Mike,
This fictional story you describe was, as I'm sure you're aware, pretty
close to reality in the USSR, and a few other former communist
countries. The difference would have been that the state sponsored the
'university' of technical/trade learning. The Soviets built massive
factories of all kinds across their empire, but as it crumbled, many
factories were financially unable to adjust to new technologies or had
to reduce their output for lack of raw materials, power or heat.
Countless others became inoperable for being situated in the regions no
longer under Soviet control.
One of my relations, a recently discovered half-sister who lived in the
beautiful medieval city of Lviv, Ukraine, obtained a state sponsored
university engineering degree which was very specifically geared towards
managing humongous shoe factories. After the Ukrainian revolution, hers
was not the only such industry to fold and never again reopen. The
fledgling Ukrainian government had no means nor market structure for
operating these dinosaurs, so millions of workers became unfortunate
subjects of system collapse.
My half-sister lived in relative poverty before, but things grew much
worse till she managed to obtain a visa to visit Canada. She worked for
a Polish Canadian farmer in the 90's who paid $2-3 dollars per hour to
such wanna-be immigrants, tending to pigs and chickens. Shocking and
demeaning for an educated city gal. Fortunately for her, she was tough
and driven to send money home to her grown children. She also got to
work a deli the farmer owned in Toronto, where she met a kindly man in
need of a care worker. They fell in love, and she became a legitimate
Canadian soon after.
Natalia
On 6/23/2011 8:48 PM, Mike Spencer wrote:
Arthur posted a piece by John W. Schoen:
Why some jobs go begging in tough economy
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43465034/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/
> From the article:
Darlene Miller, CEO of Permac Industries in South Burnsville,
Minn., said the days are long gone when a new hire could learn how
to operate machinery on the job. Miller said she would add another
half-dozen workers to her payroll of 38 workers - if she could
find people skilled at operating the high-tech equipment she
recently purchased to boost productivity.
"We just can't afford to take the time and the money to hire and
someone to just shadow someone else and learn hands-on," she
said. "The equipment is just too high-tech to do that."
There's a science fiction story published decades ago that captured this.
In a moderately distant future, all the brightest kids go to
university where, if they do well, they will be assured of
prestigious, highly paid jobs with corporate-financed colonies on
newly discovered planets.
Only what a university education consists of is learning everything
there is to know about some piece of incredibly complex, high-tech
piece of industrial equipment. The kids are all exultant when they
pass the trials -- being able, say, to repair a huge piece of
automated mining equipment, in the dark while (literally) up to their
waists in a swamp filled with alien monsters, in 30 minutes flat.
The curve ball is that, in a few years, this gear will be obsolete,
replaced by newer and even more high-tech stuff. The only place to
learn the new gear is at the manufacturer-sponsored uni -- certainly
not in some remote mining colony. So as soon as the second wave of
settlers arrives with the newest gear on board, this cohort of hotshot,
highly technical guys will be totally "surplus to needs."
The focus of the story, though, is this one kid who isn't doing so
great because, well, because he keeps wasting his time getting what
we'd call an education. Reads books instead of drilling on diagnosis
of a malfunctioning Digital MegaBlivet(tm).
The happy ending is that he is noticed by Those Who Are There to
Notice and, after failing the corporate trials, is quietly led aside
and told that his real education is just beginning, that he has an
assured, even more prestigious, career as a real scientist, engineer,
analyst, synthesist or whatever.
Great for him but all his high-achieving school chums are destined for
obsolescence in the predictable future. Age 37, light years from home
and redundant.
Of *course* our (non-fictional) companies don't want to spend two or
three years training someone to use the high-tech gear. In two or
three years, the boss will be looking at replacing it with newer, more
competitive stuff.
- Mike
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