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Americans win the most Nobel prizes; you have to give them top marks for inventiveness. While people like US President Barack Obama are blaming India and China for job losses, others have spread their targets far and wide. Here’s a sampler:
The iPad: Jesse Jackson Jr, representative for Illinois, thinks that what Jobs (Steve) has created destroys jobs. He told the US house recently that bookstores are closing because you don’t need to go there any longer. “Now Borders is closing stores because why do you need to go to Borders anymore?” he said. “Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad and download your newspaper, book or magazine.” All this is costing jobs. Incidentally, Jackson uses an iPad himself. With Luddite instincts clashing with his lifestyle, Jackson is evidently contradicting himself. In some other country, he would have lost his job.
Grandmas: “Grandmas stealing Jobs” is the title of a show on CNBC. “Since October 2008 the number of working Americans ages 16 to 55 has plummeted by 7.5 million, while the over-55 workforce has grown by 1.7 million. The conclusion: older workers are not only putting off retirement, they are rejoining the working world, and maybe taking jobs away from younger people,” reports MSN Money.
Productivity: “Manufacturing worker productivity has doubled in the past 17 years since 1993, and that has contributed to the loss of more than 11 million jobs,” says Mark Perry of Daily Markets. “That is, if factory workers were only as productive today as their counterparts in 1993, it would require more than 23 million factory workers today to produce $3.26 trillion worth of manufacturing output today, instead of the 11.7 million workers employed today to produce that much manufacturing output.”
Immigrants: They are a familiar suspect — Indians, IT and the H1-B visa. But the Centre for Immigration Studies has a slightly different take; the New York-based non-profit organisation feels that immigrants are stealing jobs out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. “The share of US-born teenagers (16 to 19) in the labour force, working or looking for work, during the summer has been declining for more than a decade, long before the recession. In 1994, nearly two-thirds of US-born teenagers were in the summer labour force; by 2007 it was less than half. At the same time, the overall number of immigrants (legal and illegal) holding a job doubled. The evidence indicates that immigration accounts for a significant share of the decline in teen labour force participation. This is worrisome because research shows that those who do not hold jobs as teenagers often fail to develop the work habits necessary to function in the labour market.”
The BP oil spill: “Jobs that have been thriving for years have disappeared and will continue to do so in the next five years,” says a report by Top Colleges. “David Kotok, Wall Street analyst and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, has projected at least 1 million jobs will be lost within the next couple of years.” Fisheries, tourism and real estate will be the worst affected.
Goats: Says the Huffington Post, “On Thursday’s The Colbert Report, a dangerous new threat to the American workforce is highlighted in the segment People Destroying America. Tammy Dunakin won’t employ American citizens for her landscaping business, and her undocumented workers are taking jobs extremely vital to hardworking Americans in this time of economic struggle. But she’s not employing illegal immigrants; they’re just goats. ‘I will not be satisfied until goats are doing all the landscaping jobs in this country,’ Dunakin tells The Colbert Report. Naturally, her competitors aren’t happy. ‘This woman’s completely out of her mind,’ one landscaper says, while another knocks the downside of Dunakin’s animals: ‘I don’t think we would ever poop on a job site.’”
So don’t allow the US bleat about Indians stealing their jobs to get your goat. They appear to be recruiting goats too.
THE LAYOFF KINGS
The 25 companies responsible for 7,00,000 lost jobs in the US* General Motors 1,07,357
Citigroup 73,056
Hewlett-Packard 47,540
Circuit City Stores 41,495
Merrill Lynch 40,650
Verizon Wireless 39,000
Pfizer 31,771
Merck 24,400
Lehman Brothers 23,340
Caterpillar 23,024
JPMorgan Chase 22,852
Starbucks 21,316
AT&T 18,401
Alcoa 17,655
Dow Chemical 17,530
DuPont 17,000
Berkshire Hathaway 16,900
Ford Motor 15,912
KB Toys 15,100
United States Postal Service 15,000
DHL Express 14,900
Sprint Nextel 14,500
Sun Microsystems 14,000
Boeing 13,715
Chrysler 13,672
*Number of jobs cut since recession began
