing in the United States is nowhere in sight.
To former Intel executive Andy
Grove, that fact is seriously bad news.
He contends that a nation’s manufacturing
prowess is the key to its ability
to innovate. Start-ups alone cannot
continue a cycle of innovations (Reference
1). Start-ups are wonderful, Grove
writes, but what should follow “that
mythical moment of creation in the garage”
is equally important, as companies
learn to scale up to mass production.
Scaling, he says, is “necessary to make
innovation matter,” but, unfortunately,
it’s no longer happening in the United
States. He cites personal experience
with failure to scale, pointing out that
Intel’s hesitancy to expand production
of memory chips enabled its offshore
competitors to dominate the market.
Grove notes that Intel did not repeat
this mistake with microprocessors.
To help other US companies avoid the
same pitfall, he proposes strong medicine,
including taxing the products of
offshore labor, dedicating the proceeds
to companies that will scale up their US
production facilities, and creating jobs
that can absorb the increasing numbers
of people entering the US work force.If—absent Grove’s strong medicine, which Congress seems unlikely to soon administer—the manufacturing-employment outlook is bleak, prospects for EDN readers should be considerably better, according to speakers at National Instruments’ NIWeek event, which took place this month in Austin, TX. Keynote speaker Michio Kaku, PhD, a theoretical physicist and TV personality, said that the future is bleak for middlemen, agents, tellers, brokers, and anyone performing repetitive tasks but that the future is bright for artists, leaders, creative people, and intellectual workers of the type who attend NIWeek.
During a panel discussion, NI executives painted a similarly bright picture for engineers. James Truchard, PhD, president, chief executive officer, and co-founder of NI, commented on recent corporate failures, from the tragic BP oil spill to the nearly comical “antennagate” problems of Apple. Such cases, he said, stem from a lack of healthy communication up the chain of command—which can lead to situations in which safety takes a back seat to the bottom line, as in BP’s case, or in which aesthetic concerns outweigh performance issues, as in Apple’s case. The consensus seems to be that corporations need to foster an environment in which engineers can have a stronger role in challenging the decisions of dysfunctional management.
As Jeff Kodosky, co-founder and fellow at NI, put it, “Engineering is the only solution to the grand challenges we face. Those challenges can be solved only by engineers.”
The NI executives aren’t seconding Grove’s prescription. “I believe the world is flat, and we must compete on a global basis,” said Phil Hester, senior vice president for R&D at the company. And that idea pertains to engineering as well as manufacturing, he added, with the sun never setting on dispersed teams of innovators. Alex Davern, chief financial officer and senior vice president of NI, said that the goal should center on eliminating low-value jobs and on driving investment that increases the standard of living for everyone.
As the various executives explained, there are no shortages of grand challenges for engineers to solve—from perfecting fusion to safely extracting shale gas. Add to that the challenge of providing meaningful employment for laid-off workers who will never become certified LabView programmers. Let the work begin.
Contact me at richard.nelson@cancom.com.
| Reference |
|
Talkback
-
"Low value jobs"
That would be the manufacturing base there son.
It's the thousands of little people, who look at their gauges and dials and figure out that your recipe isn't being followed, WITHOUT waiting for product failure feedback two or three months down the road, who preserve your brand value.
Now you want Indians and Chinese, who do not WANT to support your brand, preferring to earn employment history with you so they can sell it to the soon-to-arrive Chinese competitor as 'experienced senior talent', to lie to you, ignore your orders and destroy your brand.
Michael Miller - 2010-3-9 10:08:42 PDT -
As Jeff Kodosky, co-founder and fellow at NI, put it, “Engineering is the only solution to the grand challenges we face. Those challenges can be solved only by engineers.”
We've been hearing that from C-level executives for decades, but just try to get an engineering job. These executives, with their business school backgrounds, do not understand engineers or the engineering process. They want quick cheap solutions NOW that they can wring money out of, without adding value themselves. They are not willing to fund research and development, or even current product advancement. They post job advertisements with impossible skills mixtures and will only settle for perfect candidates. They wait to replace senior engineers just days before they retire, without training replacements in-house and without realizing that their refusal to hire engineers over the past two decades has created an experience gap in the candidate pool. They do not even want to take advantage of fresh college graduates any more! They complain that we do not graduate enough new engineers each year, yet our new graduates cannot get interviews. Gen Y has realized that there is little future in engineering. Executives have milked their companies to death, and are surprised to watch it die.
Ferd Dong - 2010-27-8 09:11:12 PDT -
Mr. Grove is wrong to suggest taxing the product of foreign labor. He is really suggesting that efficient labor should subsidize inefficient labor, driving out the incentive for the inefficient to innovate while increasing the cost to the consumer. We burden our businesses with some of the world's highest taxes, punishing the entities that could provide jobs. We further tax them through excessive regulation that fails to abate the abuses it purports to protect us from. We have to compete or we'll continue to lose out.
Humphrey Ploughjogger - 2010-26-8 14:35:42 PDT -
"Alex Davern, chief financial officer and senior vice president of NI, said that the goal should center on eliminating low-value jobs and on driving investment that increases the standard of living for everyone."
What? How is it possible to increase the standard of living of "everyone" by eliminating low-value jobs? Can everyone have a high-value job in Mr Daverns world? Perhaps Mr Davern would feel differently if his CFO job was considered low-value...now that I think of it, when has a CFO actually created value for anyone "else"...like by innovating a new product that people will buy?
William Martin - 2010-26-8 13:29:34 PDT
