WHERE HAVE ALL THE JOBS GONE? 

Do you remember jobs of days past? A few short years ago, no passenger elevator moved without an operator, no newspaper office could function without a "copy boy" and papers could not be sold without a newsboy on every downtown corner. Utility services could never have got started without sweating men digging ditches, for phone, water and sewer lines? And, what about gas station attendants, street car conductors, typewriter repairmen, stenographers, cops walking the beat, household bread or milk deliverymen, train firemen, printbox type setters, linotype operators and hydro meter readers? Most have gone to that big unemployment centre in the sky. What has replaced them? Computers, automated teller machines, fax machines. Even machines are being replaced -- by machines that do multiple jobs, like the new E-mail modem/fax/answering machine by Dove Computers, that does three jobs in one -- at half the price of last year's single-unit fax machine.

If your job can be replaced by a machine, even one not yet invented, better start retraining now. Global competition dictates it. If your company cannot match productivity of overseas robots on the dull, monotonous, repetitive, still existing jobs of the past, be assured some foreign operation has already got that market targeted. If your work is tied to what-used-to-be-called a "natural resource" don't expect to be working at your present job when you retire. It or the industry involved won't be around. While Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten presided over the end of the British Empire. Today Jack Munro, Canadian President of the International Woodworkers of America, has a similar position -- his army of lumberjacks is shrinking rapidly and is now 50 percent smaller than a few years ago. No amount of promotional "creativity" can make it grow again.

Plastic is replacing steel. Ceramics, vinyl and such new materials as spun carbon are replacing wood, steel and other materials. Molecular engineers are developing materials that never existed before ... materials that will be "assembled" molecule by molecule, with a strength that will make steel look weak. Cheap carbon spun fibres are already replacing steel reinforcing rods in office wall construction in Japan. The Japanese Ohbayashi Corporation, builds the first floor of an office, apartment or hotel building that is itself a robot. The first floor builds the rest of the building with only two humans supervising the computerized "control tower". Postal delivery which once dominated the day's office work is fast being replaced by E-mail, faxes and telephones. The answering machine is replacing the receptionist, the automated bank machine is replacing many human bank tellers and voice navigators are replacing the secretaries. No job is sacred. Even the Vatican is broadcasting messages via satellites.

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