President's Column
(November 2002)

Unemployment Continues

I was honored to represent IEEE-USA’s views at the Pan-Organizational Summit on U.S. Science and Engineering Workforce, sponsored by the National Academies Government University Industry Research Roundtable, on 11-12 November. Although the summit was called primarily for the purpose of discussing different perspectives on the status of the pipeline for future engineers, I think that most of the participating engineering societies joined IEEE-USA and took this as an opportunity to speak out on behalf of the overall status of the U.S. engineering workforce.

Summit proceedings should be available in the near future at http://nationalacademies.org/.

Though recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor indicate that the number of unemployed engineers decreased at the end of the third quarter, many of us know that we are still experiencing high levels of unemployment for electrical engineers and computer scientists, and that new layoffs are announced weekly. At the same time, the Labor Department announced that another 100,000 engineering and computer scientists’ jobs have disappeared. IEEE-USA staff is trying to understand how these jobs can disappear without creating an equal increase in the number of unemployed engineers. When they get the answers, we’ll let you know the rationalization for this discrepancy.

With a continuing downward employment trend, do members of IEEE-USA have reasons to be concerned about the longevity of their preferred area of employment? I think the answer is definitely “YES.” In fact, I also think that we have reason to be concerned about the economic and physical security of our nation.

My primary reason for voicing this concern is based on the need for U.S. employers to be competitive globally, and their means for achieving this competitiveness. Increasingly, U.S. companies are indicating that they’re importing a technical H-1B visa workforce in order to save money and maintain or increase their competitive position. U.S. employers are also increasing the exportation of jobs to areas with lower costs of living in order to improve their competitive position. This will increasingly weaken the strength of the U.S. workforce and economy.

I was privileged to represent IEEE-USA at a recent meeting sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness addressing the security of our nation. Surprisingly, the viability of the U.S. technical workforce wasn’t mentioned until the last hour of the meeting. Finally, I had the opportunity to remind them that the most important component of our technical workforce was reflected by the size and quality of our experienced engineers and programmers, and that these people were being discarded by their employers at an alarming rate. Many seemed to agree with me.

In September, I attended the 2002 WESCON conference in Anaheim, Calif., where I again encountered unemployed members. More interestingly, I had a conversation with the executive director of the Electronic Representatives Association (ERA), a trade association comprised primarily of electronics companies. He told me that ERA members are concerned that as more and more U.S. hardware-design jobs are being exported overseas, their livelihood is being eroded. ERA is the first industry association to express concern that the U.S. electronic industry is being directly attacked by job exports. With the design, goes the remainder of our manufacturing base. With the disappearance of our remaining electronic manufacturing base, goes the security of our nation.

If these issues concern you and your fellow engineers, please join others in communicating this concern at the local, state and national level. Forget the fact that you or those you know may be unemployed, if you desire. But do not forget that we are blessed by birth and/or choice to reside in this wonderful nation. Do we want to sit idly by as what we treasure most is placed at risk?

Note to Editors: Please feel free to adapt this IEEE-USA President's Column for use in your local IEEE print and electronic publications. For more information, please contact Chris McManes at c.mcmanes@ieee.org.