Though the data are not as perfect at the metropolitan level, other cities are also beating us for fresh new talent, diversity, and brainpower. Vancouver and Toronto are set to take off: Both city-regions have a higher concentration of immigrants than New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. So too are Sydney and Melbourne. As creative centers, they would rank alongside Washington, D.C. and New York City. Many of these places also offer such further inducements as spectacular waterfronts, beautiful countryside, and great outdoor life. They're safe. They're rarely at war. These cities are becoming the global equivalents of Boston or San Francisco, transforming themselves from small, obscure places to creative hotbeds that draw talent from all over--including your city and mine. Catch the waves The sudden stalling of our creative economy threatens to undermine two decades of progress. Twenty years ago, America's economy had hit a crisis point, with record unemployment, stagnant productivity, a rusting industrial base, and an oil crisis that highlighted a dangerous dependence upon raw materials whose supply it could not necessarily guarantee. But underneath the surface, some interesting things were happening. Previous investments in scientific research by both government and industry were yielding new technologies, from inexpensive computer chips to fiber optics. New financial instruments and practices were making capital more available for innovative new ventures. American film, television, and music were finding new export markets. U.S. corporations, spurred by competition from Japan and guided by best-selling books like Tom Peters's In Search of Excellence, were restructuring, pushing decision-making down the chain of command and into the hands of high-initiative line employees. And everywhere, economists and managers were talking about the need for more "human capital"--the buzz phrase meaning educated workers who could think on their feet. Eventually, supply met demand thanks to two great migrations: first, a wave of foreign immigrants, following a loosening of immigration laws in the late 1960s. By the 1980s, more than six million immigrants settled in the United States, the greatest number in half a century. In the 1990s, 12 million more arrived. Most were unskilled and found work in factories, restaurants, and construction. But many came with good schooling and went into our universities and leading industries. Today, 11 percent of foreign-born adults in the United States have a graduate or professional degree, compared to only 9 percent of natives. Most of these educated immigrants originally congregated in a handful of big vibrant cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but many have since moved to smaller hotspots like Tucson, Chapel Hill, and Colorado Springs. Without these immigrants, our high-tech economy would be unthinkable. Intel, Sun Microsystems, Google: All were founded or co-founded by immigrants from places like Russia, India, and Hungary. Nearly a third of all businesses founded in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were started by Chinese- or Indian-born entrepreneurs, according to the detailed statistical research of Annalee Saxenian of the University of California at Berkeley. And thousands upon thousands more constitute the technical core of our high-tech economy. The second great migration was an internal one: Millions of young, energetic and talented Americans from traditional industrial centers, small towns, and rural areas, packed up their Hondas and moved to more-thriving metro areas--generally the same ones that the immigrants came to. These native-born migrants helped to design and then feed the emerging creative industries that during the 1990s would come to define the age. This influx of talent turned America's creative centers into boomtowns. Salaries skyrocketed, followed by housing prices--especially those in the funky inner-city neighborhoods and gracious close-in suburbs favored by the product designers, video editors, hedge-fund analysts, and marketing consultants who made up this emerging new creative class. The rising living costs and go-go lifestyles engendered by the incoming creative class in turn drove out some of the lesser-educated natives, and even many of these creative migrants eventually had their fill and returned to their hometowns. The statistician Robert Cushing has come up with telling evidence of the economic impacts of these reciprocal migrations. Using Internal Revenue Service data, he found that families moving from Austin, a high-tech boomtown, to slower-growth Kansas City in the 1990s earned an average of $25,912 a year. Those going in the other direction, from Kansas City to Austin, earned over $65,000. He found similar disparities between Austin and other older cities: Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. But it's not as if the Clevelands and Kansas Cities didn't advance at all. Most added some jobs thanks to local nodes of creativity, such as university-connected medical centers, or managed not to lose as many jobs in their existing companies