Clips tagged jobs

America's 10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Shrinking) Jobs

odie — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:45:19 -0000

Clipped by odie

America's 10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Shrinking) Jobs

By Jordan Weissmann

Feb 7 2012, 2:13 PM ET 5

The government predicts that healthcare occupations will be booming, while postal service jobs will disappear

Reuters

If you're looking for guaranteed employment during the next eight years, become a nurse. Really. It's that simple.

Recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' released its list of the thirty occupations where it expects the greatest net-job growth through 2020, and registered nurses are the very top. Over the course of this decade, the government expects an additional 711,900 will be hired to help care for the ballooning medical needs of America's aging population -- a 26% increase from 2010. Best yet, the BLS says many parts of the country are experiencing a nurse shortage, meaning talent will come at a premium.

As you probably expected, the nursing boom is just one piece of a larger trend: The rise of the healthcare sector. Overall, eight of the 30 top-growing occupations are connected with medicine and personal care. From richly paid surgeons to low-wage home health aides, those eight occupations are expected to add more than 3 million jobs The BLS projrects the United States to gain 20.4 million new jobs overall by 2020.

The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

10: Post-secondary teachers

Net job growth: 305,700

Percentage growth: 17.4%

Degree required: Doctoral or professional

Average Pay: $71,280

The BLS says: Even with a coming wave of retirements, there will still be tough competition for old school tenure track jobs, but growth at community colleges and technical schools will offer lots of opportunities.

Reuters

Full Screen

The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

10: Post-secondary teachers

Net job growth: 305,700

Percentage growth: 17.4%

Degree required: Doctoral or professional

Average Pay: $71,280

The BLS says: Even with a coming wave of retirements, there will still be tough competition for old school tenure track jobs, but growth at community colleges and technical schools will offer lots of opportunities.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

9: Laborers and freight, stock, and material movers

Net growth: 319,100 jobs:

Percentage growth: 15.4%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $25,710

The BLS says: Employment is looking up in the warehousing and storage business, as more companies contract this work out.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

8: Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers

Net growth: 330,100 jobs

Percentage growth: 20.6%

Degree required: High school diploma or equivalent

Average pay: $39,450

The BLS says: The demand for truck drivers will seesaw based on the health of the economy.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

7: Customer service representatives

Net growth: 338,400

Percentage growth: 15.5%

Degree required:

Average pay: $32,780

The BLS says: Customer service workers have recession-proof jobs, because most of them work for companies like phone service providers where customers keep accounts, no matter how the economy is doing.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

6: Combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food

Net growth: 398,000 jobs

Percentage growth: 14.8%

Degree required: Less than high school.

Average pay: $18,600

The BLS says: Fast food restaurants are looking good: They're cheaper than the competition and BLS suspects that the increase in healthy options will draw more yuppies to the Golden Arches.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

5: Office clerks, general

Net growth: 489,000 jobs

Percentage growth: 16.6%

Degree required: High school diploma or equivalent

Average pay: $28,240

The BLS says: As technology advances, you'll see fewer specialized office workers, and more generalists who can chip in on any task.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

4: Personal care aides

Net growth: 607,000

Percentage growth: 70.5%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $20,420

The BLS says: There are going to be a lot of old people. Someone needs to take care of them.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Shutterstock / Oscar C. Williams

3: Home health aides

Net growth:706,300

Percentage growth: 69.4%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $21,760

The BLS says: Caring for the elderly and impaired is low-skill, emotionally grinding work, but there will be plenty of demand.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

2: Retail salespersons

Net growth: 706,800 jobs

Percentage growth: 16.6%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $25,000

The BLS says: It's a business with a lot of turnover, and retailers will be looking to expand operations.
The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

1: Registered nurses

Net growth: 711,900 jobs

Percentage growth: 26%

Degree required: Associate's degree

Average pay: $67,720

The BLS says: America's healthcare needs are expanding, and there's a shortage of nursing talent in certain regions of the country.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Wikipedia

10: Word processors and typists

Net decline: 13,200 jobs

Percentage decline: 11.5%

Degree required: High school diploma or equivalent

Average pay: $34,420

The BLS says: It's 2012, and most people know how to type.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Shutterstock / STILLFX

9: Data-entry keyers

Net decline:

Percentage decline:

Degree required:

Average pay: $28,400

The BLS says: Most professionals know how to type, and there's less stigma about doing your own data entry these days.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

8: Miscellaneous agricultural workers

Net decline: 19,100

Percentage decline: 2.6%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $20,040 - $35,620

