In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about the
I read your article in the Inquirer about the meeting the local leaders held yesterday and can’t help but feel cynical. Why are we still asking questions about how to create local, or for that matter, national jobs?
We, our government, allow these mega mergers to take place, like the Comcast/NBC, Exxon/Mobil, Pfizer/Wyeth, etc. What’s the second thing we hear when one of these mergers takes place? “Company X plans to begin layoffs after the merger. So these huge corporations use the “economies of scale” lie and large enterprise systems like SAP to justify, in their minds, these layoffs. SAP and their “partners” like IBM and such inform the CIO who tells the CEO, CFO and CAH that the software will eliminate the need for real labor. Euphemistically known as right sizing, reduced head count, leaner and meaner…blah, blah, blah.
The shift goes from local jobs to global IT companies who pay dimes to dollars for programming and support. Now instead of company X paying the local labor force 50 million in salaries, they’re paying a foreign labor force 50 million in salaries or more to “customize” an already expensive enterprise system that is supposed to do it all.
Working class people and entrepreneurs need to be invited to these sessions. The president of the AFL/CIO wants to build a rail line parallel to 422. That’s a great idea but with less jobs who’s going to ride the trains? What was the cost of the light rail from
Other items to help this group determine how to create local jobs: Lessen the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs – like legal fees, insurance, insurance, insurance, facilitating the patent search process.
Am I the only one who’s tired of hearing the same old spin? The answers seem obvious to me.
Because, you know, global IT companies only employ cheap foreign labor. Oh wait, that's a huge myth. This is fear of offshoring stopping progress. As someone who works in the IT field I have a simple answer for the people who were laid off in favor of a software that makes their job redundant: go and learn a technology skill and become one of the people who makes the software that make those jobs redundant, so that instead of having to offshore this software development, we can keep the jobs in this country. But I mean, it's fine to put the blame on the IT industry, they are apparently the man that is keeping everyone down. All of us are offshore workers stealing American jobs. I don't live in Philadelphia and work in Camden or anything. Oh wait, I do.— Ratiocinational- Oh, I forgot. IT workers aren't unionized labor. Since we're not unionized labor, we're open to attack! Forget I said anything!— Ratiocinational
- Jane, you are hitting some nails on the head and completely missing others. A reduction in labor is a good idea, but as you said, if it's simply being replaced by labor in India it is not. The Riverline is not actually lightly used - it has far exceeded its ridership projections. That being said, so does most of NJ's transit system. Patco was once the closest line in the US to profitability. You are correct, though, about the SVM - the 422 rail line. The current plan involves only 2 trains each way during morning and afternoon rush hours. The idea is that people will hop a train in Pottstown, ride it to KOP, and then take an employer-sponsored shuttle bus to work. Sound familiar? It's a horrible idea. There are alternatives, though - look up the proposed R8 extension to Newtown for a much better use of scarce transit resources.— js5180
The Uniform Commercial Code needs to be reformed limiting the unlimited rights of corporations. The utility of M&A to anyone other than lawyers and investment bankers and the managerial class who reap an even bigger empire is nil. There are only bigger companies by market cap, market share and little else, eventually collapsing back to a smaller size or out business. The IT industry is a continuation of the industrialization of economic production. The real question is why do we still work 5 days a week, 40 hours a week, when it economically not needed. We can produce everything we need, except money, which keeps most of us spinning our wheels. The compounded annualized gains in productivity should have reduced our work time even more so in the USA than what we have now. The internet revolution will continue to reduce the need for people's time to be tied up in corporate activity and needs to be taken back by people. We do not owe anyone this much command over our time due to the technological industrialization of work. We need to take our lives back, this a free society, is it not?- @Fernando08: But then won't the robots take over? ;-)— Billy Ray Winthorpe
Every day for 60 days, Inquirer staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen profiled someone from the ranks of the region’s unemployed.
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Cold winter for the jobless
- Ranks of long-term jobless are growing.
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How a printing plant failed
- Big gambles and bad decisions, oil prices and credit crises, even a New Zealand tycoon: All played a role in Downingtown.
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