as they might have absent the help of innovations--primarily information technology--that the creative centers gave birth to. Average incomes in these places rose more slowly, or in some cases declined, but people's purchasing power generally increased, again thanks to creative-center innovations. Patrons of 7-Elevens in Moberly, Mo., could pick up a Motorola cell phone designed by Chinese-born engineers in suburban Chicago for $30, or order any number of ever-lower-priced goods from Seattle-based Amazon.com (founded by the son of a Cuban immigrant) using ever-cheaper computers purchased at CompUSA, headquartered in Dallas. The big sort These migrations had not only economic consequences but cultural ones. The last 20 years has seen the rise of the "culture wars"--between those who value traditional virtues, and others drawn to new lifestyles and diversity of opinion. In truth, this clash mostly played out among intellectuals of the left and right; as sociologist Alan Wolfe has shown, most Americans manage a subtle balance between the two tendencies. Still, the cleavages exist, roughly paralleling the ideologies of the two political parties. And increasingly in the 1990s, they expressed themselves geographically, as more and more Americans chose to live in places that suited their culture and lifestyle preferences. This movement of people is what the journalist Bill Bishop and I have referred to as the Big Sort, a sifting with enormous political and cultural implications, which has helped to give rise to what political demographer James Gimpel of the University of Maryland calls a "patchwork nation." City by city, neighborhood to neighborhood, Gimpel and others have found, our politics are becoming more concentrated and polarized. We may live in a 50-50 country, but the actual places we live (inner-ring v. outer-ring suburbs, San Francisco v. Fresno) are much more likely to distribute their loyalties 60-40, and getting more lopsided rather than less. These divisions arise not from some master plan but from millions upon millions of individual choices. Individuals are sorting themselves into communities of like-minded people which validate their choices and identities. Gay sales reps buy ramshackle old houses in the city and renovate them; straight, married sales reps purchase newly-built houses with yards on the suburban fringe. Conservative tech geeks move to Dallas, while liberal ones are more likely to go to San Francisco. Young African Americans who can write code find their way to Atlanta or Washington, D.C., while whites with the same education and skills are more likely to migrate to Seattle or Austin. Working-class Southern Californian whites priced out of the real estate market and perhaps feeling overwhelmed by the influx of Mexicans move to suburban Phoenix. More than ever before, those who possess the means move to the city and neighborhood that reinforces their social and cultural view of the world. And while there are no hard and fast rules--some liberals prefer suburbs of modest metro areas with lots of churches and shopping malls, some conservatives like urban neighborhoods with coffee shops--in general, these cultural and lifestyle preferences overlap with political ones (which the political parties have accentuated with computer-assisted redistricting). In 1980, according to Robert Cushing's detailed analysis of the election results, there wasn't a significant difference between how high-tech and low-tech regions voted for president; the difference between the parties still depended upon other factors. By 2000, however, the 21 regions with the largest concentrations of the creative class and the highest-tech economies voted Democratic at rates 17 percent above the national average. Regions with lower levels of creative people and low-tech economies, along with rural America, went Republican. In California, the most Democratic of states, George Bush won the state's 14 low-tech regions and rural areas by 210,000 votes. Al Gore took the 12 high-tech regions and their suburbs by over 1.5 million. Mutual contempt Bill Clinton was, in many ways the midwife of the new creative economy. Present at the birth of the '90s boom, he recognized it quickly for what it was and helped spur it by such projects as wiring poor and middle-class school classrooms around the country for the Internet and beating back Republican efforts to cut immigration. For this, he was beloved not only by creatives, but also by many of those in Red America whom he convinced would benefit from the new economy. But he also personally symbolized the creative-class archetype--its libertine character, its cleverness, its global-mindedness. For this, he drew the lasting enmity of many millions of those in the "other" America. It's often been said that Clinton was the embodiment of the '60s, and one's position for or against him revealed one's attitude towards that era. It's perhaps more precise to say that with his constant hyping of new technologies and "bridge to the twenty-first century" rhetoric, Clinton was the embodiment of what the '60s became--the creative class '90s, hip but pro-growth, open-minded