The BLS says: Farms are using technology to become more productive, meaning fewer workers harvesting more food.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

7: Fast food cooks

Net decline: 19,100 jobs

Percentage decline: 3.6%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $18,540

The BLS says: In their last published employment outlook, the BLS predicted there would be more fast food cooks in the coming years, so their appearance on the list is a bit of a mystery.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

6: Postal Service clerks

Net decline: 31,600

Percentage decline: 48.2%

Degree required:

Average pay: $52,520

The BLS says: Paper mail is dying. Less mail means fewer clerks.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Shutterstock / Everett Collection

5: Switchboard operators, including answering service

Net decline: 33,200 jobs

Percentage decline: 23.3%

Degree required: High school diploma or less.

Average pay: $26,280

The BLS says: You know all of those automated company directories? Yep, that'll do it.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

4: Postal Service mail carriers

Net decline:

Percentage decline: 38,100 jobs

Degree required: 12%

Average pay: $50,250

The BLS says: Better technology will make it possible for letter carriers to spend less time sorting mail and more time delivering it. That means fewer postmen will be able to work longer routes.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

3: Sewing machine operators

Net decline: 42,100 jobs

Percentage decline: 25.8%

Degree required: Less than high school

Average pay: $22,630

The BLS says: Thanks to cheap imports, American apparel workers are an endangered species.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

2: Postal Service mail sorters, processors, and sorting machine operators

Net decline: 68,900 jobs

Percentage decline: 48.5%

Degree required: High school diploma or equivalent

Average pay: $48,340

The BLS says: Technology is making it easier to sort mail without the help of human hands.
The Top 10 Shrinking Occupations: 2010 - 2020

Reuters

1: Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers

Net decline: 96,100 jobs

Percentage decline: 8%

Degree required: High school diploma or equivalent

Average pay: Varies

The BLS says: As American agriculture learns to produce even more with fewer workers, some farmers will go out of business.

Beyond healthcare, the BLS expects that service industries will continue to add workers at a healthy clip. The biggest trend is that employers will add jobs they can't outsource or hand over to a computer. There will be plenty of opportunities for college graduates in education, accounting, and corporate sales. On the low end of the pay-scale, there will be jobs for retail workers, waiters and waitresses, and janitors.

Who should be bracing for layoffs? Postal workers, for one. The BLS also releases a list of the top 30 shrinking occupations, and it's largely split into two categories. On one hand, there are occupations that are becoming irrelevant thanks to advances in technology. The death of paper mail means less need for mail sorters, carriers, and clerks. Office workers such as typists, switchboard operators, and file clerks are becoming redundant. And advances in farm productivity mean we won't need as many agricultural workers. On the other hand, manufacturing jobs will disappear in industries facing competition from cheap labor overseas, such as apparel, semiconductors, paper goods, and electronics.

For the most part, the list of occupations expected to see the biggest employment declines is populated by jobs that require a high school diploma or less. But one occupation dominated by college grads does make it on there. That would be reporting. Maybe there'll be a few PR gigs open at all those hospitals.

Accountancy Jobs Kent

lovelylovely — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:24:58 -0000

Clipped by lovelylovely

No selection was clipped for this page

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

odie — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:18:11 -0000

Clipped by odie

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

The iEconomy

An Empire Built Abroad

Articles in this series are examining challenges posed by increasingly globalized high-tech industries.

Multimedia

The iPhone Economy

Times Topic: Apple Incorporated

Add to Portfolio

Apple Incorporated

Go to your Portfolio »

Enlarge This Image

Thomas Lee/Bloomberg News

A production line in Foxconn City in Shenzhen, China. The iPhone is assembled in this vast facility, which has 230,000 employees, many at the plant up to 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Enlarge This Image

Thomas Lee for The New York Times

In China, Lina Lin is a project manager at PCH International, which contracts with Apple. “There are lots of jobs,” she said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

Read All Comments (777) »

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. 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.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

In Foxconn City

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

Paydays for Apple

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.

While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Innovation’s Losers

Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.

Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.

What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.

In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.

“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “But will someone in his 40s have the skills for them? Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”

The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.

Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

There wasn’t even a tiny scratch on the screen.

Prevailing-wage laws don't hike costs

odie — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:03:20 -0000

Clipped by odie

Some Harrisburg politicians have a novel idea about how to create more jobs in Pennsylvania. They want to slash the middle-class wages of construction workers who build schools and fire stations in our communities. If that means hiring less experienced builders who will take longer to get the job done and make costly mistakes, so be it.

