I'm sitting here watching a C-Span broadcast of a 6/10/2011 symposium on the US Economy & Job Creation.
These people do have some ideas, but they have no basis in history.
They discuss skills mismatch, they discuss corporate creation and destruction of jobs, and they don't see the one thing that makes a job a viable part of a corporation, which is the human element.
Now don't get me wrong, this is a distinguished panel sitting there in the National Press Club, but they simply are coming up with best guess situations and ignoring the tried and true methodology of creating jobs that hold meaning for the people holding those jobs.
We have created a job environment so wildly out of control that no one can see that our jobs situation is the failure of these corporations to supply jobs of meaning.
What we have is a failure to place the worker into the proper perspective. We look at jobs as if the employee should be thankful they have a job, when in fact they don't have a job, they have a particular mission and once that mission is accomplished they are summarily relieved of their responsibilities, often at the end of a security officers hand on your elbow as you are walked out of the facility.
Now this hasn't happened to me in that particular respect, but I do know about the changes of corporate hiring and firing over the past 40 years, and I have to say that we've moved in the wrong direction.
We have a number of problems that are cast as one problem when in fact they encompass a number of larger issues. One is pay. Older people make more money as they have been with the company longer, but that only makes them vulnerable, not valuable.
Younger men and women can be trained to do the same job for less money, although they won't have the judgement in the job that maturity suggests exists. This is a major loss for corporations and causes new dynamics to be prevalent because of the misstep of the corporation in letting a highly qualified worker go.
Again, more problems because that worker needs to have a certain level of stability in both his job choice and his retirement options, but the fact that a skilled worker is actually far more advantageous to a corporation than one that has simply learned the functions of a particular job. The skilled worker knows WHY things work the way they do, and the new hire only knows you put this piece of paper there.
Our level of understanding on what a job means to the employee is so far behind that we have made 30 years of corporate mistakes in the way we treat our employees.
And I am specifically going to point to upper management's continuing rise in compensation as the major factor in turning qualified and knowledgeable employees into jobless people.
Now one might imagine that these highly qualified workers have vast numbers of opportunities, but if the last company let them go, then why would another company take up the same payroll burden for a new employee that only knows the job he did at the previous company?
It is not a reasonable assumption that the employee let go by company A will be employed by company B. It is a reasonable assumption that an employee with experience in how the company works could indeed move that knowledge into a management position, particularly in manufacturing if the age of the employee might be a determining factor in his ability to function on the manufacturing floor.
And there are numerous examples of the failure of companies to maintain the knowledge of operation and the qualified employee beyond what a new, inexperienced person could do the job for. This has been going on, like I said, for at least the past 30 years, and what has happened is that wages have stagnated, inexperienced people get hired to do the jobs that require knowledge of operational requirements, and the quality of the company goes downhill requiring new methods to rectify the loss of productivity.
So we've moved on to systems that require a highly touted, but overrated, avenues of increasing productivity by instituting buzzword compatibility and long term solutions to short term problems already created by the company in the first place.
To make a point, modernization and computerization wasn't the best idea for corporate America in the early 80s, but it went on without much of a standardization in what was required to provide maximum optimization of these systems. When a person could immediately answer virtually any question about what they do and how and when they the do it, a modernization effort always takes a period of testing and redesign in order to answer the same question.
And in my experience, virtually no system developed to work the way an employee works will really work because it does not have the experience of the person, the knowledge of the changes in the way the company operates, and for all practical purposes, won't be upgraded to provide answers for new questions.
This is an important part of the equation here. A company is, whether one likes to admit it or not, a growing entity that changes as the times change, as the interests of their investors change, and as the people involved with the functioning of that company cope with new challenges.
But automation of a system based on the knowledge and experience of a person who did the job originally will never actually be able to be nimble enough to provide that extra ummmph necessary for a corporation to immediately understand the ramifications of changes in the market or whatever problem becomes apparent. Only a person can make that type of intuitive leap, and so by eliminating our jobs by depending on automation, one needs to understand that said automation is, at best, only operationally acceptable on the day the system was put into operation. From there on it is a failure.
I'm not against automation and incorporating computer systems in the effort to increase productivity, but I'm saying that some might presume that automation is the end all and be all of the next step in corporate profitability and after 30 years of experience, I am saying these corporations are wrong.
It is not the level to which you computerize, the level to which you place your data and have the ability to draw data from, but the knowledge your own employees have in the way their job is done and how the corporation works. It is not so pristine as data in, data out. It is the interpretation of valued employees who give any particular corporation an advantage in the business world, and without these knowledgeable people the only options are to move jobs to countries where their new methodologies might work.
Usually they don't. They make do, but they have already written their obituaries once they settle for just getting by.
The human resource is the one brain that can think on multiple levels most of the time, and that is what makes a corporation an entity unto itself, as specified by the US Supreme Court in 1886 when corporations were granted the rights of people.
If that is so, and it is, then obviously people are the corporation.
You can't disassociate one from the other and computers and automation will never understand the relationship.
Comments