and progressive but ambitious. While Clinton and the Democrats increasingly drew their support from the high-tech parts of the country, the Republicans increasingly came to represent the low-tech areas. Republican leaders like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were beginning, during the early 1990s, to articulate the cultural and political antagonism Red America felt towards the emerging creative-class culture. But the politician who most skillfully spoke to these grievances was George W. Bush. Clinton's whole life is a testimony to the power of education to change class. Bush prides himself on the idea that his Yale education had no effect on how he sees things. Clinton was a famous world traveler, appreciative of foreign cultures and ideas. Bush, throughout his life, has been indifferent if not hostile to all of that. Clinton, especially in the early years of his administration, had the loose, unstructured management style of an academic department or a dot-com--manic work hours, meetings that went on forever, lots of diffuse power centers, young people running around in casual clothing, and a constant reappraising of plans and strategies. The Bush management style embodies the pre-creative corporate era--formal, hierarchal, with decision-making concentrated in the hands of only the most senior executives. Clinton was happy in Hollywood and vacationed in Martha's Vineyard. Bush can't wait to get back to Crawford. Clinton reveled in the company of writers, artists, scientists, and members of the intellectual elite. Bush has little tolerance for them. Clinton, in his rhetoric and policies, wanted to bring the gifts of the creative class--high technology, a tolerant culture--to the hinterlands. Bush aimed to bring the values and economic priorities of the hinterlands to that ultimate creative center, Washington, D.C. As president, Bush chose a group of senior advisors whose economic backgrounds have a century-old flavor. His vice president is an oil man. His treasury secretary, John Snow, is a railroad man. The White House's economic and fiscal policies have been similarly designed to provide life support for these aging red-state industries: $190 billion in subsidies for farmers; tariffs for steel; subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory relief for logging, mining, coal, and natural gas. Even Bush's tax policy shows the same old-economy preference. His dividend tax cut was supported by mainstream, blue-chip companies, which stood to gain, but opposed by high-tech executives, whose company stocks seldom pay dividends. Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh realities of the Big Sort, economically lagging parts of the country now wield ultimate political power, while the creative centers--source of most of America's economic growth--have virtually none. Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer speak for Silicon Valley and Hollywood. New York's Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, also Democrats, represent New York's finance and publishing industries. Washington State, home to Starbucks and Microsoft, has two Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. Boston's Route 128 and Washington's high-tech Maryland suburbs are also represented by Democratic senators. It's hard to understate how little influence these senators have with the Bush White House and in the GOP-controlled Congress. The new Ellis Island You don't have to be a Democrat to recognize that the political polarization of America and GOP dominance of Washington are not necessarily good news for America's economic future. Yet it's clear that Democrats themselves don't quite get it. All the current Democratic aspirants to the White House have whacked Bush for undermining our alliances and diplomatic capabilities through his unilateralism. A few, including Sen. John Kerry, have criticized the president as "anti-science." But none seems to have understood--or at least articulated--the disastrous economic consequences of these Know-Nothing views. In the post-1990s global economy, America must aggressively compete with other developed countries for the international talent that can spur new industries and new jobs. By thumbing our nose at the world and dismissing the consensus views of the scientific community, we are scaring off that talent and sending it to our competitors. If there is any candidate who speaks for the creative class right now, it is Howard Dean. His educated, tech-savvy supporters and grass-roots, non-hierarchal campaign structure perfectly represent the creative economy. Yet his economic message has so far focused on luring swing-state unionists--criticizing Bush, for instance, for not extending steel tariffs. America must not only stop making dumb mistakes, like starting trade wars with Europe and China; it must also put in place new policies that enhance our creative economy. Here, too, neither party quite gets it. Most of the Democratic candidates for president have rightly sounded the alarm about rising college-tuition costs and offered ideas to expand college access. That's well and good, but