CHRISTINE BAKER, The Patriot-News Construction is underway at the Eisenhower Elementary School and Grace Milliman Pollock Performing Arts Center located off 21st Street and the Camp Hill bypass. CHRISTINE BAKER, The Patriot-News Eisenhower Elementary School and Grace Milliman Pollock Performing Arts Center gallery (9 photos)

Does that sound like a winning jobs policy to you? I like to think that public policy is shaped in part by logic and evidence, but the current legislative debates about Pennsylvania’s prevailing-wage law illustrate just how naive that notion is.

The law requires that jobs on public construction projects pay occupation- and area-specific minimum wages that typically range from $15 to $35 per hour. The state Legislature is considering various proposals to weaken this law. Some workers on public projects could see their wages plummet from $25 per hour with health and pension benefits to $12.50 with no benefits.

Why do this now? To erode the buying power of working families because their consumption is too robust in this economy? To see the unemployment rate climb above 10 percent again? No, supporters say, we need to weaken prevailing-wage laws because they are driving up construction costs by 10 percent to 30 percent. Is there any logic or evidence to justify these claims?

To support these assertions, conservative think tanks have produced a cottage industry of reports containing hypothetical or “what if” calculations. If labor is 30 percent of the cost of a project and labor costs $30 per hour, what if you paid only $15 per hour? That would save 15 percent, they say.

This line of thinking has been paired in recent media reports with anecdotes that follow the same “what if” logic. Press stories might quote a local government official saying: “We bid our project first without prevailing wage. Then we asked the winning contractor how much the cost would go up if they had to pay prevailing wage. The price went up 15 percent.” This is just a variation of what the right-wing think tanks do: The contractor assumes the same labor hours and simply increases the labor cost.

But “what if” calculations are not actual experience; they are really little different than conjecture. In the case of prevailing wage, the “what if” calculations fall apart with a little scrutiny. When you pay less for labor, you don’t necessarily get the same quality of work. Lower quality labor might use more hours and could require more rework. The project might cost as much — or more — without prevailing wage.

Steve Herzenberg

At the least, you can’t simply assume that you will get the same productivity and skill if you slash the workers’ pay. You have to look for real-world evidence. The good news is there is plenty of evidence. It comes from comparing construction costs in states with and without prevailing-wage laws. It also comes from “before and after” looks at construction costs in states that got rid of prevailing wage.

Variation across states and over time makes it possible to sort out statistically, from thousands of actual construction projects, whether prevailing-wage laws drive up costs. It turns out they don’t. This finding wouldn’t surprise the owner of a Delaware contractor who told me much of her business comes from rewiring private commercial jobs not covered by prevailing wage.

In one supermarket, the wiring “looked like a bird’s nest” — about what you’d expect from a low-ball contractor using workers without training and experience. Maybe we should relabel our prevailing-wage law the Pennsylvania Quality Construction Act.

If there are savings at all from eliminating prevailing-wage laws, the owners and executives of contracting companies must pocket them. Sounds like a way to take money from the 99 percent and give it to the 1 percent.

The data show that one factor does drive up construction costs: undertaking projects when demand is high. By contrast, undertaking projects with the market in the tank — like now — can save 20 percent.

If policymakers are interested in an “evidence-based” construction policy, they should keep the state’s prevailing-wage law and create a “Buy Low” fund to subsidize countercyclical construction. Better value for taxpayers and jobs when workers really need them. Now that would be a novel idea.

Obama To Campaign On Jobs Bill In North Carolina, Virginia

odie — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:58:11 -0000

Clipped by odie

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will urge Congress to get to work this week on passing pieces of his larger, now-defunct jobs bill during a three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia, two southern states that will be critical to his re-election campaign.

The two-state swing, which kicks off Monday in Asheville, N.C., is Obama's latest attempt to combine campaigning for his jobs bill with campaigning for his re-election. While he has pledged to travel the country pitching his plans to get Americans back to work, his stops have focused heavily on political swing states, underscoring the degree to which what happens with the economy is tied to Obama's re-election prospects.

The bus tour comes as the fight over Obama's jobs proposals enters a new phase. The president's efforts to get his entire $447 billion bill passed were blocked by Senate Republicans, leaving Obama and his Democratic allies to push for the proposals contained in the bill to be passed piece by piece.

That means the president's rallying cry this week could go from "Pass this bill" to "Pass these bills."

