The Real Takers

When I was in college in the late 1970s the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota had a classroom outfitted with TV screens in front of every chair. A camera in the back was trained on professors who taught in the room and another camera over the desk was focused on a pad of paper they wrote on. About half my computer science classes were taught here, from introductory programming languages to advanced data structures and computer networking. 

It sounds charmingly primitive in this age of Skype and online degrees, but the point was not to save chalk; rather, it was to beam the course by microwave to remote sites where programmers working full-time could earn computer science degrees. This was the backbone of the U of M's UNITE Distributed Learning system. Communication was two-way; remote students could ask the professor questions through a mic at their end. Companies like IBM in Rochester and Univac in Roseville set up TV classrooms in their buildings. This saved the employees several hours a week because they didn't have to commute to the university in Minneapolis.

These classes were kind of annoying because of the inevitable interruptions from equipment glitches, but also because the remote students were just not with it. They were older, slower, and asked a lot of seemingly dumb questions. Fortunately, the cameras were pointed at the professor and didn't capture our eye-rolling.

Incredibly, not only did these companies pay to put these fancy electronic classrooms in their buildings, with the attendant costs for installing the microwave antennas and two-way communications, the salary of the camera operator, but they paid the employees' tuition.

That was then. This is now (from Paul Krugman at The New York Times):

A few months ago, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Marlene Seltzer, the chief executive of Jobs for the Future, published an article in Politico titled “Closing the Skills Gap.” They began portentously: “Today, nearly 11 million Americans are unemployed. Yet, at the same time, 4 million jobs sit unfilled” — supposedly demonstrating “the gulf between the skills job seekers currently have and the skills employers need.”

Back then if a company needed someone to do a new job, they often took an experienced, dedicated, hard-working and loyal employee and gave them the training to do it. These days too many companies fire those same experienced — and higher-paid — employees and hire someone cheap.

The U of M's UNITE system still exists, after more than 40 years. They use streaming video and podcasts instead, but they still pitch UNITE to companies who need technical people.

However, few companies these days invest in people. They demand prospective employees to invest tens of thousands of dollars of their own money, often accruing debt exceeding $100K, in education and training programs that companies need today, with no guarantee that the company will have any use for them in five or 10 years. Companies expect government to create secondary and vocational school programs to train employees for them in the specialty areas they need. At the same time they demand lower and lower taxes, while sending their profits to offshore tax havens.

And these same companies constantly demand that the government raise the H1B visa quotas. This program allows companies to hire "high-skilled" tech workers from countries like China and India. The reason "high-skilled" is in quotes is that what they're really after is "low-paid."

This is why the wage gap is getting so wide and so many middle-income Americans are failing. Companies are firing people in their forties and fifties who have spouses and mortgages and children with college tuition bills, and replacing them with American kids up to their eyeballs in college loans — often because their parents lost their jobs — or kids from India and China whose education was paid for by a foreign government.

The execs at these companies are selling America and Americans out, while jacking up their own salaries and reducing their corporate tax liabilities to less than nothing. Companies like Apple are giving federal and state governments no resources to run the schools the companies insist are needed produce useful workers for them.

Now. Who are the real takers?