we need to think far, far bigger. Our research universities are immigrant magnets, the Ellis Islands of the 21st century. And, with the demand among our own citizens for elite education far outstripping the supply, we should embark on a massive university building spree, for which we will be paid back many-fold in future economic growth. Building some of these top-flight universities in struggling red-state regions might give their economies a shot at a better future and help bridge the growing political divide. Democrats have understandably seized on the corporate outsourcing of jobs as a campaign issue. But let's get real: Demanding higher labor and environmental standards in trade agreements--the Democrats' favorite fix--is not going to keep software jobs from migrating to Eastern Europe. Our only hope is to strengthen our creative economy so that it produces more jobs to replace the ones we're losing. That will require taking on the Washington lobbyists who put the fix in for established industries at the expense of emerging ones. Millions of new jobs in the wireless networking field, for instance, could be created if unused broadcast spectrum, currently controlled by TV networks and the military, could be freed up. When's the last time you heard a presidential candidate talk about that? It is a sad irony: America's creative economy sparked a demographic shift and a political polarization that now threaten to choke that economy off. What America desperately needs now is political leadership savvy enough to bridge that gap. To his credit, President Bush has made the Republican Party much more immigrant-friendly. But his talk about diversity seems almost entirely pitched to win the working-class Hispanic vote; he seems uninterested, to say the least, in changing other policies that are driving away the high-end immigrants and generally undermining the creative economy. To his credit, Howard Dean has tried to speak to his party of the need to put forth policies that appeal to citizens in both blue and red parts of the country. But as he showed with remarks about reaching out to guys with rebel flags on their pickups, he seems, to say the least, not to have found the language to do so. The challenge for the GOP, if it wants to avoid running the economy into the ground, is to stop sneering at the elites, the better to win votes in their base, and to start paying attention to economic policies that might lift all boats. The challenge for Democrats, if they want to win, is to find ways of reaching out to the rest of the country, to convince at least some of its many regions that policies which operate to the interests of the creative class are in their interests as well. Richard Florida is the Heinz professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. This site and all contents within are Copyright © 2003 The Washington Monthly 733 15th St. NW Suite 520 Washington DC. 20005.
Consumers Upbeat in Jan. But Jobs Scant Tuesday January 27, 10:30 AM EST By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. consumer confidence improved in January but Americans were still having a tough time finding work, according to a report published on Tuesday. The Conference Board, a private research firm, said its index of confidence jumped to 96.8 in January from a revised 91.7 in December. Wall Street analysts had forecast a rise to 96.3. "Growing optimism about the overall health of the economy continues to bolster consumers' short-term outlook," said Lynn Franco, director of research at the Conference Board. "But consumers' assessment of current conditions, which strongly hinges on improvements in the labor market, remains both weak and volatile," she added in a statement. The number of consumers saying jobs were hard to get dipped in January to 31.4 percent, better than December's 32.4 percent but still worse than a year ago. The proportion saying jobs were plentiful also edged down, to 12.4 percent from 12.6. "Consumers are still worried about the employment situation," said Gary Thayer, chief economist at A.G. Edwards & Sons in St. Louis, Missouri. Stocks inched lower while Treasury bonds edged higher on the news, partly because analysts thought the confidence data did not bode well for next week's government payrolls report. U.S. consumers' view of the future improved, taking the expectations component to 108.1 from 103.3, and the present situation index climbed to 80.0 from 74.3. Rising optimism about the economy sent people out shopping and pumped up chain store sales, a separate report on Tuesday showed. Sales rose 1.1 percent in the week ended Jan. 24, up from a 0.7 percent fall in the previous week, the International Council of Shopping Centers and UBS said in their joint report. Sales for the week grew 4.4 percent compared with the previous year, up from the preceding week's 3.9 percent pace. According to Redbook's tally of retail performance, the pace of sales grew by 3.9 percent on a year-over-year basis for the week ended Jan. 24, up a bit from 3.4 percent the preceding week, the report said. Sales so far in January were up 0.2 percent when compared with December.
