A couple days ago, I had a phone conversation with a senior executive who spent decades in the auto business in Detroit and now has his own business. He never mentioned it, but it soon became apparent to me that things weren’t going all that well in his business, and he needed to have a regular paycheck. I really felt for him because he had called to ask me to recommend him for a job for which he is way overqualified. In fact, it made me determined to find something more suited to his particular talents.
A bit later, while surfing the Internet, I ran across a headline that said the stock market is up to May 2008 levels and the country had created 100,000 new jobs in January. This seemed entirely inconsistent with everything else I’ve been seeing and hearing, such as the fact that people are lining up at Walmart at midnight on the first of each month so they can shop with food stamps and that soup kitchens are not just serving the homeless, but once self-sufficient individuals who have simply run out of money to buy food.
Then there was the profile I saw on Yahoo of three families whose annual income went from $100,000 plus to $15,000, along with other tales of the rapidly declining middle class. This info is all swirling in my head, and none of it seems to jibe with the rosy reports of an improving economy.
Now don’t get me wrong – I want the stock market to go up, and I want people to be prosperous and have an abundant lifestyle, but something isn’t right here. It just doesn’t add up. The individual I talked to the other day has a skill set I can use tomorrow, and probably will, but where are all the jobs going that are suited to people of his caliber? Have they just become obsolete as corporations make the transition to new technologies? Or have we just forgotten that people are still the key to everything we do?
As a friend recently said to me (which made me really think), “When you say come to my pad, if you are over 50 you are talking about your home. But if you are twenty-something, it means you should come over to look at my iPad.” Is this technological divide part of the problem? Probably. But at the end of the day, it is people, not technology, that fuel the engine of our economy and create the very innovations responsible for this new generation gap. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s relentless focus, after all, that made Facebook the colossus it is today, and Steve Jobs’ determination to give consumers things they didn’t even know they needed that put Apple at the top of the barrel. By the same token, it is the skills, capabilities, drive and ingenuity of America’s workforce, no matter what its members’ ages, that will be needed to make us a competitive – and comfortable – country once again. In fact, if it came down to a contest between human beings and technology, I wouldn’t hesitate to bet on people all the time.
So instead of demoralizing 44 million workers, we should be making every effort to optimize the use of their individual skill sets – and train them further if need be – to get America back on track.
