Friday, February 09, 2007

Job Cuts

There's a worrying trend beginning to emerge. Motorola, Thompson Scientific and now Pfizer are cutting jobs in Ireland, and rebalancing the labour cost in emerging economies. It's globalisation, and that's fine. However, these are skilled jobs. What started to happen thirty odd years ago in unskilled labour is now hitting its first generational cycle. The money that was injected into the economies of the far east and other developing economies has now educated and upskilled the follow-on generation, and they are now seeking to take skilled labour from mature economies. India is generating one million engineers per annum. One million. That is colossal. If Europe is generating 100,000 engineers per annum then it is doing exceedingly well.

What does that leave us with? Hard to say. The jobs can't all go. Can they?

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