Jobs, Jobs, Jobs--When?

So just when will the job recession end? Wall Street is going great guns; Goldman Sachs executives are buying guns to protect themselves this holiday season when they get their big bonuses (some spoil sports who lost retirement money are still peevish).
Toyota and Ford are beginning to sell cars again and a few more houses are being sold now. People who claim to know tell us the recession actually ended last summer. Sunday’s paper—which covers a county of 140,000 folk—listed about eight jobs available.
Several were for nurses and medical workers. That is a field, we are told, of guaranteed continuing growth. I know of at least one husky young construction worker who is now working as a nurse’s aide. With health care reform coming, what can the field do but grow?
Ask that question of guys who used to build television sets in the US—or who used to do customer service for your computer in this country. (Whatever happened to the guys who lived in the woods of Oregon or northern Michigan and could do a workman like job of getting your computer to perform as it was meant to?
They’ve been replaced by people in far off places whose only English seems to consist of the sentence—no matter what your computer problem may be—“You must reinstall your operating system”. The guy in Oregon or Georgia could fix it without drastic measures that wiped out your data and your updates, putting your computer three or four years behind where it is now. But these replacement folk seem to have no other options available.)
But health care, that’s secure, right? Oh? It has dawned on insurance companies—and some uninsured patients as well—that the same procedure you can have done here for as much as $90,000 can be done in India for as little as $12,000 including air fare and rehabilitation. Rooms contain beds for a traveling companion, computers, cable TV and a sitting area.
The quality of care? Physicians are trained in the United States or Australia—and the operations work. What insurance company in its right mind wouldn’t rather schedule you for Bengalore instead of Columbia Presbyterian or the Cleveland Clinic at that kind of saving?
(Incidentally, procedures done here in America are oftener and oftener done by people with very foreign names, trained—just like their classmates in India—in American medical schools. It’s just they cost less over there.)
So just how secure are American healthcare jobs? Oh, and don’t look for health care reform to improve things much. Even those who think it will be enacted admit it won’t lower costs—it may well raise some. So it won’t do what needs to be done. And, hospitals are consolidating like crazy; every time they do, it costs more jobs.
“BusinessWeek” had an article in its most recent issue about why job growth won’t be sufficient to put all the unemployed back to work any time soon. They tracked re-employment back to the 1970s when it took about a year after a recession ended to put everybody back to work.
That time got longer and longer through 1982, 1991, 2001—when it took over 30 months to get everyone back on the job. Companies now have so many workers on a part time basis (who WANT full time work) that it won’t be necessary to hire for awhile after new orders come in. “BusinessWeek” quotes experts who predict as much as five years to get everybody back to work.
Other, more pessimistic sources, suggest as much as ten years. After all, we have to generate 150,000 jobs a month just to employ new kids who reach job hunting age. Will the auto companies help? GM just sold more cars in China than in the US! They didn’t build those cars in the states!
Houses may sell; cars may sell (after all, 90% still have incomes), but that doesn’t mean we’re back. Are we entering a time when large numbers of people who once had good incomes while just spiral down (almost invisibly) to a subsistence level of living?
That’s too possible not to be scary. When enough people fall through the cracks, they can drag all sorts of things down with them. Henry Ford understood this.