Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?

Today we have bad unemployment in the USA, Australia and almost everywhere in the western world. Why? The answers from the unemployed and/or struggling are:

• Bad politicians;
• Bad economy;
• Greedy corporations; and/or
• Cheap offshore labour stealing our jobs.

Have you noticed that no group or person ever takes responsibility for the situation? The government is never going to say they goofed, the economy cant talk for itself, corporations will never admit to greed and cheap labour in Asia is never going to rock the boat.

Does anyone actually look at themselves not just as an individual but as a workforce? Its a touchy subject, isn't it? Nobody dares attract the wrath of the public, voters, unions or peers by suggesting something as simple as “we have become lazy”. Oh boy, isn't that like opening hell’s gates? 

Well, I am officially climbing up upon my soap box and proclaiming “we have become lazy and we need to pull our heads out of our own asses!”

I know, your first reaction is that I am wrong, everyone else is lazy but not you, how dare I say something like this, who am I to think this........ I can feel those imaginary rotten tomatoes that are being thrown at me, but I can explain so please allow me to. 

First lets examine the first reasons people give for their unemployment or lack of success....

Bad Politicians

OK, I will give this one to you partially, but as this whole article suggests you/we have a big part in this. If you are living in a democratic society then the game of politics is not about being the best fiscal manager, economist or job creator – it is all about getting voted in and then reinstated. The state of the job market may be a factor towards your happiness at the time of voting but it is only just one factor. A politician cant woo a voter by telling them to work harder, be more productive and stop buying the dirt cheap stuff out of China. In fact, that is a sure fire recipe for electoral disaster. Today’s voter wants to hear:

• More benefits,
• Shorter working week,
• More government handouts,
• Green policies, and
• Handouts and support for minorities.

To boil it down people now vote for an easier life where the government pays for as much as possible and we all have a clear conscious on social issues. The whole population has gone Socialist and Green. I like green (in fact I am somewhat passionate about it), but tempered with common sense, but socialism really only works if you have a communist dictator. Socialism is eating away at Democracy, not because we are becoming communists but because the desire for all the socialist benefits is eating away at out ability to sustain our way of life.

Right wing governments (Republicans in the USA, the Liberal/National Coalition in Australia) are becoming more left wing and socialist to attract voters, not because they want to but because they simply wont get into power if they don't. Can you blame anyone other than the voter for this? The voter now has the power to dictate policy and he/she uses it recklessly.

Bad Economy

Correct, today (2011) we have a terrible economy throughout most of the world with the exception of China, Germany and half of Australia’s two speed economy. Overall we can blame that on the other excuses I have listed herein. But I have a comeback on each of those excuses so you may need to consider that the blame once again lies back with ourselves.

Greedy Corporations

Unions and politicians LOVE this term. Even right leaning politicians love to dabble with it. It invokes the passion in the workforce and tells them “It is not you that is causing the layoff, it is those damned greedy corporations”,  “you deserve even more because you are just as good as those greedy corporations”, and “you should work less because those corporations are greedy”.

Never does anyone publish “Workers were lazy, had to be laid off”, or “Chinese work twice as hard for one 10th of the pay and they never strike”. You never read “Business owner loses everything because workforce could not compete” or “Incompetent staff causes corporation to fail”. These things happen all the time but nobody will report them as “Greedy Corporations” will sell more news and get votes.

Cheap offshore labour stealing our jobs

Yes and no. While the Asian base of offshore labour LOVES to take your business, money and jobs we seem to LOVE giving it all to them!

Today I was berated by an architect who called for a price. He wanted his job in a hurry, immaculate quality and assistance with design through the process as he has a particularly demanding client. I quoted my normal rate and he was offended that I was so expensive and expressed “it is no wonder everyone sends their work to China”. This doesn't get me uptight anymore as I know that you can either have price, speed or quality but never all three together. I have plenty of work and have not raised my prices, in fact I was cutting him a deal, but he has the idea of a cheap rendering from China at a quarter of the price that I would be. I am certain that this guy is going to be disappointed and a quick look at his website reveals a dismal display of sub-quality work.

What it comes down to is that people will forgo quality, service and supporting people in their own region if they can find a cheap price. But it wasn't always like that, in fact western countries were do just fine before the trend of outsourcing and offshore production became so popular. Why do we now rely on offshore labour so much now? Because we got addicted to it and it made us lazy. So do you blame Asia or do we take responsibility? If they were seeking to employ millions of westerners and send all their money in our direction would we refuse it?

Why is China’s economy doing well? Because people are working their proverbial behinds off for little money and the western world is sending most of their money there. How could it do badly?

Why is Germany’s economy doing well? Because the discipline and ethic of the German population has not been eroded like most countries so their Gross Domestic Product well exceeds its European neighbours.

Why is half of Australia’s economy going well? Because Australia is digging its sovereign wealth out of the ground and selling it to China as fast as it can be loaded onto ships. The other half of the economy, that is not involved in mining, is suffering partially due to the success of the other half and mostly due to the issues within this article.

So who is going to take responsibility for all of this? My answer is that it simply doesn't matter. Blame, responsibility and fault have become the excuse for inaction. Until the everyday person forgets about blame and excuses and starts to do something about it then the western world will continue to stagnate. So what needs to be said, yet nobody wants to admit to is:

• We need to stop wasting time and start working. Stop just turning up for work but make sure something incredible is achieved every day. Most people should keep Facebook, Twitter and their mobile phones at home, not at work.
• Stop sending your money overseas to buy junk. If it is junk then don't buy it today - save up and get a quality product from someone that supports your own economy.
• Stop voting for people that are promising benefits that your tax dollars simply cant pay for. Thats right, the governments money comes from you, so stop using your votes to recklessly throw it to the wind because you are already in debt and its growing.
• Stop relying on finance to survive, start making real money and live within your means. I will probably write a whole new article on this alone.