http://www.forbes.com/markets/newswire/2004/02/03/rtr1239447.html January job cuts reach more than 100,000 -Challenger Reuters, 02.03.04, 10:00 AM ET NEW YORK (Reuters) - Planned job cuts in January were 26 percent higher than in December due to increases in offshore outsourcing and to mergers and acquisitions that have made some positions redundant, global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., reported on Tuesday. Post-holiday job cuts reached 117,556 in January, surpassing the 100,000 threshold for the first time since last October. Consumer product companies led with 22,775 job cuts, the largest number of reported job cuts in that sector in a single month since 1993, according to Challenger. The firm said one of the main factors behind the cuts was an increase of employers eliminating jobs in the United States and shifting to service providers in India, China and the Philippines. Another factor was an increase in mergers so far this year. The survey's head, John Challenger, noted in a statement that one of those mergers will result in "as many as 10,000 job cuts to take place as redundant positions are eliminated." Copyright 2004, Reuters News Service
Hey, a recovery without wage or salary increases, too. http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots weekly presentation of downloadable charts and short analyses designed to graphically illustrate important economic issues. Updated every Wednesday. [See Snapshots Archive.] Snapshot for February 4, 2004. Wage and salary income yet to share in growth The Department of Commerce's advance release on gross domestic product (GDP) estimated that the U.S. economy grew 4% in the last quarter of 2003. This is a solid growth number, although well off the extraordinarily high (and unsustainable) 8.2% rate of the third quarter. However, the rise in GDP has not yet translated into higher wages and salaries for many U.S. workers. Despite solid GDP growth in the second half of 2003, many Americans continue to rate addressing the economy and jobs as the nation's highest priority.1 One possible reason for this continued anxiety in the face of rising GDP is shown in the figure below: the current recovery remains the single worst on record in terms of generating the real (inflation-adjusted) growth in wages and salary income that is the economic lifeblood of most American families. . . .
It's spread to Texas! Workfare is apparently the main creator of jobs. All the conservative folks getting jobs from the government should repudidate them now... http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2395142 Feb. 9, 2004, 9:44PM Panel of economists paints bleak picture on tax boost Economy recovering, but flat job growth a concern By R.G. RATCLIFFE Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau AUSTIN -- A panel of economists told state budget writers Monday that the Texas economy is rebounding but without creating new private-sector jobs. "The reason people question whether the economic recovery is real is because there hasn't been much job creation," said Bernard Weinstein, director of the Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas. Weinstein and three other economists testified to the Legislative Budget Board on how economic recovery would affect state revenue from tax collections. The portrait they drew was bleak, despite an increase in economic activity in businesses. The LBB is the Legislature's budget agency. Board membership includes Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Speaker Tom Craddick. Weinstein told the panel that if job growth is flat, consumer sales tax collections for the state will not sustain major new investments in public education without expanding the sales tax base on personal and business services. James LeBas, chief revenue forecaster for the state Comptroller's Office, said growth in the state's gross domestic product this year will run about 4 percent, the strongest it has been since 1999. But LeBas said the state has lost 160,000 manufacturing jobs and 5,000 oil and gas industry jobs in the past three years during the recession. Private-sector job growth, he said, has been in 33,000 new low-wage jobs in leisure, hospitality and other services. The biggest area for job growth, LeBas said, has been an additional 119,000 government jobs in the education and health care fields. He said that is mostly new employment in local school districts. "If we're adding government jobs, we're mostly recycling money that is there," LeBas said. "We're not growing the underlying base economy." . . .
NEW YORK, Feb 12 (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Thursday after a weaker-than-expected report on weekly jobless claims cast some doubt on the strength of the economic recovery. A government report said the number of Americans lining up for first-time jobless claims rose unexpectedly for the second consecutive week, with inclement weather again being blamed. Wall Street had expected claims to drop. U.S. retail sales posted a surprise decline in January as weakness in auto sales more than offset gains in purchases of clothing and groceries, another government report said. http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/newswire/2004/02/12/rtr1258340.html ----------------------- NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - New jobless claims rose in the United States last week, the government said Thursday, missing Wall Street expectations. The Labor Department said 363,000 people filed new claims for state unemployment benefits in the week ended Feb. 7, up from a revised 357,000 the prior week. Economists, on average, expected 345,000 new claims, according to Briefing.com. The four-week moving average of new claims, which irons out the volatility of the weekly data, rose to 350,500 from a revised 345,500 the prior week. Continued claims, the number of people out of work for a week or more, fell to 3.08 million for the week ended Jan. 31, the latest data available, from a revised 3.1 million the prior week. http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/12/news/economy/jobless/index.htm
The Legislative Budget Board, for those who don't know, is a non-partisan agency that works for the Legislature. They are very respected. This is terrible news for Texas and the Republican leadership.
