ALL’S FAIR IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Unemployment Knows No Country of Origin

The growth of the global economy is supposedly the reason why nearly all the manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the US. Besides eliminating the good paying jobs for “blue collar” workers, it has also eliminated thousands of middle and upper management “white collar” jobs.
Further, over the past 5 years, college graduates have found the job market fairly thin. Less than 30 percent have been hired in their field of study. This year, the demand for graduates is up but it has a long way to go to reach 50 percent. For example, last year the State of Pennsylvania reported that 13,000 people graduated from state colleges and universities with an education degree but only 6000 were hired. (It does make you wonder why so many students are being directed into the education field.)
That is old news; the “new” news is that job market has now become saturated in China, the same country that is sending billions of dollars of manufactured goods to the US. According to the newsmagazine, The Week, 4.1 million Chinese will complete the requirements for a degree yet there are only 1.7 million jobs. As one analyst stated, Asia’s success will soon be eclipsed by a huge army of unemployed.
With the age of automation and mass production that is “cheap” and can produce “abundance,” maybe its time to start thinking about rotating workers, kind of like serving on a submarine.
Sailors on submarines have equal periods of active and non-active cycles. It’s not practical to bring a sub home every night, so a sailor serves for several months and then is assigned to the base for a similar period of time before the next assignment.
With so many qualified workers, companies could start to cycle their workforce, for example 6 months with one group of workers, 6 months with a second group and then rotate the original group back to the job. Gone would be holidays, vacations, sabbaticals and other such benefits. Since you are only working 6 months, you will have plenty of family and recreation time. There would need to be some overlap of workers to help “pass the torch” after each 6-month period, but it should only be a modest cost to the company.
A final idea that differs from the work-split idea is to employ a modification of the 80/20 Rule (where 20 percent accomplishes 80 percent of the results). Perhaps the world only needs to employ 30 percent of the population. The other 70 percent become “wards of the state,” or permanently unemployed, drawing financial support from a fund designed to meet their needs.
I’m sure some sci-fi writer has already figured this out. Why not give it a try?