ARE JOBS ERODING, OR ONLY MOVING?
In a sense, the idea of job loss is much like the street hawker's shell game. Guess under which shell the pea is and you win! It is a fact that the U.S. is losing jobs- not only in the low rung of jobs (textile manufacturing, appliances, etc.) which have moved to low-labor-coast nations in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan; but also supervisory and middle-management jobs which, one once thought, were the province of American workers.
In Arizona, for example, "semi-conductor manufacturing, which accounts for the majority of Arizona's high-paid technology jobs, is declining here at an alarming rateà.Those jobs took a hit in 2002 when 7,700 people lost jobs" (Talton D1). The future looks even dimmer: "Over the next 15 years, 3.3 million U.S. service industry jobs and $136 billion in wages will move off-shore à As painful as this year's job cuts have been, what's even more painful is that many of those jobs are never coming back, as U.S. employers in a wide range of industries move more and more jobs overseas" (Gongloff 2003 1).
U. S. workers are not giving up easily. According to Schroeder and Aeppel, "Intel Corp Chairman Andy Grove, a pioneer in the American high-tech industry, warned that the U.S. could lose the bulk of its information technology jobs to overseas competitors in the next decade, largely to India and China" (Schroeder & Aeppel A1). The protest is being spearheaded and supported by high-tech employees used to earning more than $70,000 a year, and are now forced to take either lower paid jobs, or still without a significant job at all. Today's jobless, ther4efore, are no longer at the bottom of the economic ladder.
It would be simple and perhaps nanve to suggest that the loss of such jobs is not because of wages in Asia, but because more productive techniques for manufacturing have reduced the need for some employees. "At least 15 percent of the 2.81 mi...