Presidential spokesman Jay Carney told reporters traveling with Obama that the White House expects the Senate will take action first on a proposal to send aid to states and local governments so that they can hire or prevent layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters. The president has proposed $35 billion for that purpose.

Carney said, though, the decision is up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and that an announcement from Reid was likely soon.

Despite Obama's calls for urgency, it appears the lawmakers may not take up individual components of the president's bill until November, at the earliest. The Senate is set to debate appropriations bills this week, and lawmakers have a scheduled break at the end of the month.

Obama is also touting another elements of his jobs package, $50 billion in new spending on infrastructure.

Obama's stops on the bus trip are designed to highlight those aspects of his plan, including his first stop at the Ashville Regional Airport, where the White House says government funds could be used to renovate a runway and create construction jobs.

The president will also speak at community colleges, high schools and a firehouse as he travels through North Carolina and Virginia this week.

Both states are traditionally Republican leaning, but changing demographics and a boost in voter turnout among young people and African-Americans helped Obama carry them in 2008.

But nearly three years after his historic election, the president's approval ratings in both states are sagging, in line with the national trend.

A Quinnipiac University poll out earlier this month put Obama's approval rating in Virginia at 45 percent, with 52 percent disapproving. The same poll showed 83 percent of Virginians were dissatisfied with the direction of the country. In North Carolina, Obama has a 42 percent approval rating, according to an Elon University poll conducted this month. Most national polls put Obama's approval rating in the mid- to low-40s.

The conservative advocacy group American Crossroads planned to run television ads in both states during Obama's trip, criticizing the president's jobs proposals as a second round of stimulus spending.

The president will be ditching Air Force One for much of his trip this week, traveling instead on a $1.1 million bus purchased by the Secret Service. The impenetrable-looking bus is painted all black, with dark tinted windows and flashing red and blue lights. Obama first used the custom-made bus during a similar road trip in August, when he traveled through Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

___

Associated Press writers Ken Thomas in Washington, Bob Lewis in Richmond, Va., and Tom Breen in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

The Most Underrated Jobs | Power Your Future - Yahoo! Finance

odie — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:42:53 -0000

Clipped by odie

The Most Underrated Jobs

| Power Your Future – Fri, Sep 23, 2011 4:09 PM EDT

provided by

by Susan Adams

Paralegals and legal assistants make an average annual income of $47,000, and over the past three years the average unemployment rate in the field has been just 3.1%. The job is also relatively low-stress, involves little contact with the public, and doesn't require employees to breathe in toxic fumes or lift loads of 50 lbs. or more. Those factors land paralegal in the number one spot on CareerCast.com's new list of most underrated jobs. Second on the list: accountant, with an average income of $60,000 and an average three-year unemployment rate of 4.8%. Loan officer ranks third, with income of $55,000 and a three-year unemployment rate of 4.4%.

Resume service

1deadcow — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:43:17 -0000

Clipped by 1deadcow

No selection was clipped for this page

Games Jobs Direct

bikash365 — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:58:16 -0000

Clipped by bikash365

Games Jobs by Category

Jobs by Job Category

View more jobs by job category

Games Jobs by Region

Jobs by Region

View more jobs by region

Search Games Jobs

Featured Recruiters

A-Z of our Recruiters

Games Industry News

News: Frima Studio acquires art specialists Volta

News: Moshi Monsters magazine passes 113,000 circulation

News: Activision: EA "mud-slinging" bad for industry

News: GameStop profits down but digital sales surge 69%

Ninja Gaiden adds Move support

Somo latest Monetising Mobile sponsor

Activision calls for calm in EA feud

Lollipop Chainsaw gets first video

About Games Jobs Direct

Welcome to the home of Game Industry Jobs in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and the rest of the world!

Games Jobs Direct is the global video games jobs board for the games industry. We advertise vacancies from the leading games publishers, developers, recruitment agencies and staffing agencies worldwide.

Job seekers - search our job board for game designer jobs, game programming jobs, game developer jobs and commercial roles including sales, marketing, PR and operational functions.

Employers & recruiters – promote your vacancies to top games industry candidates and source the best talent directly via our CV database.

