10/14/09 Stockholm, Sweden – In addition to having your salary slashed, you also face the very real threat of having your job shipped overseas.
I was having lunch with a UBS banker today, who was quick to describe how many of his colleages are now training smart, young Indians to take over their positions. It’s fun to visit the up-and-coming country, but it’s also a difficult reality that’s eating away at Anglo-Saxon morale.
It’s not an isolated occurrence, as former White House economist Alan Blinder points out, 38 percent of American jobs could ultimately meet this fate. He recommends that measures be immediately taken in anticipation of these extraordinarily tough times.
Of course it’s not clear what measures make the most sense. The Daily Reckoning certainly doesn’t want to see the government parading into even more interventionist and protectionist policies, but we also can’t turn a blind eye to the disintegration of America’s economic strength. We simply need to see more real goods being made in the US, rather than intellectualizing about how to keep the nation’s flagging service sector – including banking – afloat.
Newsmax has more details on the pain of US jobs continuing to go abroad.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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So what’s wrong with that, as I’ve been told many many times. It’s all about the free movement of labor, or in this case the free movement of jobs, and the ability to find the lowest wage costs.
In reality what we currently have is an inverted pyramid structure. This is where we outsource all low level jobs until the only thing we have left are the top upper management positions.
What we really need to do is rotate that pyramid 180 degrees and start at the top instead of the bottom.
Just think if we could outsource the CEO positions of all the top management at all the Wall Street firms to India. Think of the millions in salary and bonuses we could save.
Heck the billions in salary and bonuses to Goldman Sachs CEO’s alone would pay the salaries of lowest level workers for years.
Brazil is recovering quickly with a roar, yet they have maybe the most protectionist economy in the world. The endless US claims of free-trade-at-all-cost ignore currency issues and basically BS.
Hmmm is manufacturing really the solution ?? These days a factory is so automated, you only need a few people. I have a friend starting a £0.5M project in the UK to make environmentally friendly shower soap dishes!!!
He is planning to employ 6 people…and only 3 on the production line…
Manufacturing jobs are going the same way as Agricultural jobs.
Automate or Die…
Which leaves Project Management (like the new electro car manufatureres), building houses, healthcare and food distribution to lead the next boom….
Indeed.