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	June 28, 2003

WHY THE PREDICTED TALENT SHORTAGE WILL NEVER HAPPEN For the past week, I've been blogging from hotel rooms (more details on this week's fascinating travel, with incriminating photos, when I get back home), and with the completion of Zakaria's book, I ran out of offline reading material. So I'm reduced to reading the American Airlines inflight magazine, which has yet another prediction of an imminent talent shortage: The size of the pool gets smaller and smaller, and the demand for those skills gets bigger and bigger, so you have more companies competing for a smaller and smaller group of talented people. Yeah, sure. These grandiose predictions fail to take into account that the elites that run most large enterprises were badly stung by the minor talent shortage of the late 1990s, and will do everything possible to ensure they don't get stung again. They won't allow employees to hit them up for signing bonuses, flex time, liberal dress codes and other disruptive trends that hurt ROI and weaken command and control. There are three things they will do to ensure the talent shortage predicted by  demographic studies will not be allowed to occur: Exporting Jobs : Software development work exported by US companies last year totaled $8B, and help-desk support outsourced is probably higher than that, growing at 20% per year. Add in other sectors and that's a ton of skilled jobs (probably at least ten million) taken from Americans. As the baby bust rolls through, expect this give-away to multiply many-fold. Increasing Retirement Age : Thanks to the elimination of the middle class in America by Bush and previous administrations hell bent on privatizing everything, curtailing social services, and allowing public infrastructure to fall into chaos and disrepair, fewer and fewer Americans can afford to retire at the age they used to. And thanks to fiscal mismanagement and corporate greed, many Americans' retirement funds have been decimated anyway. Add fifteen years to the average retirement age and the talent shortage quickly turns into a talent glut. Tapping the Vast Pool of Under-Employed : If the above two tricks don't do the job, companies can always start to move Americans, the majority of whom describe themselves as under-employed, out of the abysmal temporary, part-time and contract jobs they've been doing through the Bush recession, into more suitable jobs. So if anyone will be facing a 'talent shortage', it will be McDonalds and WalMart. And those jobs can always be filled by desperate moonlighters. In combination, these three shifts will more than offset the demand increase caused by the retirement of baby boomers and the movement of the post-baby boom 'bust' generation into business' senior ranks. They will ensure the perpetuation of centuries of wage slavery, the demoralization of more generations of workers in largely meaningless, underpaid jobs, and the continued subjugation of many bright and competent people by a small number of moneyed and incompetent managers, most of whom either inherited their wealth and position or bought it by virtue of enrolment in ivy league colleges and subsequent employment by companies currying favour with their privileged fathers. In short, American economics stacks the deck against new entrepreneurs, against young people and old people with ambition and ideas, and against a more egalitarian working world. True talent, the ability to run a healthy business that puts people and the environment ahead of short term profit, will continue to be scarce in the executive suites of major corporations.The reality that America is not the land of unlimited opportunity, but rather a land where cartels of privilege prevail and consolidate their staggering wealth and power by working the political and economic engines to entrench their dynasties, will be hard for Americans to face up to. But ending this tyranny is the only way out. We can't hope or expect a 'talent shortage' to do the job for us. Postscript: Image above from VisionFragments - see right sidebar. 12:16:02 PM  trackback []  comment []

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