The Declining Need for Human Resource Professionals in Our Jobless Recovery: Where’S the Jobs?

By William N. Spencer

While government vote buyers continue to rant and rave, scream and yell about all kinds of current politically correct or politically incorrect discrimination in the business and corporate world, these very same politicos totally ignore the real government created discrimination practiced every day, that of the inferior education provided by most public school systems throughout every city and state in America. The business of businessis business. It is also often stated that any action undertaken or performed by a corporation that does not make the maximum amount of profit for that corporation, is a crime committed against the businesss owners/stockholders.
We have now had five years of a micro-managing, over-controlling federal government whos only stated goal is: To put every American business out of business, and every American worker out of work. Good Job Guys!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493166305

William N. Spencer

A life-long advocacy of youth ministry and teaching, with over forty years of work in the unionized labor sector, both public and private, has given me a strange perspective of the American workplace. After starting college at age 51, and ending with post-graduate degrees in both Management/Leadership and Human Resources Management, I have acquired the astuteness and discernment to put these shortcomings and faults into print.

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Copyright © 2014 by William N. Spencer.

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Rev. date: 02/12/2014

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: Why This Subject

Chapter 2: The Origins of American Business

Chapter 3: Capitalism/Economics Simplified

Chapter 4: It’s The Economy Stupid

Chapter 5: Asian Influence

Chapter 6: Skills Gap

Chapter 7: Where Are The Jobs?

Chapter 8: The Fate of the Business

Conclusion

Dedication

I N WRITING THIS book, my foremost gratitude and appreciation is directed at two different people, for two completely different reasons. The first responsible person, my employer’s Director of Employee Development, Dr. Pamela Dohoney, in the year 2001, at the time when I wanted to pursue academic areas other than scientific or mathematical—her suggestion was the management field of Human Resources—which for me, was a back-door entry into learning better people skills such as counseling, which would be applicable to my avocation of Religious Youth Ministry.

The second person most responsible was my first teacher in my first introductory class of my college Human Resources program—a National Society for Human Resources Management (SHERM) certification course. This instructor, himself a Director of Human Resources at a very large city government public utility company, was most adamant of the fact that this course was supposed to be a ‘post graduate’ program, not intended for someone with only an ‘Associate Degree’ in ‘Electronics’ from a ‘junior college / trade school,’ and that I would most assuredly drop out right away, and/or miserably fail the first class (his class). At the end of term, it practically demoralized this person that the lowest grade he could legitimately get away with giving me was a B and by all rights should have been an A—this of course, considering that a few others of his high and mighty BA Degree holders did truly fail the course.

There again, thanks to each and every teacher/professor, for whatever reason, even if unknown to them, that made me strive to succeed and do the best learning work possible through my BA in Management, my MA in Management Leadership, and my MA in Human Resources Management.

One could/should/would think that after three books in three years—this being number four—the process would be almost automatic, and much easier, but such is not the case. New lives, new deaths, new injuries, illnesses, and major emergency surgical operations have all contributed to a prolonged and delayed completion of this current endeavor.

As explained above, the more and the bigger the obstacles placed in my path, the stronger are my enthusiasm and perseverance to succeed.

Prologue

O NE OF MY two MA degrees is in Human Resources Management, reason being that most of my adult life has been spent as a religious youth minister, a Boy Scout/Girl Scout/Cub Scout leader, and/or as a teacher of those organization’s other adult leaders; the interactions of everyday life, people dealing with other people, is basically the same regardless of one’s employer.

My first book: What Goes Up Must Come Down, chronicles the rise of American labor union from 1945 until approximately 1980, and these same unions’ subsequent decline and demise from 1980 until today.

My second book: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along, discusses the where, what, why, and how for all humans to peacefully interrelate and coexist in the business world and in everyday life and living.

My third book: Trickle Down Deviancy, details the ups and downs, profits and or losses, the disgraceful and disingenuous greed, and the great philanthropic good of America’s corporate businesses and of their American workers.

This prologue chapter for my fourth book will tie all of these various and varied themes together as an explanation, and provide an understanding of why our American economy is functioning as it is today.

