jim
--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> (Some statistics on the composition and growth of
> the US labour force since
> 2000 from the conservative economics writer for
> Barron's. Note that the
> stats do not reflect the increasing displacement of
> secure better paid jobs
> by uncertain part-time, term, and casual employment.
> If pay has lagged,
> so-called psychic rewards haven't; more than twenty
> million American
> workers - one in seven - is classified as
> "managerial", a category which
> presumably encompasses anyone in today's vast
> organizational heirarchies who
> has the modest authority to oversee work and grant
> leave to one or more
> lower-classified workers, but who don't otherwise
> participate in the overall
> direction of the enterprise. The combined effect of
> the crisis in
> manufacturing and the real estate boom have, for the
> first time, resulted in
> the building trades outnumbering factory workers,
> but employees with
> post-secondary education ("professionals") continue
> to be the fastest
> growing part of the workforce, and health care and
> hi tech the fastest
> growing sectors.)
> -----------------------------
> As Jobs Growth Proves, Outsourcing Isn't Downsizing
> By GENE EPSTEIN
> Barron's
> December 5 2005
>
> THERE'S BEEN A LOT of scary talk in recent years
> about the coming
> destruction of white-collar work as jobs "move"
> offshore. Now that we've had
> more than two years of fairly solid job gains, has
> any of that talk proved
> true? And where, precisely, have all those gains
> come from anyway?
>
> The broad story is that a greater share of
> "transportable" service work
> definitely has lost out to foreign competition.
> Apart from engineering,
> however, the main effect of "offshoring" has been to
> cap the growth of these
> professions, not cause outright declines.
> White-collar employment in general
> has accounted for an increasing share of total
> employment. The main casualty
> of foreign competition has been, as always, factory
> work.
>
> But before we elaborate further, it's worth looking
> at the November
> employment report, released Friday, to see what it
> can tell us about the
> bigger-picture trend in jobs. By showing a rise in
> payroll employment of
> 215,000 and an unchanged unemployment rate of 5%,
> the report lent further
> confirmation to the trends that first appeared in
> early '04: Employment
> increases that are fairly modest by the standards of
> the late-1990s have
> been enough to lower the unemployment rate by nearly
> half a percentage point
> per year.
>
> So if, as seems likely, these trends persist through
> '06, the labor markets
> will get increasingly tight as the rate of
> joblessness moves squarely into
> the mid-4% region -- a prospect that seems
> underappreciated by the bond
> market.
>
> Now back to our questions. Bureau of Labor
> Statistics Commissioner Kathleen
> P. Utgoff happily informed us that the November data
> showed "over-the-month
> gains in a wide array of industries." Could she say
> the same about the past
> few years? Not quite. But if the past few years have
> not been happy for
> some, they look like they've been happy for most.
>
> Let's look at the numbers as they stood in the third
> quarter of 2005, the
> most recent period for which data are available,
> compared with a fairly
> tough base period -- 2000, the peak year of the
> previous boom, when the
> unemployment rate was at a 30-year low. For example,
> if management jobs are
> supposed to be in peril, you wouldn't know it from
> the figures. With a total
> of 20.5 million folks currently employed as manager
> in the U.S., this
> category of employment has added nearly a million
> jobs since 2000. Then, as
> now, about one out of seven jobs in the U.S. is
> classified as managerial.
>
> The professions, which exclude managerial jobs, did
> even better -- although
> here there is evidence that transportable services
> lost out to foreign
> labor. At 28.5 million, professions as a whole
> gained 1.8 million since
> 2000. Not surprisingly, the biggest gainer was
> health care, which added 1
> million, to 6.9 million.
>
> But while there are still many more people in the
> U.S. working as engineers
> than as lawyers, the gap between the two fields
> continues to narrow. In
> fact, the loss in the one neatly matches the gain in
> the other. At 1.7
> million workers, legal occupations added 300,000
> since 2000; at 2.5 million,
> engineering jobs declined by 300,000.
>
> On the other hand, the hard sciences added 200,000
> jobs over this same
> period, to 1.1 million. And probably the
> fastest-growing managerial job
> category in the U.S. is computer and information
> systems. With nearly
> 400,000 people holding this type of job in '05,
> computer-related work in
> general, at 3.6 million, eked out small gains. Over
> the past 10 years, the
> number of computer-related jobs in the U.S. has more
> than doubled.
>
> At 9.2 million, factory jobs fell by 2.2 million
> since the year 2000. While
> it's hard to sort out how much of it was due to
> rising productivity, foreign
> competition was probably the main factor involved.
>
> But blue-collar work is hardly going extinct. The
> decline in factory
> employment was more than offset by increases in
> construction (+1.9 million),
> installation and repair (+0.5 million), and
> transportation and trucking
> (+200,000).
>
> In fact, BLS data recently marked a first: There are
> now more construction
> workers in the U.S. than factory workers (9.4
> million versus 9.2 million).
>
> Perhaps the most shocking statistic: There are now
> 30,000 economists in the
> U.S., 9,000 more than in 2000 -- an increase of 30%
> in less than five years.
> And yet gross domestic product grew by less than
> half that rate. Time to
> downsize?
>
>
>
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>
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>
Jim Davis Ozark Bioregion, USA
My latest books:
"The Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims: A Short Introduciton" http://www.lulu.com/content/114194
"Pure Land Now!" http://www.lulu.com/content/116320
"Vision and Praxis" http://www.lulu.com/content/132902