treehumper
Carpal tunnel level member
- Location
- Ridgefield, NJ
Jobs and their duties and functions aren't created by us, they're created by corporations. More so now than ever before. It's about maximizing profits not satisfaction. Roles are being broken down into functions then aggregated based on them instead of the client. Take a restaurant as an example. Once upon a time you had a maitre'd who would greet you, confirm your reservation and take you to your table. That is now a 2 person task. The hostess who greets you and then the person who seats you. At the table where you had the waiter/ress who took your introduced you to the menu, took your drink order, food order and delivered your food is now a three possibly 4 person task. The drinks order taken by one person, they're delivered by another, your food order taken by your "waiter/ress", then it's delivered by a runner. This is done in the name of efficiency.
While I was in the hospital I noticed something similar, patient care is broken down into incremental tasks, jobs are formulated around those so now you have a host of people looking after you but each in only a very limited scope. They then see a larger number of patients in the day.
What this in effect does is create an assembly line process where the workers move from instead of the piece being worked on, you. What sort of job satisfaction can there be? How does this limit the earnings of each person in those roles?
Much of the trade oriented programs were eliminated because parents didn't see that as the best prospects for their kids. The demand was minimal thus hard to justify the cost of maintaining the programs. The community college model was developed in conjunction with trade and skilled labor industries to supply them with qualified new workers. Yet, the cost of keeping up with the rapid changes in technology limited these programs. Once again, there was also much greater demand for university educated workers for high tech jobs. Those demands pushed schools to focus on that instead of the industrial or construction oriented jobs. All the while, companies in North America were looking for the quickest route to profit and that didn't involve training or apprenticing. Instead they looked beyond our borders to the international market to find skilled, experienced labor. It is here that we have the biggest problem. Our desire as a society, not just a generation, to have immediate results without the necessary development of long term capacity.
This is a very complex and involved problem that we can only begin to scratch the surface of.
While I was in the hospital I noticed something similar, patient care is broken down into incremental tasks, jobs are formulated around those so now you have a host of people looking after you but each in only a very limited scope. They then see a larger number of patients in the day.
What this in effect does is create an assembly line process where the workers move from instead of the piece being worked on, you. What sort of job satisfaction can there be? How does this limit the earnings of each person in those roles?
Much of the trade oriented programs were eliminated because parents didn't see that as the best prospects for their kids. The demand was minimal thus hard to justify the cost of maintaining the programs. The community college model was developed in conjunction with trade and skilled labor industries to supply them with qualified new workers. Yet, the cost of keeping up with the rapid changes in technology limited these programs. Once again, there was also much greater demand for university educated workers for high tech jobs. Those demands pushed schools to focus on that instead of the industrial or construction oriented jobs. All the while, companies in North America were looking for the quickest route to profit and that didn't involve training or apprenticing. Instead they looked beyond our borders to the international market to find skilled, experienced labor. It is here that we have the biggest problem. Our desire as a society, not just a generation, to have immediate results without the necessary development of long term capacity.
This is a very complex and involved problem that we can only begin to scratch the surface of.
