687,000 U.S. High-Tech Jobs Lost in a Decade

"687,000 U.S. High-Tech Jobs Lost"

Did they check under the cushions of the couch...I found my keys and wallet there once

well.. it ought to happen.. companies find that Chinese are cheaper to work with.. shifted most of their manufacturing to China.. every other product in the world carries a "Made In China" tag.. blame the companies for that not the government.. the government has limited role in this.. remember America is a capitalistic and not socialistic economy to dictate the rules..

Yea, one of the things about a recession... I know this cause' my number is 686,999........

The Chinese/Indians are cheaper, but they're not better from what I've seen. The companies I've dealt with seem to have a "good enough" attitude. Specifications are just suggestions and quality control is something to throw out the window when deadlines/expectations can't be met. Like most things in corporate America, off shoring is about dollars and shortsightedness. We're not losing to China because of their innovation, they're just the people that build the crap we think up. The dream of seamless, 24/7 HW/SW development is a crock.

US Politicians rarely think more than 2 years ahead. Wall Street rarely thinks more than 1 quarter ahead. This outcome is hardly surprising.

Once the patent trolls have sued all US tech companies out of existence, we're going to be left wondering just how it was that tech went the way of the auto industry.

As long as the government keeps investing the same percentage of GDP you can't really blame them. Yeah, sure the global percentage will drop but that's only natural because of population growth and economic growth around the world and those factors are supposed to increase the number of high tech jobs worldwide so no country should just lose jobs, unless greedy corporations start outsourcing. The government can do something about this: force corporations that outsource to pay their foreign employees the same wage they would pay an emplopyee in the home country of the corporation, or at least the minimum wage of the home country. Globalization is supposed to pull poor countries up, not drag rich countries down.

The government helps push the business cycle. They are the ones that setup free trade which basically equals out the living standards between the two populations which means US citizens drop off the cliff. Free trade would only work in a system where both countries follow the exact same rules with the exact same enforcement mechanisms. All the regulations and things a company must comply with just to have workers in a plant are large. Reduce these or streamline them in a way that is easy to understand and that will aid in a comeback of manufacturing. Don't believe me? Look at RCRA and read through it and tell me its easy to follow. We also don't live in a capitalistic society anymore we live in a semi-oligarch society. Central bank controls interest rates(state control) and we have a banking cartel that won't be broken up because so many of their players are in key positions(see goldman sachs/jp morgan). We also have social welfare up the wazoo only getting worse. We aren't capitalists at best we are an oligarchy(corptocracy) on the way to a socialist banana republic where there are only rich and poor people.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is probably a bad idea to let the Chinese be more technologically advanced than the US.

China has a larger population almost 5 times the USA. Companies simply don't hire here anymore too. Besides that, today kids thinks is cool to be bad, hates math and science. Too much entertainment. remember when i use to go to my room, means i'm boxed in without any contact. now kids go into their room = TV, consoles, computer, cell phone.

@doeboy

I think you got social welfare programs and unregulated capitalism mixed up there.

[citation]All the regulations and things a company must comply with just to have workers in a plant are large. Reduce these or streamline them in a way that is easy to understand and that will aid in a comeback of manufacturing.[/citation]

Yes, manufacturing would come back, in fact it would boom, though to be fair you should also mention people would only make $1.50 an hour and get fired if they refuse to work more than 12 hours a day or operate dangerous equipment. Maybe you should visit a low-regulation country once and see how the average person lives there. Maybe take a tour of the Foxconn plant and see how their booming manufacturing sector operates, just be sure to wear a helmet when you walk outside.

P.S. do some research and discover how US tech companies have only increased their profits over the last 10 years. The next time you hear some slimy CEO talk about how regulations are strangling his business, requiring him to outsource jobs, ask him for a graph of company profits and CEO pay, over the last 10 years, I'll bet $100 with you that he'll either try to change the subject or literally leave the room. Oh and also try asking him how it's possible that his German and Japanese counterparts, who have to deal with more regulation, employee benefits and higher effective taxes, are not complaining and are in fact thriving.

Blame the stupid government and unions for high labor costs. Government and Unions workers works only 9 months a year with supreme benefits. When government can't pay the workers they raise tax on everything and unions would go on strike to force what they want. A $70,000 worker equal to $130,000 in private companies.

Yes, those good old days when a more intelligent America elected such intellectual behemoths as Ronald Reagan and George Bush Jr... that must be it and it's got nothing at all to do with tech education having becoming unaffordable while at the same time corporations only want to hire people who are ok with living in slums.

Labor costs have not increased compared to inflation, in fact they have declined since the 1960s and 1970s, meanwhile the 1%'s share of the national income tripled while CEO pay has grown tenfold (the average is now 400 times a worker's pay) and naturally the economy has grown faster than workers wages, so compared to the average income per capita, worker wages, and thus labor costs, have gone down. But don't let facts get in the way of rhetoric...

That's what you get when you have colleges and high school who are more interested in their sports teams than in their education.
There are no sports teams and 'bowl' games in Europe or Asia for school teams. They actually learn stuff there. We have to rethink making our educational institutions a training ground for professional sports teams. Heck, try to find a soccer player with a high school diploma in Europe.

Two way street. Blame the companies for squeezing out maximum profits and blame consumers for buying whats cheapest, not what's made in the USA.

It's not the just the companies. Consumers (at least in the USA) are satisfied with 'good enough' for the most part. I feel like I'm in a minority because I'm not satisfied with 'good enough.' Almost everyone I know buys whatever they can get the cheapest, not what will last the longest or is built well. It's all about the bottom dollar for america and this is how china and other countries end up with our money.

It's a vicious cycle: pay your employees less and (surprise, surprise) you'll find they have less spending power and therefore resort to buying cheap sh*t. You can then point to that and say labor costs need to be cut further to lower the price of the product, this leads to people having even less spending power, etc...