Let’s start with the great American labor unions. At one time, a mere 65 or 70 years ago, almost half of the American work force belonged to a labor union, paid union dues, and was proud to be a part of such an honorable organization. But what then went wrong? Today barely twelve percent of Americans are union employees, and more than half of those numbers are government/public sector employees. These same numbers also tell us that eighty-eight percent of Americans are non-union workers.

Perhaps some of you caught my word play at the end of the above paragraph, union employees vs. non-union workers; and that my friend, is the number one reason that there are so few unionized businesses, and so few union employees. At one time, most notably in the middle of the twentieth century, union jobs and union workers meant higher quality products, a higher level of productivity, and a higher profit for management and owners. Union made, and products entirely made in America, primarily only for other Americans, of which half were also union members, preordained the continuation of American style unionism.

Unions were themselves ‘big business’ at one time, and like any for profit or customer oriented corporation, they must grow and/or change with the times, or find themselves out of business; which with but a few notable exceptions, they already are. Most manufacturing unions, such as steel, consumer goods, and the automotive industry, continued the never-ending demands of gimme, gimme, gimme—more, more, more for doing less, less, less—until most manufacturing industries’ production facilities and hundreds of thousands of jobs have left America. No more American made products, no more American workers, and no more taxes at so many different levels being paid into so many government entities. The demise and decline of Detroit anyone?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am currently a dues-paying union employee, and I have spent more than forty years, cumulatively, as a union member. I fervently and one hundred percent believe in the original mandate for strong unions, with honest, non-criminal, non-corrupt labor leaders doing not only what is best for their dues-paying members, but also, and probably most important, doing what is best for all of America. Without strong unions, we could all be earning third-world wages!

The thought processes and temperaments of most American people have changed in the decades since World War II and the participating ‘Greatest Generation.’ Enter the ‘Baby-Boomers’—the beginning of the end, many will say—Woodstock (drugs, sex, rock and roll), the burning of ‘draft cards’, no more Nationism, such as, ‘Duty-Honor-Country’ inspiring or motivating our youths, the Berkeley Syndrome of greatly lowering and diminishing higher education; being rewarded with a lifetime high paying job just because one spent five or six years in college to receive a four-year degree in a worthless, know-nothing, do-nothing field with little or no economic purpose in the world of business or industry.

This same dumbing-down of not only higher education, but pervasively throughout our entire ‘public school’ system has corrupted not only the goal of our Constitution, but also it’s meaning. Equal opportunity towards one’s ‘pursuit of happiness’ has now been replaced by ‘equal outcome,’ without any personal labor or effort involving one’s individual pursuit. This socialist/communist doctrine which has replaced America’s past of rugged individualism and self-reliance has made personal successful achievement an evil, instead of a desired outcome.

In today’s ‘better’ modern world, discrimination, bias, prejudice, favoritism—all so bad, so wicked, and so illegal, are they not? NOT! NOT! NOT! Our great and wonderful American Constitution grants us the legal right to like or not like anything we so please, although most of our country’s so-called ‘elected representatives’ have chosen to ignore, circumvent, and distort our laws with much disdain. Just because RED (University of Louisville) is your favorite color, and mine is BLUE (University of Kentucky) does not make either one of us wrong, hateful, bigoted, or unfair to anyone anywhere, or to each other; but today’s elite government ruling class says it is. Are these so-called leaders being honest and truthful with us or are they just playing politics as usual, feigning their heartfelt sincerity as a means of buying more votes?

For 250 years, until the mid-1960s, the Democrat Party and the KKK were synonymous, one and the same—slave buying/trading, lynching, blocking schoolhouse doors, using German Shepard dogs and fire hoses on Black people who were demanding freedom and equal rights. In congress during the late 1950s and early 1960s, 100 percent of elected republicans voted in favor of every piece of ‘civil rights’ legislation; but far less than 50 percent of elected Democrats favored these pro-people bills. Yet, in a strange twist and turn of events, still as such explained or understood, the Democrat party became the ‘champion’ of civil rights and the Black population.

While government ‘vote buyers’ continue to rant and rave, scream and yell about all kinds of current ‘politically correct or politically incorrect’ discrimination in the business and corporate world, these very same politicos totally ignore the real ‘government created’ discrimination practiced every day, that of the inferior education provided by most public school systems throughout every city and state in America. The business of business—is business. It is also often stated that any action undertaken or performed by a corporation that does not make the maximum amount of profit for that corporation, is a crime committed against the business’s owners/stockholders.

