BuyUSAFirst

Innovation Economy Strong, But State Lags in High Tech Job Creation, MTC Index Finds – December 13, 2005
Massachusetts’ innovation indicators may be strong, but the conversion of innovation into new high tech jobs is lagging and the state’s median household income continues to dip, according to the latest Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy. http://www.ssti.org/Digest/2004/121304.htm#MTC

Wall Street Journal article reports that companies create their own shortages – November 16, 2005
“Corporations often create the very shortages they decry by insisting on applicants who meet every item on a detailed list of qualifications.” Employers are being inundated with resumes, but instead of putting greater numbers of unemployed U.S. engineers back to work, as one might expect, the overwhelming response has caused employers to narrow their search criteria, effectively weeding out engineers who don’t possess very specific skills.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05320/607304.stm

The US is Losing Its Technology Edge – July 8, 2005
More than half a century of U.S. dominance in science and engineering maybe slipping as America’s share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says. The study, written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, warned that changes in the global science and engineering job market may require a long period of adjustment for U.S. workers. Moves by international companies to move jobs in information technology, high-tech manufacturing and research and development to low-income developing countries were just “harbingers” of that longer-term adjustment, Freeman said. Urgent action was needed to ensure that slippage in science and engineering education and research, a bulwark of the U.S. productivity boom and resurgence during the 1990s, did not undermine America’s global economic leadership, he added. The United States has had a substantial lead in science and technology since World War II. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, it employs almost a third of science and engineering researchers, accounts for 40 percent of research and development spending and publishes 35 percent of science and engineering research papers. Many of the world’s top high-tech firms are American, and government spending on defense-related technology ensures the U.S. military’s technological dominance on battlefields. But the roots of this lead may be eroding, Freeman said. Numbers of science and engineering graduates from European and Asian universities are soaring while new degrees in the United States have stagnated–cutting its overall share. In 2000, the paper said, 17 percent of university bachelor degrees in the U.S. were in science and engineering compared with a world average of 27 percent and 52 percent in China. The picture among doctorates–key to advanced scientific research–was more striking. In 2001, universities in the European Union granted 40 percent more science and engineering doctorates than the United States, with that figure expected to reach nearly 100 percent by about 2010, the study showed. The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged U.S. students from entering these fields, but not those born in other countries. These trends are challenging the so-called North-South global economic divide, the paper said, by undermining a perceived rich-country advantage in high technology. ”Research and technological activity and production are moving where the people are, even when they are located in the low-wage South,” Freeman wrote, citing a study saying some 10-15 percent of all U.S. jobs were “off-shorable”. Story Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

April 12, 2005 Tech Job Cuts Hit Five Quarter High
Losses in the tech sector account for more than one fifth of all jobs lost in 1Q ’05.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Job cuts in the tech sector hit their highest quarterly total since 2003, global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said Monday. Heavy job cutting in the telecommunications and computer sectors pushed first-quarter job cuts to 59,537, up 3.2 percent from the previous quarter and more than double the number of cuts in the year-ago period, the Challenger report said.
“The biggest factor pushing tech job cuts to a five-quarter high was a surge in corporate combinations in the telecom sector, which resulted in over 3,000 job cuts in February,” said John Challenger, the company’s chief executive.
“In fact, 92 percent of the first-quarter telecom job cuts resulted from mergers,” he added.
Telecommunication firms led all tech-sector job losses in the period with 35,079 job cuts, more than double the pace of job cutting in the computer industry.
Losses in the tech sector account for 20.7 percent of all job cuts in the first quarter, the report said, adding that tech-sector job cuts could rise in the near term.

March 1, 2005 New Report: One million California manufacturing jobs “at risk”
The Bay Area Economic Forum released a report this morning explaining manufacturers’ vulnerability and estimating the number of “at risk” manufacturing jobs in our state. The report also makes recommendations to both management and government as to how the “at risk” jobs might be saved.
Download report | Press release

March 1, 2005 Without Timely Action, the U.S. Faces a Decline in Competitiveness as Other Countries Catch Up
Decline can be avoided if the United States stops ignoring the factors that sparked the technological breakthroughs of the last 60 years

The AeA’s new report, Losing the Competitive Advantage?: The Challenge for Science and Technology in the United States, finds that America can no longer remain idle if we hope to continue our lead in science and technology. We are neglecting the factors that sparked the U.S. technology
revolution. Ultimately, this threatens U.S. economic vitality and our competitiveness in the global marketplace.
A copy of the report can be found at http://www.aeanet.org/competitiveness

January 9, 2005 Offshore Outsourcing: How Far Does It Go?
After some members of ASME raised concerns regarding the recent media coverage of the offshore outsourcing of professional services, the Society’s Board on Government Relations conducted a confidential, random survey of 5,000 non-academic U.S.-based members to gauge the impact on ASME’s U.S. constituency. There were 260 responses—a response rate of 5.2 percent, about the average for a survey.
by Patti Curtis, ASME Government Relations

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