The Middle Class and Offshoring

Re: Into thin Air, Fast Company, April 2004
America’ Middle Class has traditionally been composed of higher paying manufacturing (blue Collar) workers, white collar (service) workers, and professionals. Manufacturing is rapidly exiting the Country and as the article so explicitly describes, so are service jobs and eventually many professional jobs as well. Those who have lost their jobs are finding their future downwardly mobile as they find positions paying half or less their previous employment; record bankruptcies and foreclosures tell their story of survival on a day-to-day basis. Those who still have their jobs find unrelenting downward pressures on both wages and benefits. The net result in the not-so-distant future is the disappearance of the American Middle Class. The extinction of this class that has been the glue of the American social fabric for over two centuries does not bode well for this country. The effect of globalization and multinationals with no country loyalty (IBM can no longer be considered an American firm but a global one who seeks global advantages no matter what cost to any nation state) is the lowering of global wages to the least common denominator (As India will soon learn to its amazement when ‘higher-paying’ Indian jobs start moving to Filipinos and Indonesians who will work for half to third). As for globalization, beware of what you asked for, you just might get it, and we did!

Paul Herbig
Angola, Indiana



Re: Into thin Air, Fast Company, April 2004
I wept as I read the personal stories of those who have lost their jobs to offshoring. What a waste of human resources. We tell our youth “Get a college Education in a good field and you will get a great job”. They do and the result is throw-away workers, discarded and forgotten. No safety net exists for them and as they exhaust their savings and retirement funds, they scurry around looking for work, any work. Economists and global trade proponents say they need to be retrained and educated further. But these disposable workers said, almost to the person and correctly so, “In What? What should I train for that will still be here when I graduate?” And we do not have an answer for them.. What should they do? Be a retail clerk at Walmart without benefits? An health care nursing assistant making minimum wage? So goes the Baby Boomers, the most educated generation in the world, little good it did them.

Paul Herbig
Angola, Indiana


Re: Into thin Air, Fast Company, April 2004
The Information Technology (IT) industry in the U.S. has begun an inevitable death spiral. Offshoring and high unemployment in the field has caused wages to drop dramatically. They will continue until an equilibrium with overseas counterparts has been reached (probably in low 40s). The best and brightest of our youth will see this tumble and correctly calculate the industry holds no future for them and they will go elsewhere (The number of Computer Science majors have fallen annually over the last 3 years and will continue to drop). One day the multinationals will look around and comment with delayed justification, “See. We can’t find enough good IT workers. Not enough American students are entering this field so we have no choice but to bring in foreign workers and offshore these jobs.”. And so the vicious circle has claimed yet another American industry.