By John G. Agno
Reprinted: 2003-10-30

America's highly skilled workers continue to take a big hit in the jobless recovery. These workers are suffering scant wage growth and unusually high unemployment. With the overall U.S. unemployment rate at 6.2% in July, most are ready, willing and able to get back to work.

Educated workers seem especially prone to bouts of long-term unemployment in this downturn. Of the 1.9 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or more, one in five is a former executive, professional or manager, according to a study by the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit advocacy group for the unemployed. Because these workers have specific, often technical, skills it sometimes takes them longer to find a job that matches those skills.

Permanent job losses are the result of productivity growth where companies are squeezing more output from existing workers. Worker productivity has been growing faster than the overall economy. That has allowed corporate executives to meet small increases in demand while still eliminating jobs.

These are anxious times for U.S. workers. Sure, the recovery seems to be getting under way. Yet hardly a week goes by without another report of a batch of high-paying, white-collar jobs getting exported to far cheaper locales such as India, China, or the Philippines. In mid-July, IBM set off a firestorm when news of its plans to move more white-collar jobs overseas was leaked to The New York Times. And news service Reuters announced on July 28 that it will move 600 or so jobs from New York, as well as dozens of other slots in England, Scotland, and Singapore, to its operations in India.

As white-collar jobs move away with increasing regularity, a debate that once focused on the loss of manufacturing to foreign outsourcing is once again raging: Just how serious for America, its workforce, and its economy is the shift?

The outsourcing of highly skilled service jobs in the new global economy is fundamentally different and poses greater risks for the U.S. economy. This is not your father's economy. Most of the white-collar jobs downsized in the U.S. are gone forever. The new economy is evolving and the pursuit of the lowest-cost source is global and real. The old regional agreements of the past, like NAFTA, are obsolete. Forget what the economy was like in the 1990's, change your mental model of what and where you fit in the new 21st Century economy and get on with your life.

It means nothing that you were making a big salary a few years ago. That job and those like it are gone. Figure out where you might fit in the New Economy and begin today to build your earning capability in attunement with this new global economy.

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