J-O-B-S – the number one issue in The Real World America today.  Certainly it is the number one concern in our 10^th District here in Western North Carolina.  Our unemployment is close to 15%, way above the national average.  But, let’s not get into citing a bunch of statistics, we know it’s bad.  So, what do we do about this?  Do we look to the Government for help?  Is that what our parents did when they went through difficult times, or our Founding Fathers?  Were they better at providing for their families that we?  Silly as it sounds, “I am my father’s son!”  I learned when there is a problem to stand up and confront it.  It is up to us.  How often is it up to us?

How do we take on our problem of high unemployment?  How do we create jobs to replace the jobs lost due to Economic downturns and Globalization?  Well, let’s attack Globalization first. 

Globalization – something we’ve been hearing about for 20 years now; my kids heard about it in school as they grew up; the importance of “globalizing” -  spreading our free enterprise system around the world, and opening our country to the world’s way of doing business.  I tried that in my businesses, but a funny thing happened; I ran into cultural differences, something they don’t tell you about when expounding on the importance of globalization.  We need to “Level the playing field.”  Does that sound familiar?  Easy to say, but an “unlevel” playing field has a lot to do with different cultures around the world; something people who have no real world experience don’t know about.  But, I’ll save that for writing.

I attended a Tom Peter’s (renowned author and business guru) seminar about 20 years ago and remember him saying there were hungry, intelligent, competitive thriving cultures with workforces of 4 billion people just seconds away by phone or fax.  (This was before the internet.)  And, that the Asians were targeting the United States with all their efforts.  Why were they targeting us?  Because we were, and still are the center of the Global Economy, the economic breadbasket of the world!

Tom Peter’s was right.  They came after us and attacked us in our weakness – our bloated, inefficient manufacturing industries.  This wasn’t the fault of the employees, but rather management who let these economic giants flounder and decay from within.  I remember in my early days of small business, people talking about “getting on with Delco, or Chrysler”.  Getting on!  Not going to work but getting on!  If I hired one of these people for my small business they’d be gone in a minute if Delco called.

So, what happened in these large corporate facilities?  Anybody who worked in one saw and knew what made those companies grow and prosper in the glory days, the original owner’s management style and passion for the industry was long gone, along with the passion of the original labor force.  When globalization hit with a cheap work force “There was nothing that could be done.”, so they said.  That was wrong!  What built those industries was not cheap labor to be taken away:  it was American Ingenuity and the Free Enterprise System working together.  That’s what was lost first, why the companies stagnated, decayed, and why the jobs were then lost.  The Asian continent attacked our weakness and our jobs suffered; lost to overseas manufacturing.

But, what happens when you attack someone’s weakness?  Well, in war you get to kill them, but that’s not legal in business.  When someone attacks your weakness in business what do you do?  You fix it.  And now what have you done?  You just made yourself stronger.  This is what we need to do; we need to make ourselves stronger in our jobs!