I thought it was very interesting to find 5 articles within 24 hours that all have something to say about the economy and jobs in the United States.
- First, Sixty Minutes reports on the effect of technology on the workplace, which generally isn’t good for workers.
- Next I found BusinessWeek’s piece on a third of Americans believing that we are actually still in a recession and still more having other economic worries.
- Then there is this extensive look by the IEEE Spectrum (a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) about the myth of the STEM worker shortage.
- Staying with the storyline of the promise held out by education and training in the technical field an article on InfoWorld, an IT industry publication, looks at job losses in IT because of the combination of increased productivity and offshoring.
- And when you look at where these trends have taken us, you have results like the ones pointed out by this article on Reuters.
The closest I came to looking for any of these was when I saw an ad for Sixty Minutes Sunday afternoon. The others were links in e-mails or headlines from news aggregators. This kind of news is just that common in today’s economy. One could consider it just the natural direction created by shifts in technology. I tend to not think of it as being that simple because I think there has to be a reason for a company to want to shed workers even when they are making money, as Abbott Laboratories has done more than once including just last year. One of the biggest motivations is based on a myth even more pervasive than the STEM worker shortage. That myth is the idea that the only value that shareholder value is the holy grail of business. It’s a very destructive myth for business as well as workers, as the writer interviewed in this piece from Marketplace Morning Report points out. Yes, I wrote about this before. But as I pointed out earlier there’s just so very many examples of this pernicious problem in the news it’s hard to avoid.