North Star Writers Group

A study the center conducted of 578 companies across the United States found that two-thirds of employers have not started planning for the impending retirement of the baby-boom generation. The oldest boomers turned 60 in 2006. The study projects that by 2012, most business sectors will experience worker shortages.

According to Marcie Pitts-Catsouphes, the center’s co-director, the dearth of more widespread planning arises out of a combination of factors. These include the relative invisibility of a problem still years away from being acute; the fact that the issue affects different industries in different ways; and the fact that even in industries already affected by worker shortages, such as healthcare, the aging worker issue is often confined to one or two departments and thus hidden from big-picture long-term planning.

So let’s connect some dots and indulge in some educated speculation about why U.S. employers are so under prepared.

First, American companies aren’t encouraged to plan long-term. If they are public, they are rewarded or penalized on quarterly results. This shortsighted focus spills over into the private sector, too. It’s a consequence of the impatience in the American psyche.

Second, most businesses aren’t all that efficient. Reactive, not pro-active, they insist on face time for at least 40 hours a week to make up for their inability to cope with the flexible work schedules that the center advocates as key to retaining older employees. It’s pitiful, really.

Third, businesses aren’t worried about retiring boomers possibly due to the H1B and H2B visa programs - their aces in the hole. The H1B visa program permits U.S. employers to import via sponsorship thousands (currently 65,000 a year) of highly skilled workers from other countries (India, Pakistan, Russia, etc.). To qualify, work-based immigrants must be in a specialty field like information technology, finance, engineering, teaching, healthcare, etc. The H2B visa allows employers to hire unskilled workers outside the United States for non-agricultural jobs under a current annual limit of 66,000.

One of the presumed conditions of these programs is that employers may resort to the H1B and H2B workforce only if they cannot find U.S.-based workers to fill the jobs. Companies have skirted this requirement for decades, making the H1B visa a thorn in the side of U.S. information technology workers. Software and hardware engineers and programmers have watched their salaries drop as their employers fill job vacancies with immigrants who cannot demand higher pay or better work conditions, because to do so might jeopardize their employment status and thus risk deportation.

U.S. companies are already lobbying quietly and heavily to remove all H1B and H2B visa caps. There was a provision in immigration legislation last year in Congress designed to do just that. It died in an election year because the politicians feared a voter backlash, but just last month, former Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan again advocated removing all H1B visa caps as a way to bring down the salaries of top U.S. earners.

The retirement of the boomers may provide the perfect rationale for U.S. companies to get what they really want – no limits on employment-based immigration with the resulting nosedive in wages and salaries and elimination of benefits across the country for all but the fortunate few in the executive suite.

Pitts-Catsouphes, however, warns employers not to take for granted that immigration labor will solve future worker shortages as it has done in the past. In the post-9/11 environment, it’s much more difficult for foreign workers to accept jobs in the United States. In addition, booming economies in their native countries are prompting foreign students to return home in greater numbers after they graduate rather than accepting jobs here.

Let’s hope she’s correct in her assessment of the trend. Once the workforce is truly global, businesses won’t have to give a hoot whether the boomers or anyone else are retiring. They will shift employees from one country to another based solely on the availability of the cheapest labor possible.

Let’s hear it for corporate serfdom, coming soon to a workplace near all of us.

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