Sat, 07 Mar 2009

Continuing Job Losses May Signal Broad Economic Shift

Ah, yes, retraining is the answer:

The stimulus spending bill signed last month includes $4.5 billion for job training. That only begins to address an area long neglected, said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project in New York. In current dollars, the nation devoted the equivalent of $20 billion a year to job training in 1979, compared with only $6 billion last year, Mr. Stettner said. “We have to seriously look at fundamentally rebuilding the economy,” he said. “You’ve got to use this moment to retrain for jobs.”

The rest of the article is a litany of lost industries: autos, manufacturing, financial services, construction, retail, transportation, warehousing. Nowhere does anybody mention exactly what jobs we have to retrain workers for: and with a list like that, it's tough to puzzle out? About the only "industry" left out of the roll call was medical.

Software wasn't in there, either, but I'm guessing that's because everybody now knows that's a lost cause in the US. Can we all be doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists? Or patients? Is this our future?

As the economy lost another 651,000 jobs in February, bringing the jobless rate to 8.1 percent, some economists believe a fundamental restructuring is underway.

(link) [NYT > Home Page]

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