You either hurt your own wallet by buying more expensive stuff or you hurt the wallets of workers by buying cheap stuff (it's catch 22 when you are a worker yourself). Regulations, unions, and groups representing the interests of employers are all supposed to stop the vicious cycle under a representative government. Things go wrong when one group gets too much influence over that government (and no, usually that's not the unions).

The IRS expects to forego $100 billion of corporate taxes (that's tax evasion by large corporations only) every year, that's 2 million $50k or 4 million 25k wages (which would lower the unemployment rate by 1.3 and 2.6 percentage points respectively). How do we know this money isn't going to jobs? Wages are tax deductible so a corporation wouldn't have to evade taxes hire more employees.

I lost my tech job to a Canadian because he/she was happy to do it for half the salary I was receiving, and my salary wasn't that great to begin with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/ [...] .html?_r=1

Part of our problem is we have to many people getting degrees in the arts and "soft sciences" instead of in engineering and computer sciences where a good chunk of all the jobs are headed. There is actually a major lack of engineers in this country that is causing companies to have a hard time finding people to fill those spots.

Another problem with manufacturing in the US is that somehow we have made community college and tech schools seem like a bad choice or a choice for second rate people. Manufacturing requires a lot of skilled industrial engineers to oversee the operators but doesn't really require a full bachelor's degree. If we accepted tech school as a great choice for people who would otherwise not be able to graduate from a full four year university but still have good skills then we'd suddenly have a lot easier time find the labor force we need.

Its a multifaceted problem and simply blaming corrupt government or big business alone won't do anything about the labor force. Encourage high schoolers to go into engineering degrees or that tech school for an associates degree is a great choice instead of going with no degree at all!

@ikefu

Are you saying kids have become 35% less interested (pop. growth was 10%, tech job reduction was 28%) in tech fields in just 10 years?

The burden of government regulation and taxes is pushing as many jobs offshore as lower wages. After transportation costs, the differential for most manufactured goods is 20 to 30%. That's easily erased with government taking less and controlling less.

There's a deeper problem in that decades of bad government has pushed the entire supply chain offshore. Lack NSF funding to blame? How does giving NSF more funds taken from productive enterprises solve that? How many successful commercial ventures have resulted from NSF backing? The problem isn't lack of government involvement. The problem is government.

How about a little real journalism guys, instead of parroting a snarky fed press release.

Real worker wages have decreased, so have effective tax rates and regulation is still child's play compared to most of the other developed countries (most of whom are doing better economically, by the way). Stop beating around the bush and admit you can't beat out workers in China who are forced to work for $2 an hour and 60-80 hours a week, no matter how much you cut taxes and regulations, you're never going to beat that, not unless you give American workers $2 an hour and let them work 60-80 hours a week and if that's your solution don't be surprised when you find yourself standing in front of a guillotine some day.

ajay_vishvanathan: No, the government is in charge of regulating the greedy companies. Before we starting signing "free trade" agreements with every country, we were charging tariffs on imported goods, making it prohibitively expensive to outsource.

Import tariffs are the logical way to protect one's economy. America's economy was strong because of the hard work and ingenuity of a lot of people. Not executives, but inventors, scientists and engineers. Free trade turns around and screws those same people who made America great by forcing them to compete with cheap labor.

If you think I can or should have to consider working as an engineer for $5 a day because somebody in China does it, you need to put down the crack pipe. There's a little thing called cost of living, and there are reasons why it's cheap to live over there, and expensive to live over here.

If you want to see whats happened to this country in the last thirty years read this la times article about the comparison of living costs, general public attitude/behavior and government policy as compared to Germany. In a wide number of indicators we are lagging way behind a country we bombed into rubble 65 years ago. Notice how their companies treated the recession as opposed ours. How their politicians wanted to handle the crisis' of the last decade or so.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la [...] 4773.story

Social services man. Americans want high salaries, but no regulation on the costs of necessary services such as medicine and education. Its counterproductive

The government has nothing to do with it is just NOT true. Look into Clinton signing a trade agreement with China in 1999. Part of that deal was we would need to let them be part of the WTO and that had a direct impact with Chinese imports. I am not in any way trying to bash Clinton here, but that point is just fact.

Humans in general are short-sighted. Treaty of Versailles is a classical example, small wonder why some people called it, "The peace to end all peace".

This is the scary bottom line: China graduates about as many engineers as we do lawyers, which is about 10 times as many engineers as we do (500k vs 50k per year). China also doesn't reinvent the wheel: they steal any IP they want. Contract with them to build a product for you, and you'll see it undercut on the shelf next to yours with some generic name. We've got to get them to respect our patents or this will only get much much worse.

the Chinese are more technologically advanced thousand and hundred years ago before the US exist

A huge part of this is due to the lack of basic research being conducted by the US gov't. DARPA and the Energy Dept have been responsible for ALOT of the innovation we see today, as they funded US universities and institutions to conduct this work, and would hold the patents...now, the focus of research isn't for learning of inque phenomena, but instead for practical application. This shift in approach is problematic, since without that basic research, you will never get to the 6.2 to 6.4 levels.

687,000 only counts the jobs that have been lost. That is not taking into account the number of jobs that would have been created were those companies still in the USA. If that were taken into account, considering how technology has taken off, that number would be somewhere near 2-3million--if not more. When you count only the jobs that have been lost and not the jobs that would have been created you are cheating. Until America wakes up and realizes that 'free trade' and 'corporate deregulation' are harming out economy things will never change. We are giving China all of our technology and know how just because they can employ a slave labor worker and it makes OUR corporations RICH. This has got to stop. We are gutting our economy every time we allow corporations to outsource high skilled/high tech jobs overseas.