White House Backs Off Job-Growth Forecast By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent WASHINGTON - The White House backed away Wednesday from its own prediction that the economy will add 2.6 million new jobs before the end of this year, saying the forecast was the work of number-crunchers and that President Bush was not a statistician. Bush, himself, stopped short of echoing the prediction. "I think the economy's growing, and I think it's going to get stronger," said Bush, the nation's first MBA president. He said he was pleased that 366,000 new jobs have been added since August. "But I'm mindful there are still people looking for work, and we've got to continue building on the progress we've made so far." The administration's refusal to back its own jobs estimate brought criticism from John Kerry the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. "Now George Bush is saying he's going to create 2.6 million jobs this year alone - and his advisors are saying, 'What, you didn't actually believe that, did you?' Apparently George Bush is the only person left in the country who actually believes the far-fetched promises he's peddling," Kerry said in a statement. White House press secretary Scott McClellan, asked repeatedly about the forecast, declined to embrace the prediction which was contained in the annual economic report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Unemployment and the slow pace of job creation are political liabilities for Bush as he heads into a battle for re-election. Despite strong economic growth, the nation has lost about 2.2 million jobs since he became president. The jobs forecast was the second economic flap in recent days for the White House. Last week, Bush was forced to distance himself from White House economist N. Gregory Mankiw's assertion that the loss of U.S. jobs overseas has long-term benefits for the U.S. economy. Asked about the 2.6 million jobs forecast, McClellan said, "The president is interested in actual jobs being created rather than economic modeling." He quoted Bush as saying, "I'm not a statistician. I'm not a predictor." "We are interested in reality," McClellan said He said the annual economic report was based on data from about three months ago. Since then, Bush has said that things are improving. The issue arose at the White House after Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and Commerce Secretary Don Evans declined to endorse the jobs prediction and said it was based on economic assumptions that have an inherent margin of error. They spoke during a tour through Oregon and Washington to promote the president's economic agenda. "The number-crunchers will do their job. The president's job is to make sure we're creating as robust an environment as possible for job-creation," McClellan said. "That's where his focus is." "This is economic modeling. ... some have said it would be lower," he said. "The president has said he is not a statistician. He is most concerned about whether people are hurting and able to find jobs," McClellan said. "The economy is moving in the right direction ... but there is more to do," he said. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20040218/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_jobs
I guess high tech is a dead end career now until the third world salary catches up to us or we settle down to their level. http://news.com.com/2100-1022_3-5166458.html?tag=nefd_top Tech execs look to expand--outside U.S. Last modified: February 27, 2004, 8:02 AM PST By Reuters Tech companies are seeing a rebound in business, but top executives said this week that any jobs added to meet growing demand will likely be in countries where labor is cheaper than the United States. Executives speaking at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York said they see increased hiring in countries like India and China, but few jobs will be added in the United States. Michael Jordan, chief executive of technology services provider Electronic Data Systems, said the company's employees in low-cost locations like India will rise from 9,000 now to 20,000 by 2006. Bruce Claflin, chief executive of network products maker 3Com, said the company's joint-venture with Huawei Technologies of China will add 1,000 engineers, all supplied by Huawei. In the future, customers "won't know where the technology comes from,'' Claflin said. Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox, which has about 40 percent of its 60,000 employees outside the U.S., expects little hiring. "I don't really think we'll be adding people the way we used to,'' she said. Xerox has already handed over manufacturing of most printers to Flextronics International of Singapore. Only a few companies, such as IBM, the world's No. 1 technology company, have announced plans to add jobs this year. But even IBM, which derives most of its sales abroad, plans to shift jobs to remain competitive. U.S. employment fell U.S. technology employment fell 4 percent last year to just below 6 million, the American Electronics Association estimates, the lowest level since 1999. The unemployment rate for electrical and electronics engineers rose to a record 6.2 percent, according to the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). . . . Michael Turner, president of the Information Technology Institute, an industry study group, said European countries that have laws prohibiting the transfer of personal data abroad may be better protected against offshoring. Some institutional shareholders also plan to take a stand. Dan Steininger, chief executive of Catholic Knights, a Milwaukee-based mutual funds group with assets around $1 billion, said he plans to introduce resolutions to deal with offshoring this year. "CEOs never think of reducing their own pay,'' Steininger said. "Why do they always think the pain must start out at the bottom?'' Story Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
