How To Save Jobs

Back in the dot-com boom, the dot-coms had a lot of work to be done, and not enough Americans were available to do it all. Many of the dot-com firms began to outsource much of their work to make up for the lack of available U.S. workers.

To many Americans, the word “outsourcing” is a four-letter word. It implies, as Ross Perot called it, a “giant sucking sound,” where jobs leave the United States for less advantaged countries. Perot was concerned about NAFTA in the early 1990s sucking good paying American jobs to Mexico, but as it turns out, he had no idea what was coming.

While many of the tasks we perform here in the 21st century are pretty much the same as those we performed before the turn of the century, many factors have changed the flavor, pace, and experience of 21st century employment.

For much of the 20th century, India followed an extremely socialist economic policy. Its economy was excessively regulated, protectionism was rampant, corruption was everywhere, and growth was slow. But in 1991, India changed its policy.

Here’s an interesting universal truth: everyone wants a better life. This is as true of the desperate poor in third world nations as it is of middle-class Americans. And while economic downturns are scary to most Americans, even the poorest of Americans live a better life than the shocking level of never-ending squalor experienced by some of the poorest of the poor in developing nations.

Our relation with work has changed as time passed. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, more and more people lived in cities and areas removed from the land. Individuals became more reliant on buying food and goods rather than growing their own.

In today’s civilization, it’s virtually impossible to survive without money. One-hundred-and-fifty centuries ago, if a Natufian wanted to build a hut, he’d find an empty spot of land and dig. But, today, if an American wants to build a house (or even a hut), land has to be bought.

Human civilization goes back more than 16,500 years. Harvard Professor of Prehistoric Archeology Ofer Bar-Yosef talks about a civilization he named the “Natufians.” These were a people living near modern-day Israel, an ancient tribe he believes were perhaps the world’s first farmers.

A company is not successful because it has created jobs. A company creates jobs because it has some level of success. The more successful a company is, the more jobs it creates to support that success. It stands to reason, then, that if we want more jobs and we want to save the jobs we have, our companies need to be more successful. The answer to the question of “How do we save jobs?” is this: create more successful and sustainable companies.