Shortage of skilled workers is mirage

Date: Monday, May 08, 2006 2:28 PM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1473 >>>>>

It has been a long time since an outstanding editorial was published in a
major newspaper that debunks the standard shortage shouting propaganda.
Christopher R. Moylan, a city council member of Sunnyvale, California, just
published a whopper in the Mercury News.

Moylan's editorial is even more surprising considering that he is an
academic that teaches in the California university system. He has an
undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Princeton and a PhD from Stanford.
It's very rare to see anyone in academia openly deny worker shortages, and
even rarer for one to admit that there is a good reason kids are shunning
technical careers.

You can find out more about such as contact information by going to this
web page:
http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/City+Council/Council+Members/christopher-moylan.htm

Moylan should be holding a much higher public office than city council
member. Soon he may be looking for a new job when the Stanford University
administration reads this editorial, so how about some of you Californians
ask him to run for Governor? If Moylan won we might be able to say "HASTA
LA VISTA, BABY" to shortage shouting!

I strongly encourage all California voters to call or email Moylan and
encourage him to run for a higher office. I'm sure he wouldn't mind seeing
some support from out of state people also.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/14523129.htm

Posted on Sun, May. 07, 2006

Shortage of skilled workers is a convenient mirage

By Christopher R. Moylan

Know any scientists or engineers who have been laid off in the last five
years?

Most readers would be able to answer ``yes'' to that question, but you'd
never know it from reading op-ed pieces by local academics and senior
managers from industry. ``Technology companies are starving for skilled
employees,'' wrote IBM's Jeanette Horan (Mercury News, May 2). ``The supply
is low.'' Her solution, like that of San Jose State's engineering dean
Belle Wei (April 27) and former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz (March 24, 2005)
is to close what Wei refers to as ``this alarming gap'' by pressuring more
women to major in technical fields. Others, such as SpikeSource CEO Kim
Polese (May 1), use the excuse of a shortage of high-tech workers to
justify eliminating ``excessive restrictions on immigration'' and allowing
businesses to import higher numbers of foreign workers. Whether the cry is
for more H-1B visas or more female engineers, the goal is the same: a
dramatic increase in the supply of high-tech workers. The problem with
these proposed remedies is that they address an employee shortage that does
not, in fact, exist.

Thousands of highly trained scientists and engineers still roam Silicon
Valley looking for work after having been cut adrift by the same types of
people who now claim that they can't find anyone to hire. And thousands
more are now working in different fields at substantially lower salaries,
having given up searching for an equivalent to their previous positions.
``No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able
to find any sign of a current shortage,'' said demographer Michael
Teitelbaum in the Wall Street Journal's Nov. 16 front-page story, ``Behind
`Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy.'' In a column titled
``A Phony Science Gap?'' (Feb. 22), the Washington Post's Robert J.
Samuelson explained in detail why ``it's emphatically not true, as much of
the alarmist commentary on America's `competitiveness' implies, that the
United States now faces crippling shortages in its technological elites.''

Do these bogus claims of a scarcity of skilled technical workers constitute
a campaign to avoid having to pay market price for white-collar labor? Yes,
but there's more to it than that. Corporations legitimately can anticipate
a shortage of such workers in the future, because their own actions are
setting the stage for one.

Since the early 1980s, employers have systematically eliminated most of the
traditional incentives for high-tech careers. They pay the inventors and
developers of their products a fraction of what their sales and marketing
representatives make. They have eliminated pensions, individual offices and
medical benefits. They charge vacation time for company shutdowns. And,
most significantly, they have done away with job security -- a critical
blunder because product-development cycles are often longer than economic
cycles.

It's amazing that Horan's IBM made it through the Great Depression without
laying off a single employee, but somehow couldn't survive the eight
prosperous years of the Clinton administration without axing tens of
thousands of workers. Parents used to tell their children to major in
engineering or science in order to get a secure job. Now children sit
around the dinner table and hear about layoffs, current and anticipated.
New York Times reporter Louis Uchitelle's new book, ``The Disposable
American,'' documents the nationwide decrease in worker productivity that
has occurred since ``Neutron'' Jack Welch of General Electric popularized
the repeated layoff approach to economic downturns. Not only are the
displaced workers unproductive, but those who have been spared for the
moment are also permanently less productive because of worrying about
whether they will be next. When the time comes for students whose parents
grew up in the United States to choose a college major, they will remember
those dinner-table conversations. When the best students, being rational,
start to desert science and engineering, businesses will have nobody to
blame but themselves. The solution will be the same one that existed before
the Reagan administration, as Harvard economist Richard Freeman told
Samuelson: ``If we want more (scientists and engineers), we have to pay
them better and give them better careers.''

CHRISTOPHER R. MOYLAN, a member of the Sunnyvale City Council, is a
lecturer of chemistry and director of the undergraduate laboratories at
Stanford University. He has taught engineering at the University of
California-Santa Cruz and San Jose State University. He wrote this article
for the Mercury News.

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