Your Job May Be Going Out the Window

Things are changing. Money, freedom, rights, jobs…You can see it all around you. The countries fronting onto the Mediterranean Sea are going bust, one after they other; Greece, Portugal, Spain is grumbling, Italy is shivering and so it goes on. Other countries are in the midst of social revolution: Yemen, Libya, Syria, and more will follow. Hellooo, was that a touch of social revolution last week in Wall Street and on the Brooklyn Bridge? We are not immune.

 

By the year 2018, the manufacturing industry will lose 1.2 million more jobs, the mining and oil/gas extraction industry will lose another 104,000 jobs and even the utility companies will see 59,000 job losses according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). First will be the outsourcing people. But outsourcing and foreign competitors aren’t the only reasons we’re witnessing shrinking industries. The needs of our economy have changed in recent years while companies have become leaner and meaner in order to survive.

 

And though these cuts and shifts have been painful for millions in the past and present, they are making our country more competitive for the future. We’ve seen dramatic advancements in technology and operations techniques that have more than doubled the output per worker since 1970. Our manufacturing industry has progressed from making simple household appliances, cars and textiles to producing cutting-edge medical technologies, life-saving medicines and light-speed computer processors with worldwide demand.

 

But as any nation’s economy grows and progresses, the loss of older industries and professions will be a cause of hardship for many. And many of those professions lost will be middle-class jobs. These middle-class professions may soon face the fate of the milk man, the telegraph operator, the stagecoach driver and the switchboard operator, joining them in obsolete-job heaven.

 

These skilled craftsmen, who specialize in the machine sculpting of high-precision metal parts, work primarily in the waning manufacturing industry.

 

As with other professions, the increase in automation, gains in productivity and competition from overseas has decreased the need for assembly workers in manufacturing. And without assembly workers, there is no one to supervise.

 

The profession championed by America’s earliest founders, including Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, has sadly seen large employment declines in the industrial age of the 21st century.

 

Despite its title, this job is less common and less relevant to today’s needs than you might think.

 

These middle-class workers install, operate, and repair the machines that make every day paper products.

 

Desktop publishers use computers to put together pictures and text to make brochures, books, calendars, newsletters and newspapers.

 

Fabric and Apparel Patternmakers are responsible for drawing and constructing fabric patterns and layouts.

 

Wellhead pumpers ensure that oil or gas is properly extracted from fields using pumps and auxiliary equipment.

 

The workers who prepare the incoming and outgoing mail for distribution throughout our complex postal system may become more obsolete in the future.

 

This position has the fastest rate of decline on our list, but not for the reasons you might expect. Today’s processing chips, such as the Intel Core i Processors, have semiconductors that are nanometers (one millionth of a millimeter) in size, which is perfect for finely-tuned machines to assemble but far too small for any human to handle during production.