Saturday: Why the desperation?

So, I went to see my employment counselor, like a cat dragged in from the cold.  “Fix my CV! PLEASE!”, I cried.  He calmly and methodically walked me through the procedure of finding a new job.  Just being with him lowers my heart rate.  During the first meeting, he told me that the he sees signs that the job market is starting to return, slowly, but that the pharmaceuticals research jobs are responding much more slowly.

By the way, anyone out there interested in pursuing a career in chemistry (biologists, you’re next), should read some of the entries in this post.  Here’s a sample:

I’m a synthetic organic chemist. I used to like organic chemistry a lot. It’s a cool science, but it’s not a valid career path anymore. Universities should really restrain the number of new students in chemistry programs, for their sake. In 2000, when I started my degree, the pharma industry was doing very well and paying big bucks for chemists. This is NEVER going to happen again. Our jobs are all in China now. I have a PhD from a top Canadian school and I did a postdoc in a top US lab. I’ve now been looking for a job for 6 months, and I’m willing to relocate ANYWHERE in North America, Europe or Australia, but I can’t find anything! Talk about wasted time! If you are ready to work very hard (easily 70 hrs/week) to do a PhD & postdoc, and then need to work as a store clerk to pay the rent, then organic chemistry is for you. If you don’t want to completely waste the best years of your life, then PLEASE PLEASE choose something else!!

This is what you’ll be up against: years and years of hard study in math and the sciences while your business major buddies are pledging down at Sigma Chi.  When you finally get your PhD after 10 years, you may be stuck in a post doc position making $40K- for years- if you’re lucky.  That’s the kind of thanks we get.  Americans do not appreciate scientists and you know what?  This country’s going to pay for that neglect and hostility.  Big Time.  Because young people who would make better money selling cars are going to sell cars, not run Suzuki couplings and Friedel-Crafts acylations.

We STEM researchers feel abandoned.  No one wants to invite people like us to jobs summits and we are virtually ignored by the media.  So, when this generation of R&D specialists die out, don’t expect a new generation to take its place.  The children most likely to succeed in these fields see what is happening to their parents and will avoid careers in science like the plague.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, the nice man who is trying to keep me focussed on finding a job.  So, I asked him, does he see any employment trends.  Yes, he says, the people who run the corporations are desperate for money.  You can draw your own conclusions from that but here’s my interpretation:

The current retirement structure is primarily based on a 401K.  Some of us have pensions, that we can’t tap into for decades to come.  But these are small.  Without social security supplements, our pensions will not be enough to live on. For those of us in the science industry, we were partially compensated with stock.  And that was peachy keen in the 90’s but in order to benefit from stock options, you have to wait a few years to cash them in and the pharma industry has been hit with so many recalls and gigantic lawsuits that most of our options are underwater compared to when we received them.  Yeah, really, go look at the stock prices of the pharmas for the past 15-20 years.  Despite what you might think, they’re not doing so well.  The did pretty well during the late 90s but since then, the stocks have plateaued or ailing companies have been absorbed by others.  There haven’t been significant gains.  So, if you’re a pharma exec during the last 15 years, you should be asking yourself why you’ve spent so much money lobbying Republicans.  They haven’t done a damn thing for you.  But I digress.

Most of us have our savings in 401Ks.  But 401Ks are like a giant pyramid scheme.  Imagine Bernie Madoff in a casino doing speedballs and shooting heroine (if those are the same things or combinations thereof, that just goes to show how innocent my illegal drug patois is).  The problem is that babyboomers are starting to cash in their chips.  They are going to start cashing more and more chips in the next decade or so.  Lucky me, I was born at the tail end of the baby boom generation and actually identify more with the gen Xers.  We will be the ones holding the bag.  So, imagine you’re a CEO and you have to keep the shareholders happy.  It’s going to be like bailing out at sinking ship.  You have to keep bailing more and more water at an ever increasing speed.  You cut and cut and pay your MBAs who are addicted to money and appease the Wall Street Gods because they are running the casino and the players are swilling champagne in their black tie tuxes around the craps table in an ever more dizzying frenzy of the game.  It’s out of control.

The shareholders must be appeased.  The money has to come from somewhere.  The end of the quarter is coming up.  Jobs will be cut.  They’re desperate.  But their short term thinking only makes the situation worse.  Because the fewer the number of people with good salaries that are employed, the fewer number will be contributing to the 401K scheme.  So, even as they cut jobs to pump up the stock prices, they are losing players to put down their money.  Which leads to more desperation and job cutting.  I’m no Paul Krugman but if I didn’t know better, I’d think we were looking at a new financial/economic phenomenon.  Maybe there’s a name for it illustrated with the kind indecipherable graphs that Paul is so fond of putting on his wonky blog posts.

This phenomenon might also explain (partially) the pressure to cut Social Security benefits.  If you make Social Security look like a welfare program, maybe workers would be more receptive to risking everything they own on the stock market through their 401K.  After all, what are your options?  Put it in a bank?  With the lousy interest rates??  Stuff it under your mattress?  Buy gold?  But giving the finance “geniuses” more of our money to invest in emerging markets will just add to the decline of our economy here.  There’s only so much money to earn or burn.  Sooner or later, the demands of the shareholders are going to exceed the ability of the CEOs and the consultant braintrusts to cut.  I think we have already reached that limit in pharma.  I’m going to guess that research is badly damaged if not disfunctional at some large pharmas.  Someone correct me if I’m wrong.  And if your corporation is based on research, what the heck are those high paid marketing and sales people going to sell exactly?  Pretty soon, the ideas from outside entities are going to get really expensive to buy.

I think when the job guy said “they’re desperate”, he means they are on a merry-go-round and they can’t get off.  It’s a more and more vicious circle that has one potentially catastrophic end.  There will soon be nothing left to cut and the financial guys are going to need another bailout.

Speaking of bailouts, check out William Cohan’s recent appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart as he discusses the biggest casino operators, Goldman-Sachs.  Not to be missed.

What to do?  I dunno.  I hate playing with money.  It seems wasteful to me even if my own 401K has done pretty well lately. Right now, I wish there was a nice secure pension fund I could stuff it into.  I’d love to live in a small place in a medium sized city close to public transportation with a regular job with benefits.  Nothing fancy.  Give me modesty and security over glitz and desperation any day.

And check out this guy’s Swiss Army knife apartment.  Brilliant.