GM's retiring I.T. czar, CIO Ralph Szygenda is having a $35 per person retirement bash and "strolling buffet". E-mail have gone out reminding admiring employees, that tickets can still be had! Next week, thousands of salaried employees are going to pink slips...no party.

Ralph and his arrogant hand-picked leadership team are completely oblivious to the sensitivities of employees or to the company's situation. His legacy will unfortunately linger long after he leaves.

Ralphs disasterous outsourcing contracts in 06/06/06 and his "next wave" of outsourcing at GM helped to ruin I.T. as a career path for people in the U.S. and continues to paralyse IT support inside the company.

The party's over.

Meridith,

You chronicle the careers and the employment of the practitioners of our humble IT profession. You ask probing, serious (even scary) questions and you do it with a smile in your voice that gets the message across so much more effectively than rants and finger pointing (wish I could do that...).

I think the layoffs at the end of the dot com bubble where the biggest because we collectively took leave of our senses and poured money into things that made no sense and had no substance (a human frailty that repeats itself over time - see Dutch Tulip Mania 1634-1637 and work forward from there as waves of irrational exhuberence wash over us). We learn hard lessons; we put regulations in place (our meds) to try to avoid those excesses; we forget; we stop taking our meds; we get into trouble again.

During the 1980s and 90s we took apart the regulations and social saftey net that we put in place after the hard lessons of the 1930s. Maybe we need to apply the "designated driver" rule to the way we manage our finances (personal as well as national and international). Somebody needs to stay sober during our times of irrational exhuberence; somebody needs to remember that what goes up actually does come down; and remember that the pain of coming down is even more than the high we get while going up.

But so anyway, here we are (again) waking up from another binge (what was it this time - oh yes; it was real estate that was the sure deal that would go up forever). We have the seeds of greatness in us. The last "greatest generation" came out of the Great Depression and World War II. We got our Great Ression; hopefully we won't also need a world war to bring out our greatness this time. Greatness comes when there is no other alternative (which is about where we are now) and it comes when we look out for each other instead of only looking out for ourselves. It's not as if we can't figure this out. Sustainable prosperity is possible and once we collectively decide to get on with the things we know we need to do, our humble IT profession will be right down the middle of it.

Michael

Can't see the relevant research on their website - could you publish a link?

Are these net job losses in the whole economy? That would imply over 10m jobs lost from the economy since 2000 which seems unlikely.

The 'halcyon' days of the late '90's were built on ephemeral company valuations and a belief that the established order had been overturned. No different to the finance boom that's led to the current disaster. Both based on very shaky foundations.

Meridith,

Another good place to look for stats is here:

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/

A few thoughts and comments based on your post, Mr Hugos reply and some other observations:

• One disturbing trend is that beginning with the 1990-91 recession, job losses continued to climb for a period of time AFTER the recession ended. In recessions prior to that one, job losses (and the unemployment rate) began to bounce back almost immediately after the recession ended. And if we have seen the technical end of the recession (which many believe has occurred), then this trend of continued job losses and rising unemployment is going to hold true for this decline as well.

• Job losses are not the sole indicator of what is going on with the state of employment. “Churn” is at least as important a factor as well. Are we creating more new jobs than we are destroying? Right now the answer is decidedly no and the result is a net loss in jobs. One must also throw in the trend over the last century for people to have more jobs for shorter periods of time over the course of their lives. Whether by choice or not, if my parents had just 4 jobs from high-school to retirement (and my grandparents held down just 1) and I hold 8 this is going to have a dramatic effect on job-loss statistics, especially if those stats don’t factor-in job creation stats.

• Productivity is at an all-time high, and while this has been going on at least since the discovery of tools and fire, the question of rising productivity during increasing unemployment should always be a cause for concern because Enterprises are not generally getting these productivity gains via any big advancement in technology or major insights in management. The gains are coming by reducing labor costs to the point individual pain. Example: Someone whom I know very well was recently cut from his management job because of the divisions stated unprofitability. Less than 30 days later he was extended an offer for a “supervisor” position with the exact same job duties (but not the title) for half his prior salary. Long story short he took the position while continuing to actively seek a new one but considering national unemployment is likely already at 10% nationally as I write this (and at 12% where this person is currently living) what choice does one have? I suspect this is more than a small factor in the rising productivity levels but it will not be sustainable. It also will continue to lower the standard of living which ironically will result in a more conservative level of disposable income and less likelihood that GDP will return to previous levels for a long time to come.

• Michael Hugos is also correct in that we have to a large extent removed the checks and balances from our economic and societal infrastructures. One of the great ironies is that while not exact, there does seem to be a correlation to periods of long term growth and standards of living when checks and balances have been put into place and enforced (federal minimal wage and overtime laws, anti-trust practices and utilities regulations, etc…). When those checks and balances are neutered, bypassed, or stripped away, an explosive period (or binge) almost always seems to result which looks wonderful while the binge is occurring. That bad news is they also seem to come with a huge crash and hangover afterwards. I think Michael is also correct in that we do have the ability to create cycles of sustainable prosperity and the passionate optimist in me believes we can do it. The cynic wonders though it will be anytime soon enough to help the roughly 15% of Americans who are not earning enough income to fulfill the goals of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

- MEK

My impression is the alarming job loss trend this article illustrates is due mainly to the financing of an unnecessary, ill-conceived war in Iraq and an increasing current account deficit/national debt. With so much money going toward paying for war, payment for increasing amounts of foreign imports and the payment of interest and principle on increasing national debt there just wasn't enough money left to create new 21st Century jobs to replace the 20th Century jobs lost. These forces were aided by our "trading partner" China and other countries holding their currencies at artificially low rates of exchange particularly versus the US dollar, and/or subsidizing exports in other ways. This devastated US manufacturing and other industries that were all but run out of business by cheaper imports. Finally, the "prosperity" of the early 21st Century, as we now know, was actually just a real-estate/mortgage financing bubble that burst in the second half of 2008. While this bubble created great wealth for some and some new jobs in the financial industry for others, the vast majority of Americans experienced the declining purchasing power of their stagnant incomes, escalating job losses and in millions of instances loss of their homes along with any other wealth they may have amassed. Although "off-shoring", shipping American jobs overseas, has played a very visible role in the job loss trend in the US, I believe it is more of a symptom than a cause. Specifically, it is symptomatic of the imbalances of trade and currency exchange mentioned above, and will stabilize and perhaps even decline as the US standard of living continues to fall and those of other countries rise, China and India in particular.

Unfortunately, I don't believe these forces can be reversed in the near term. What our political leaders in most cases are not telling us is that we are increasingly faced with a choice of two evils. On the one hand, increased taxes and prices for goods and services combined with fairly stagnant incomes will continue to lower the whole country's net living standard/buying power and will require dramatic increases in exports to reverse. On the other hand, if our political institutions pursue a more "conservative" approach, we face increasing social unrest in the form of organized crime and "white collar" crime, street gang violence and militia/survivalist activity which will drive the country in the direction of becoming a failing state.

For a start, our political leaders must stop complacently insisting that the US is "the greatest country/economy in the world" which it still is but won't remain so much longer at the present rate, and admit we have very serious structural problems to address. The present health care reform debate and its outcome may be a precursor of the country's future direction in this regard.