Donna Perry: RI’s Jobs Creation Strategy is Not Working
Thursday, January 26, 2012
During the height of this past Christmas shopping season, I recall the long line I stood on at the bustling Best Buy mega store in Warwick. I was just one consumer among the throngs of weary suburban parents who, like me, were loaded up with small but pricey Apple made gadgets which would be placed under the tree for their children. The iPads, iPods, and iPhones were flowing out the door at a brisk pace and as each group of buyers made their way through the check-out, a new crowd of shoppers filed in. There’s no doubt the store had been that way all season.
I recalled that scene this week while watching the President’s rallying cry for American jobs, in his State of the Union address, and reading new data on the Rhode Island jobless. It’s ironic that a nation that can produce the mind, creativity, and determination of a Steven Jobs, as well as the free market environment that unleashes his genius, would not be able to sustain the manufacturing sector needed to make his products here.
The underlying reasons for all that are best left to others, and I would only note that a lengthy and extraordinary must read piece in last Sunday’s New York Times painstakingly captures how and why the Chinese have won the manufacturing race and their people’s labor is sought by innovators like Apple for the assembly of their smash hit products. Twelve hour days, six days a week, and over 200,000 workers living in dormitories adjacent to the assembly factory for constant availability, certainly partly explains why the iPads and iPhones will never be made in this country. Although it’s true that Apple still employs over 40,000 people in the U.S., the subcontractors who all are part of the full creation of the Apple products employ about another 500,000 workers at plants spread out among several Asian countries.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTDisappearance of Old Economy
Speed of assembly and worker technical skill, not to mention profit margins, are clearly enhanced when workers are warehoused at the plant at the full disposal of management. Those labor practices, which are common in China and elsewhere overseas, are rightfully rejected here but have permanently transformed the playing field for American high tech manufacturing.
In fact, the disappearance of old economy manufacturing as a job creation sector is still being felt in the persistently dismal employment outlook for Rhode Island.It’s hard not to characterize the numbers released last week by the state Department of Labor and Training (DLT) as anything less than the portrait of a growing employment crisis in the state. Compared to the steady job recovery seen elsewhere, our state seems clearly going in the opposite, bleak direction. An estimated 60,800 Rhode Islanders are without jobs this month as the unemployment rate ticked back up to nearly 11%, at 10.8%.
Most telling is the estimated number of jobs this state is presently capable of creating in contrast to the nation and our neighbor states who long ago nurtured new job sectors for the post manufacturing America. The snapshot goes like this: In 2011, the nation’s rebounding job market saw the creation of 1.6 million new jobs. In Massachusetts, there were 40,700 new jobs created. In the Ocean State: a mere 500 new jobs were added in 2011. Complicating the state’s widening job problem is the growing and well publicized gap between the skill readiness of the state’s job seekers and the new job opportunities in the growth fields of health care and health sciences, data management and other components of the knowledge sector.
Public Sector Changes
Also significant in last week’s data was the changes in employment in the public sector. State and local governments have been reducingemployee numbers at a rate unseen in previous years in Rhode Island, shedding about 9,200 positions in 2011. That still leaves roughly 59,600 Rhode Islanders employed in the public sector, through a combination of federal, state, and city and town government positions.
Ironically, the number of jobless Rhode Islanders, most as refugees from smaller local private sector employers, nearly equals the number of Rhode Islanders employed in the public sector. But even local governments, whose employee unions fiercely protect their job turf, havehad no choice in recent years but to streamline workforce numbers as they begin to buckle under their own fiscal weight. They will likely continue to shed more and more jobs--and most importantly, the expensive retirement benefits that go with them.
Unfortunately, the combined factors of the states’ long reliance on local public government to serve as one of the major job employers and the failure of state leadership over the years to craft a sustained long range economic development strategy have caught up with Rhode Island and the result is the current employment crisis.
The jobless Rhode Islanders, whose numbers just won’t budge, prove it.
Donna Perry is a Communications Consultant
If you valued this article, please LIKE GoLocalProv.com on Facebook by clicking HERE.
Related Articles
- Donna Perry: Mitt’s Moment is Now
- Donna Perry: The COLA Advantage
- Donna Perry: New Session Will Focus on Old Debts
- Donna Perry: The Next GOP Chairman
- Donna Perry: No American Dream in RI
- Donna Perry: The Tragedy of Lost Young Lives
- Donna Perry: Predictions for 2012
- Donna Perry: The Vote the Taxpayers Will Watch for 2012
- Donna Perry: A Real Chance for a RI Recovery Begins
- Donna Perry: RI Should Follow The Flanders’ Road Map
- Donna Perry: Union Strategy: Sabotage Pension Reform
- Donna Perry: A Reason to Believe in RI
- Donna Perry: Rallying Their Way to Irrelevance
- Donna Perry: Whose School Committee Is It Anyway?
- Donna Perry: Be Thankful and Get Ready for 2012
- Donna Perry: Road to Reform Reaches Retirees
- Donna Perry: Cicilline Will Do Anything to get Re-Elected
- Donna Perry: The Biggest Risk of All