At times I've gotten some real laughs out of job postings on some of the various career sites. Jobs that want an experienced network engineer with cisco and juniper experience, who also knows both exchange and SQL, with programming experience and who can also repair satellite communications equipment plus do engine repair on generators - yes, I really saw one similiar to that. And I really doubt they were paying what such a paragon would deserve, which would be in the neighborhood of 500K per year, given they wanted expat work with 72 hours per week on station and on call the rest of the time in Afghanistan, living in tents and communal showers/facilities. With extensive travel in country, BTW, did I ever mention that travelling there is what usually gets you killed? I do expect they'll always have trouble filling that position, no matter what the economy does. There really are jobs you can't fill, but they usually aren't very realistic job requirements/situations.
Very likely they'll fill that with three people from India with the requested skills, then whine to Congress about how Americans don't want to work and aren't properly trained.
You'll have to excuse me this morning, I'm a bit irritable over a very weird article discussing some of Steve Job's statements about Apple production methods.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/busin ... wanted=all
That's well worth reading from an employee POV, Jobs apparently had some weird ideas about the ideal employee.
A few curious quotes:
“What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
(Shall we add "for low wages and working 12 hour shifts seven days?". This is made perfectly clear in the preceding paragraphs.)
In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend.
(OK now, just what are we calling an "engineer" here? Whatever these guys are, and I suppose they are some kind of technicians, they aren't recognized as engineers by anything like ASME. A LOT of this "shortage" business is simply credential creep unrelated to the job they want performed just because the job is in the USA and the company demands total control, instead of just doing the job. Micromanagement and CYA are the bane of everything. Calling anyone an engineer in the US who doesn't have a bachleors degree at minimum will likely result in a lawsuit from the engineering society.)
The
Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.
(I thought there were laws against that type of international gouging?)
And anticompetitive hiring agreements between companies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/2 ... 20244.html
(To be absolutely clear here, I never liked Jobs, nor his pricing practices, his goofy lawsuits like the "we stole the windowed OS idea from Xerox Parc first, so Microsoft can't possibly produce a windowed OS of any kind" suit, his general attitude of "I'm right and you aren't" and on and on. As far as I'm concerned, Apple was full of worms from the Apple III "walk on me" board on.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-hap ... apple-iii/ )
Everything I've read, and that includes a lot of stuff from Apple and others, says to me that the big electronics companies wanted Chinese production facilities where they had quality control, but wanted to just wave the baton after delivering a blueprint. In the US however, they demanded owning their own facilities, and wouldn't dream of relinquishing control over any part of the process. Different situations will produce different results, and they certainly set up different situations.
So what could destroy this bit of arbitrage (for arbitrage it most certainly is)?
Natural disaster could do it, but that can strike anywhere. However, floods in Thailand certainly caused problems with hard drive production and flattened PC sales recently. So much interlocked production in such a small area - putting all the eggs in one basket is the old saying.
Epidemic disease - Asia has a real problem with this one. While the US has it's own issues, crowding in Asia is MUCH MUCH worse, and the more crowding the greater the probability of epidemic disease. A major epidemic on the order of the Spanish Influenza (normalized for greater populations) would devastate both the population and the industries relying on this population for workers.
War - perhaps the most likely of all, civil war, war with India, with Taiwan, with South Korea or with Iran or Russia could break out at any moment. Any of those could draw in the US, or we could sit on the sidelines, but ANY of those wars would destroy the entire computer/cellphone/chip industry that has been built in that region. Or cause denial of delivery for war reasons or cause the factories to retool for war production or cause the US to sanction China - all would have the same result on the US side of the pond.
Terrorist Acts - unpredictable but highly likely, though the results would probably be limited to one factory or region unless biological agents were used. I guess we can lump worker action/sabotage in with this category.
So what's the result to the USA of any of these occurances? Immediate collapse of the retail industries depending on these production facilities, government actions of many sorts, companies begging for bailouts, etc. I suppose it would be the trigger for the crisis, so we'd actually get action, not just jawboning.
I would suppose that govt funds and huge amounts of labor would be poured into building and renovating production facilities in the USA. Credential creep would be a thing of the past, if you MIGHT be able to do the job you'd get a chance at it. Plus the older and experienced hands would be in demand as trainers and shop leads, not cast aside as "bad investments". It would take at least five years to get this going, longer if the US joined in a major war.
We do know the crisis will most likely hit from an unexpected direction, and this would be one direction where nobody seems to be looking, at least not in public. I have wondered how much such concerns are driving the movement of facilities away from Asia.