I guess high tech is a dead end career now until the third world salary catches up to us or we settle down to their level. http://news.com.com/2100-1022_3-5166458.html?tag=nefd_top Tech execs look to expand--outside U.S. Last modified: February 27, 2004, 8:02 AM PST By Reuters Tech companies are seeing a rebound in business, but top executives said this week that any jobs added to meet growing demand will likely be in countries where labor is cheaper than the United States. Executives speaking at the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit in New York said they see increased hiring in countries like India and China, but few jobs will be added in the United States. Michael Jordan, chief executive of technology services provider Electronic Data Systems, said the company's employees in low-cost locations like India will rise from 9,000 now to 20,000 by 2006. Bruce Claflin, chief executive of network products maker 3Com, said the company's joint-venture with Huawei Technologies of China will add 1,000 engineers, all supplied by Huawei. In the future, customers "won't know where the technology comes from,'' Claflin said. Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox, which has about 40 percent of its 60,000 employees outside the U.S., expects little hiring. "I don't really think we'll be adding people the way we used to,'' she said. Xerox has already handed over manufacturing of most printers to Flextronics International of Singapore. Only a few companies, such as IBM, the world's No. 1 technology company, have announced plans to add jobs this year. But even IBM, which derives most of its sales abroad, plans to shift jobs to remain competitive. U.S. employment fell U.S. technology employment fell 4 percent last year to just below 6 million, the American Electronics Association estimates, the lowest level since 1999. The unemployment rate for electrical and electronics engineers rose to a record 6.2 percent, according to the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). . . . Michael Turner, president of the Information Technology Institute, an industry study group, said European countries that have laws prohibiting the transfer of personal data abroad may be better protected against offshoring. Some institutional shareholders also plan to take a stand. Dan Steininger, chief executive of Catholic Knights, a Milwaukee-based mutual funds group with assets around $1 billion, said he plans to introduce resolutions to deal with offshoring this year. "CEOs never think of reducing their own pay,'' Steininger said. "Why do they always think the pain must start out at the bottom?'' Story Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Unemployment Steady As Few Jobs Added By JEANNINE AVERSA, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - America's unemployment rate remained stuck at 5.6 percent in February as the economy added a paltry 21,000 positions. The latest snapshot of the employment climate released by the Labor Department Friday depicted the painfully slow job growth the country has been enduring. The net gain in payrolls in February fell well short of the 125,000 jobs that economists had been forecasting. "Employers are still very, very cautious about adding bodies," said a disappointed Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock. "If you are out there looking for a job, this is bad news," he said. Moreover, the job gains in January were revised to show a pickup of just 97,000 positions, down from the 112,000 first estimated a month ago. Nevertheless, the overall seasonally adjusted civilian unemployment rate stayed at 5.6 percent in February as thousands of prospective workers gave up looking for a job. Approximately 392,000 people left the civilian work force in February from January. The health of the nation's economy, especially the job climate, is a major issue in this year's presidential race. Slow job growth has been a sore spot for President Bush. Presumptive Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry has seized upon this as evidence of what he contends is Bush's poor handling of the economy. The economy, after struggling mightily to get back on its feet after being knocked down by the 2001, finally staged a material rebound in the second half of last year. But for out-of-work Americans, it hasn't felt like better economic times. There were some 8.2 million people unemployed in February, with the average duration of 20.3 weeks without work. That marked the highest average duration of joblessness in over 20 years. Manufacturers lost jobs for the 43rd month in a row in February. Factories cut 3,000 positions last month, but that marked a slower pace than the 13,000 cut in January. Construction companies lost 24,000 jobs in February as bad winter weather in some parts of the country delayed projects. Leisure and hospitality firms cut 9,000 jobs in February http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...05/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy&cid=668&ncid=716
