Op Ed:
Out-Sourcing Threatens
Oregon Service Jobs,
Demands Education Change

Worldwide Digitized Communications Shaping Worker-Future Now.

Is the American dream still there for this youth? Photo by: Kevin Hays

(SALEM) - Our long-vaunted “Brain-Worker” advantage, endowed for many by college/university degree, is now degenerating into future futilities for oncoming youth, sure to impact our educational system. Many desirable working-posts are now departed for overseas destination, and done by lower-paid workers. This desperate drain is deepening widespread concern --into near-despair for many parents-- on opportunity languishing for youth finishing constantly higher-cost college work --with others arriving-there still later in many families. They all see “the American dream” disappearing due to malign political mischief driven by large-interest motivation and petty-selfish political mayhem beyond their control --even by vote. That undeniable fact has strong shaping-influence on what we MUST-do next for Oregon education at ALL levels. Parents understand this cutting-edge fact of our current realities better --and more rapidly--than professional educators. Openly-obvious needs are painfully visible to parents coping with child-and-youth concerns about the rapidly-changing future; while educators must still fight the unending battle for basic funding and facilities, for simple survival. That leaves little time, energy, initiative or motivation for any future redesign, made reachable only via improved teaching-learning modes and methods demanding still further effort. What this ineluctable Oregon dilemma teaches us will transform the unavoidable transition of our system into what it must be to prepare child and youth for working opportunities in the real world. Insights involved have been emerging since the National Defense Education Act, first federal funding for many aspects of instructional technologies and learning media, nearly 50 years ago, hung up ever since for politically propagandized reasons. (See: Op Ed “Modern Instructional Media Can Save Learners and Dollars”, 10/10; available from S-N Archives via Search-box.) NOW the worldwide trend is well-recognized by insightful “leading thinkers” such as Robert Kuttner, Joan Fitzgerald, Harold Meyerson, and Alan S. Blinder, in the current issue of THE AMERICAN PROSPECT {Nov. 06} in a new series we will summarize in depth soon.} Long-traditional impacts on lifestyle, income, and work-future for the current generation are under way, driven by deep life-changes around the world from rapid growth and universal applications in many digital technologies shaping every aspect of modern life and work. Business, industry, the professions --and now service-level occupations and many trades-- are directly impacted, negatively and positively. Multiplying changes are creating opportunities for creative development of broad application and personal impacts via worker choice, leading to upgrading of the tasks AND the compensations. Oregon is leading the way with strikingly effective new mechanisms for management and meaningful change in nursing-connected occupations, via creative coordination by The Oregon Nursing Leadership Council. (Report-in-depth underway.) Practical preservation of best-portions in current nurse-occupation teaching and trial-working experiences is strengthened by consensus cooperation from community college to corporate and union acceptance and cooperative activities. That pattern provides a rapid and rational approach for what must be done for the whole Oregon educational system to prepare children and youth for characteristics demanded as jobs undergo drastic change. “Service”-level work, once the right choice for many, is already under direct attack by millions more low-cost workers overseas. If it involves digitized dialog and description, and depends on language and special experience so dispensed or displayed; then it can be transported and translated rapidly, worldwide; and b done effectively and efficiently by lower-cost workers massaging it “there” just as well as “here.” Many jobs we consider “hands-on-here” tasks, assignments, and activities are as easily exported via digital traffic as this typed-work you are seeing here: “I could be keyboarding this in India as easily as in Salem”. The transition, already well under way, will continue as many more relative levels of worker-pay and benefits motivate modern corporate managements to move more jobs --this time at “service”-levels. The decision is whether they are unchangeably “personal-contact” or can be “impersonally”-managed. That already applies to code-writing for computer programs; no physical presence here is essential. Next will be aspects of legal and other “law-work”; and then “consultancies” of many types and levels, offering no real reason for “skin-to-skin” contacts. This trends is widely operable in mundane aspects of medicine long thought to be impregnable to malign aspects of globalization because high levels of professional training are demanded. But that has already changed with X-ray/reading and similar instrumentation-analysis already off-shored widely. Patient’s body-presence under precise doctoral supervision is demanded for image-making in multiple-millions/costly special equipment. That does not preclude practical meaningful interpretation rapidly overseas, by lower-cost doctors specially trained for that interpretive skill. For some trades and crafts, there is good news: Plumbers are prompted and practice in close proximity to their work; and barbers, baby-sitters, beauticians, firefighters and policemen are little influenced. Even for those and others at public-service levels, like nurses, the work-environment and social conditions demand solid change to build those jobs into broader-better-trained,more knowledgeable, satisfying situations --well deserving a living wage and benefits worthy of our society-now. Everyone else is under threat sure to grow, unless and until education, itself still a half-century behind in organization and much practice, can be coerced up-to-speed --ironically, by mass measures via digitally-based instructional technologies. Attention-demanding bells of warning are being heard across the whole American educational system, with growing impact on changing educational curricula, already long overdue for revision. Methods, modes and media to shape new learning levels, patterns and procedures for everyone, to meet these new demands, are under close study widely, including Oregon. No such fundamental change-process has presented itself in the past fifty years of educational progress in this nation. Nothing like this demand for decision and then definite and rapid action has faced the future-makers of our educational system in all those years. “Efficiencies” and further slashed-and-cannibalized State educational programs and participants cannot be the answer. Progress for our future demands positive decision followed by decisive action by all responsible Oregonians.