GLOBALIZATION

Jobs dry up for travel 

agents and IT workers

By Peter Blakeborough

“If you’re a travel agent or an accountant, you could be facing extinction by 2017,” wrote Alanah Eriksen in the New Zealand Herald business pages on August 13, 2012.

She predicted also, just as many others often do, that car manufacturers, retail and IT workers would also need to look for new career paths. Eriksen pointed to Balance Recruitment as an agency that had compiled a list of top jobs that would disappear within five years. But two years after the jobs should have disappeared, it is mostly the job seekers that are disappearing as the world economy and employment continue to boom.

When the NZ Herald article predicted that travel agents and accountants would disappear by 2017, they were clearly wrong. The Herald article was one of the most masterly written pieces of doom and gloom ever published. 

It is true that over time some occupations do disappear, but the evolution of business and employment is, in some ways, just like the evolution of nature; as one species becomes extinct many new species take its place. There is a popular saying that as one door closes another opens, but in reality it is often a case of many new doors opening.

Many people like to blame the internet for the so-called hard times that exist today. Let’s examine that.

At the start of the twentieth century, www could have meant wooden wagon wheel because the whole world was busy bemoaning the expected demise of the wooden wagon wheel maker. But the wooden wagon was inefficient, few individuals owned one and, often as not, the wheels fell off between one town and the next. To add to the woes of wooden wagon owners, they needed to own a horse and have somewhere to graze it. If the wagon was needed to transport produce to a market, they needed a team of horses.

Nowadays people will tell you that motor vehicles, and their exhaust fumes, are destroying the world, but think where the world would be without motor vehicles. With today’s population the world would be literally knee-deep in horse manure.  

The evolution of business and employment has been going on for thousands of years and the invention of the wheel and the wagon has been a vital part of that evolution, but the development of motor vehicles has been crucial. Before the Industrial Revolution few people lived beyond the age of 40 and the main causes of death were starvation (chiefly from unemployment) war, plague, murder and suicide. 

Industries and occupations are lost when more efficient industries and occupations take their place and efficiency ultimately puts more spending power into more pockets. Granted, there can be pain during transition but in the end commercial and industrial progress means wealth for more people and that can be seen in the growing range of occupations, products and services available that are available and affordable today.

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When the wooden wagon wheel disappeared cars, aircraft and telephones were rare. Only the exceptionally wealthy owned them. Radio, television, computers and music tapes and discs, play station and thousands of other products and services now available were yet to be launched. Launching those products and services was not just a simple matter of inventing them and selling millions. They would have been next to useless until the masses of people had the money to buy them.

Outsourcing is a dirty word to many but it has positive benefits. It helps reduce the cost of goods and services and bring them within the reach of more people.

India, with more poverty and unemployment than any other country in the world, benefits enormously from outsourcing and that is just part of the evolving economic globalization in which ultimately everyone wins. As India becomes more wealthy, there are spin-offs for the rest of the world. Indians are now travelling more than previously thereby creating jobs in travel and tourism. They are also able to import more products from the rest of the world. 

Everyone ultimately wins from globalization.