Thursday, May 30, 2013

How to Get a Job. By Thomas L. Friedman.

How to Get a Job. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, May 28, 2013.

Friedman on Jobs. Video. Meet the Press. NBC News, June 2, 2013.

Video transcript:

FRIEDMAN: Well, that’s the tragedy for him. It’s a tragedy for all of us. Because we are in the middle, I would argue, David, of a huge inflection where two points I would make about this moment. One is that the – the thing that sustained the American middle class for 50 years was something called high wage middle skill jobs. There is no such thing anymore as a high wage middle skill job. There’s only going to be a high wage high skill job. So every decent middle class job today is actually being pulled in three directions at once. It’s being pulled higher. It takes more skill to have. It’s being pulled out. More software, robots, automation and people around the world can compete for it. And it’s being pulled down. It’s being outsourced to history, to the past, being made obsolete faster.

I had an experience a couple of weeks ago. I had to deal with Hertz for a pretty complicated change in reservation. For the first time I did the entire transaction with Hertz without any human interaction. This was a complicated interaction I had. It really made a point of that. So what’s been happening to blue collar jobs, that kind of Pac-man of automation outsourcing and digitization is now coming after white collar jobs as well. This requires a huge strategic response from the country.



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