I know that not much of what I have typed is going to be popular with many people. I only realised recently that I also had my head buried in the sand and had to become productive again - and what a change it made!


Once quick parting thought is that people really need to examine this chart to get an idea of what we are doing to our own work ethic lately.

The True Value of a Degree

I am sorry, your degree is worthless to me. I would pay a high school drop out much more than the holder of a university doctorate degree if that dropout meets deadlines and produces exceptional work. Ability and the use of it is all that matters to me and my peers.

As a boy I was told that having a degree in a certain field would be like the ability to write your own cheque. Parents now invest in it and educational institutions now promise it. Fortunately I did not believe a word of it. The idea of almost guaranteed success for nothing more than attending classes never sat well for me, the same way that breaking the bank at a casino, fortunes through pyramid selling and forwarding a magical email from Bill Gates don't get past my BS filter either.

Today our children are told that if they don't have a degree they will endure the equivalent of banishment to damnation. Nobody encourages their kids to grow up to be artists, boat builders, or metal workers. Today a child is taught that unless he is doctor, architect or 3D animator then life will be dull and penniless. This, of course, created a whole new range of opportunities for the educational system.

Education is now a business and a degree is practically guaranteed with your attendance and accompanying cheque or student loan. People pay big money for a degree now so the possibility of non-acceptance or failure to pass is incomprehensible. People can no longer fail, all university attendees pass and employers can no longer weed out the good from the bad by any means other than trialling them for a while. Unfortunately I feel the resultant dumbing down of the higher education “gene pool” to be detrimental to the the truly brilliant students that attend.

College, TAFE, Tech and Universities are supposed to be a place to learn and prove yourself, not a place to hang out so you can then demand a huge paycheck. As an employer I expect that if someone has spent years studying that they would come out ready to work, achieve and succeed. Unfortunately what I experience is a quality of work that I would not even give a “D” for if it was an exam, and staff that are more interested in discussing health care, benefits, parking spaces, superannuation, 401Ks and pay rises than what they need to do to produce an acceptable, let along high-quality, piece of work. Don't get me wrong, I have had some brilliant staff, but they would now only be what I estimate as 10% of the workforce in my game.

There were no degrees, courses or any education in 3D when I got into it. There wasn't even much on the internet - no youtube tutorials, pirate downloads or model libraries that the learners of today use. The most we had were some online forums where guys like me exchanged notes, ideas and experiences. We each invested a fortune in hardware and software that, in todays terms, was primitive and underpowered. Before that I was designing homes, drawing plans and tendering contracts with nothing more than high school, perseverance, personal study and charisma. I actually started formal studies after I was quite successful in my field because everyone told me I should have a degree for what I do - I wasted a lot of time but it did reinforce my opinion of today’s system while I was being lectured by people that would have been lucky to have even 20% of my experience and knowledge in the trade. In hindsight an apprenticeship would have been the best thing for me out of school as it was very obvious that my drive was found in working and achieving, not sitting in a classroom.

Some people are not cut out of higher education. Why do so many graduates work at McDonalds, as telemarketers or other jobs that they consider temporary until they get that magical job offer? What happened to the people that used to build houses and roads? Doesn't anyone want to get their hands dirty? Do we not see value in this? There are too many graduates out there now and not enough tradesmen.

This can be seen in the early explosion of “IT” graduates. For a while everyone decided that working with your hands, apart from using them to push a keyboard around, was menial and that the money was now in IT and computers. Millions of people left what should have been their real vocations and studied IT. The workplace was flooded with this new breed of worker that wore a tie and cheap business clothes. They spoke language that most people didn't understand and that they guarded closely for fear of their newly acquired knowledge spreading to rest of the world and therefore devaluing them.

But computers got easier and the general population got smarter. There were also way too many IT people out there. Within only a few years the IT trade got very difficult, wages dropped and the number of qualified IT workers in the unemployment line grew exponentially. At the same time the shortage of skilled manual labour began and anyone left in the construction industry, most with no degree of any kind, were making more money then they had ever seen before.

So what was the value of that IT degree? To the people that really have a skill for it and a strong desire to succeed in that field, for the sake of the challenges it presents and not just the size of the pay packet, there are still fantastic opportunities. For the people who ignored fields such as carpentry, plumbing, hydraulics, foreman, landscape and road building because they were taught they were dead ends, too laborious of too “dirty” the degrees has been very costly not just in cash but lost opportunities.

In my field, 3D, the same has happened. The job market is flooded with graduates that simply should not be in this game. They feel they now deserve a six figure paycheck because they heard that is what people at Pixar get, but they lack the ability to do what a six figure employee can. OK, I admit, 3D can be very cool so I cant blame people for being attracted to it, but it also requires a great deal of perseverance, ability and knowledge to be at the top of this game. It suits me, I get it, and my brain seems to work well in this complex mesh of design, physics, mathematics, art and animation. But I have to admit that there some things that I will never be good at, like medicine, accounting, agriculture, retail, in fact many things.

I pay someone to fix my air conditioner because I still have no idea why it would stop working. I am prepared to pay well to have it taken care of, and I expect that what I pay for that hour of work is going to exceed what I may have personally billed out that hour. But people don't want to be air conditioner technicians anymore so I guess I am going to pay more and more every year to a trade that is unable to find people to join it. This world not getting any cooler so I hope that changes.