March 28, 2008
Neo-feudalism
In 2006, AT&T promised to return 5000 jobs it had outsourced to India to the US. In 2008, having only returned 1400 jobs, AT&T's CEO reports that the company is having trouble finding sufficient numbers of people to fill the positions it has. There simply aren't enough people worth hiring in the US who are willing to do this kind of work.
Let's be clear: this isn't a particularly challenging job. We're talking customer service. I've done it. You answer the phone, you speak courteously with customers, and you resolve their problems as best you can in keeping with established company policies. All you really need to be able to do is be nice while you remember what you're allowed to do. This ain't rocket science. So the fact that AT&T can't find a few thousand people to do this--and they alone in this--is rather disheartening.
I think corporate America is coming to the conclusion that the public school experiment is, on average, a failure. Though there are good schools out there, and though there are lots of people who had good experiences there, Mr. Stephenson is right: any entity which has a 50% failure rate in its final product is irretrievably broken.
I also think it's plausible that rather than wait for the government to fix this, large corporations are going to take matters into their own hands. They'll start targeting kids as young as 16 and get them to sign extended service contracts. The company will provide training to prepare them to hold down a job in exchange for three to five years of employment. Everybody wins. If the student/employee doesn't want to finish the contract, fine, but all they must repay the cost of the training they received.
Obviously this would only work for jobs which do not require a college degree. This would make the stratification of society more explicit, but it's not like that stratification isn't real already, and at least this way everybody gets to work.