Latest Jobs

Level Designer Competitive Utah

Gameplay Programmer Competitive Utah

Gameplay Programmer Competitive North Carolina

FX Artist Competitive North Carolina

Engine Support Engineer Competitive Japan

View All Latest Jobs

Candidates: Login or Register | Recruiters: Login

The global video games industry job board

Candidates

Recruiters

Site Pages

Contact Us

+44 (0) 1302 247 227
+44 (0) 1302 822 237
info@gamesjobsdirect.com

Games Jobs Direct Ltd

Suite 1A

Hutton Business Centre

Bentley Rd, Doncaster

DN5 9QP

Latest Job Listings

Security Jobs Board in UK

edwords915 — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 06:44:36 -0000

Clipped by edwords915

Home | Register | Sign In

Job Search

Job Seekers

Employers

Featured Companies

Jobs by Category

Jobs by City

Featured Jobs

Fire & Security Systems Engineer

Pinks TRS

Doncaster (DN), Lincolnshire,Nottinghamshire

Design / Estimator - Fire & Security Systems

Pinks TRS

South Wales & Midlands,

Service Engineer - Fire Systems

Pinks TRS

South Wales, Central

Latest Jobs

Electrical Power Engineer

Timothy James Consulting

City, London

HSE Manager

Badger Associates Ltd

Thetford, Norfolk

Senior Electrical Design Engineer

Vivid Resourcing Ltd

Not Specified, North

Field Service Engineer (SBS) -Installation Engineer - (VM Ware) - Milt

FOCUS IT

Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

Blog Posts

Security Jobs Board Pinks Online Adds New Feature Which Allows Clients To Automatically Add Jobs To The Site Saving Time & Money

08.11.2010

Pinks launched a new, improved website earlier this year and from the middle of November Pinks are launching a new Job Wrapping service which allows companies to automatically add jobs to the Pinks Online job board, saving precious time and money for clients whilst maximising the effectiveness of the vacancies by pushing the jobs across the internet in seconds, providing a rapid response to vacancies advertised.

Security Jobs In The UK

02.11.2010

There are many security jobs in UK that include working as manned guards, management of security, retail security, alarms, and fraud and investigation. But before you apply for jobs such as manned guards, you will need to have the proper qualifications and experience as that is a prerequisite for being employed.

Finding The Right Security Recruitment Agency

12.10.2010

There are a number of different security recruitment agencies in the United Kingdom today and part of being a person that is up on the job scene rests in understanding not only how these security recruitment agencies work, but also in understanding exactly what they can do for you.

Skrive CV maler oppsett

sarahyoung52 — Mon, 23 May 2011 11:00:18 -0000

Clipped by sarahyoung52

No selection was clipped for this page

Job Search South Africa

bruce635 — Tue, 03 May 2011 17:24:35 -0000

Clipped by bruce635

Find quickly and without difficulties the right Job for you! You can find here the newest jobs and vacancies. Renego.co.za is your online employment market for South Africa. Your complete job search and careers portal.

Apply Jobs and Get Back To Work

sufiankhan — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:44:39 -0000

Clipped by sufiankhan

No selection was clipped for this page

Arbeidsliv

sarahyoung52 — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:45:36 -0000

Clipped by sarahyoung52

No selection was clipped for this page

Job Search

Aliak — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:24:49 -0000

Clipped by Aliak

No selection was clipped for this page

Job Search

Ladarius11 — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:50:48 -0000

Clipped by Ladarius11

No selection was clipped for this page

What?	Where?
Marketing, Developer, Manager	Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban

Clips tagged jobs

America's 10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Shrinking) Jobs

America's 10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Shrinking) Jobs

The Top 10 Growing Occupations: 2010 - 2020

10: Post-secondary teachers

Accountancy Jobs Kent

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

The iEconomy

Multimedia

The iPhone Economy

Related

Times Topic: Apple Incorporated

Add to Portfolio

Thomas Lee/Bloomberg News

Thomas Lee for The New York Times

Readers’ Comments

Prevailing-wage laws don't hike costs

Obama To Campaign On Jobs Bill In North Carolina, Virginia

The Most Underrated Jobs | Power Your Future - Yahoo! Finance

The Most Underrated Jobs

Resume service

Games Jobs Direct

Games Jobs by Category

Jobs by Job Category

Games Jobs by Region

Jobs by Region

Search Games Jobs

Featured Recruiters

Games Industry News

About Games Jobs Direct

Popular Searches

Games Jobs by Category

Jobs by Job Category

Games Jobs by Region

Jobs by Region

Search Games Jobs

Latest Jobs

The global video games industry job board

Candidates

Recruiters

Site Pages

Contact Us

Security Jobs Board in UK

Job Seekers

Employers

Featured Companies

Jobs by Category

Jobs by City

Skrive CV maler oppsett

Job Search South Africa

Apply Jobs and Get Back To Work

Arbeidsliv

Job Search

Job Search