The Economy is Transforming

During the turn of the 19th Century, a state governor looked at the threats to his state's economy. There was a plan to build railroad tracks through his state so that goods could be quickly shipped. Up to this point, goods moved through his state from a river and through canals.

They needed a set of men and horses to move boats through restricted canals.

This governor realized what the railroad would do to his state. With goods going faster via rail, there would be no need for these men and their horses. These men and horses depended on services along the canal. Farmers grew hay and smiths specializing in horse shoes serviced these horses.

The railroad threatened all of that, which prompted this governor to write to the president. He begged the White House to intervene to prevent the railroad's construction to save these jobs; jobs he described as "American Jobs." He even criticized the train's slow speed (by our standards) as ridiculously high.

Killing a project to save American jobs, sound familiar? The turn of the century was just the beginning. The Industrial Revolution transformed the United States' job market. Before, most people worked on farms, or did agricultural crafts. This ranged from farm crafts to the different "smiths" that worked on different metal products.

These jobs were respectable, and paid a higher wage than the new manufacturing jobs. The first factory workers didn't get the wages that today's factory workers got. Many manufacturing jobs took on the "dogma" that today's "burger flipping" takes on.

In other words, our forefathers didn't exactly stumble over each other for opportunities to work in factories.

Factory jobs, and technological development contributed to the decimation of agriculture based jobs. These were the jobs most people were familiar with and comfortable doing. Farmers and craftsmen had to find other jobs; many ended up in the new factories.

Advance to the turn of the 21st Century.

Amanda gets up and prepares breakfast for her kids and brews coffee for her husband. After they leave for school, and work, she goes to her corner of the living room. She checks her voicemail and email messages.

One of the voicemails asks for the progress on their database. Another asks if she could drum up an introductory letter. A third voicemail is a business down the street; they want to know if she could operate payroll software. Amanda settles at her workstation; her living room temporarily becomes a work room.

She's a new kind of worker, a virtual assistant. She does administrative assistant work from her home computer. But why are these businesses retaining her services?

Many of her clients downsized their operations, laying workers off. Since they no longer have the manpower to do all the work they couldn't "eliminate," they turned to her for her services. Outsourcing simply means hiring someone outside the company to do things cheaper than the company could do it.

This could mean outsourcing to another country, or to an American working from her home computer.

When you purchase cookie dough from the grocery store, you've virtually outsourced "making cookies from scratch" to a cookie dough factory. Outsourcing makes sense.

The economy is evolving; it's constantly creating jobs while eliminating old ones. There are many American jobs that have been outsourced overseas, given to Americans outside the company, or simply eliminated as inefficient. The people that get laid off are left with the need to find other employment.

It's painful in the short run, but beneficial in the long run. Could you imagine what would've happened if our forefathers successfully prevented industrialization from taking root in the United States? We could've ended up as just another third world country.