Stated another way, the primary mission of any business, is business; and proponents of a pure market economy, argue that the only real and true purpose and function of a corporation is attempting to obtain the best possible return on any investment. Any weakening of this goal will lead to adulterated form of this fine tuned system. Corporations that strive to be ‘ethical’ and or ‘moral’ as well as just being profitable will more than likely eventually fail, in turn creating grief and suffering among their ex-employees and perhaps their entire community. Like some predestined and predetermined force of nature, let the ‘markets’ guide the business to prosperity; the best will survive. Wealth will ‘trickle down’ from profitable businesses, and all of humanity will be economically served. Any restraining influences put upon the freedoms of ‘the market,’ whether from vote-buying politicians of government, or from the mis-placed angst of misguided and or uneducated touchy-feely liberals, can only mess everything up.

Every business or corporation desires to hire the smartest, brightest, most educated person that they can get to fill every open position in their organization—within the boundaries of their financial constraints. 99.99 percent of companies do not care one bit if that person is a man or a woman, Black or White, lesbian/gay or straight, only that they are educated enough to successfully perform the tasks at hand for which they are being paid. Unfortunately, very few, if any, of today’s public schools, whether elementary, high school, or college/university can claim to be doing ‘their’ job properly or successfully.

Are corporate owners and managers greedy and evil? If by that one means, are they evil for being greedy, NO; that is their job, their duty to the company that hires them to make the most profit from the resources proved to and by the corporation. And of course, the next most asked question from those outside of and unknowing about the corporate business world: Are CEO’s and CFO’s etc. paid too much? So what if they are paid two thousand times more than their corporation’s lowest paid employees? Many people believe that the hamburger flipper McJob is over paid, even though they are only minimum wage jobs. There are many millions of available ‘minimum wages’ McJobs, requiring little or no formal education, knowledge, skills, or abilities; conversely, there are only a few thousand of the highest level corporate jobs which require six to eight years of advanced education after high school. Any and every McJob is just a starting point in one’s life, and it is now, and never was meant or intended to be a lifetime ultimate career.

Yes, ‘Trickle Down Economics’ is truly the one and only dynamic method and system for any chance of a viable, successful society; but what seems to be forgotten today is that before those dollars can ‘trickle’ back down to the ‘people,’ they must first be spent over and over, working their way up to the top. The system is usually erroneously called ‘Supply and Demand,’ when in reality it is really ‘Demand and then Supply,’ hence the term ‘supply side economics.’ When our very own government—by the people, of the people, and for the people—is in the business of putting American corporations out of business, and putting millions of American workers out of work, it stands to reason that there are no longer any demands for any goods or products, and therefore no need for workers to manufacture the not-needed supply.

CHAPTER 1

Why This Subject

A FEW DECADES AGO, a famous television commercial loudly opined: Where’s the beef? Today, the near same question is being reiterated as: Where’s the jobs?

We are told everyday, if not every hour by the mainstream media that all in America is now well and good, life is grand, all of our needs ands wants are being provided for us—cradle to grave, womb to the tomb—by our great philanthropic providers and caretakers in Washington D.C.

Oh joy and celebration, every month the ‘official’ unemployment numbers keep getting lower and lower. Just don’t ask how that can be possible when every month the number of able-bodied, ready to work, and job-needing Americans keeps getting higher and higher.

A jobless recovery? Oh sure, dream on oh pathetic and gullible one! Perhaps the average low-information/no-information MSNBC watching, NPR radio listening, democrat-voting American can be duped into believing such a fallacy, but anyone with more than a high school education, who actually thinks—knows that nothing of this sort can be possible—the only possible way that there can be a positive recovery is for there to be an authentic increase in real full-time jobs.

All one has to do is to recall the number one political axiom of the early 1960s: It’s the economy, stupid. This slogan was banner headline strong in every mainstream media, then; and I dare say that not a one will today be proclaiming the same question of their personally handpicked president—regardless of how much worse the economy is now as compared to then.

So where does that leave us in the employment world of Human Resource professionals? If there are no jobs, or as it is today, when almost forty percent of eligible and willing workers are either unemployed or underemployed, where the percentage number of long-term joblessness has doubled in just the past five years, corporations will no longer need to hire the