Re: [tlug] (OT) The enigma of Japan (was: UNIX jobs on TLUG)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

JC Helary writes:

 > Ah! So it's unions that keep unskilled workers to find good jobs ?  

See Godwin's post; the mechanisms are well-known, and not hard to
understand.

 > The issue is not unions, as far as unemployment in France (I don't  
 > know for Spain) is concerned. The problem is education/(lack of)  
 > vocational training policies.

Training for what, though?  I don't care if it's Japan, France, or the
U.S., the politicians want industry to make things.  "Monozukuri" is
historically where the high-paying jobs for Joe Average have been.
But that's spitting into the wind, because there are *2 billion*
people in India and China alone who are capable of and happy to do the
jobs involved in making things, and take a Frenchman's *daily* pay as
a *month*'s salary.  I guess you don't consider "those silly Indians'"
(your words!) happiness to be anything that can be compared to a
Frenchman's, though.

But realistically, the action in the OECD countries is in *services*,
especially intangibles (finance, education, IT, ...).  Sure, they can
learn to cut hair (as an example of a personal service), but I look
around me and I see "Cut 1000 yen" signs on *every* shop's door.  The
shop I go to can move two customers, at most three in an hour.  They
have to pay rent, utilities, part-time reji-kakari, on $2500/hour, or
5,000,000/year?  Uh-uh, that is not a living wage, let alone a
luxurious lifestyle to compete with the average UAW member.  Worse,
those 1000 yen haircuts pretty clearly mean that they're lucky to get
*one* customer per hour.  This sucks, but I'm used to getting a
haircut once a quarter ... I might up that to once of month for the
good of my fellow man. :-/ No, retraining as barbers and hairdressers
is not going to save the Japanese unemployed.  Do you think it will
work in France?  And what will the hairdressers' union have to say
about that?

So, about those "intangible services" like IT.  Do you really think
*your* work could be done by an ex-autoworker after 3 month's
"vocational training"?  Seems unlikely to me.  And (at least in Japan,
in Kyoto in 1994) there already is good vo-tech retraining available.
My wife got trained in CAD (AutoCAD, Omron's internal CAD, etc) after
an illustrious career (terminated by a month in Europe to exhaust her
savings ;-) in the Hankyu Dept Store in Umeda, and did pretty darn
well for herself.  But she got pretty worn out in that relatively high
tech job in CAD services (that's probably why she married me :-).  Her
acquaintances who took those courses with her were *way* less lucky
though.  Only half *ever* got jobs in CAD, and only my wife stuck with
the job more than 3 months.  (Who knows if that's representative, but
I suspect it's pretty typical in Japan.)

Can OECD economies function only on services?  I dunno, but if we're
going to retrain people, we can't aim them at the thing-making
industries anymore.  Not unless we're willing to accept rapidly
increasing income inequality as those workers are forced to compete
with the orders of magnitude cheaper "makers of things" in emerging
markets, while the workers in the financial and technical services
continue to have their salaries powered by the growing world economy.

Not even here in Japan, much less so in Europe and the U.S.