By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – To be an engineer used to guarantee a strong income doing what you love, especially in the Telecom industry. Not any more. The bursting of the Telecom bubble left no rank unscathed. And those highly intelligent, highly-paid innovative engineers are now pounding the pavement. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Middays.
I just read a sobering article in today's Wall Street Journal. I'd rather talk about how nicely the stock market is acting, but this article is an important reality check for North Texans. It profiles a telecom company (excuse me, ex-telecom company) who, like so many other startups in Richardson, had ideas of grandeur. It was July 2000 when Latus Lightworks began with a party, hiring their first 120 employees. Jumping on board were the many optical engineers that had their choice of where to work. Optical engineers were a hot commodity. Today, like so many others in the telecom industry, these engineers have no place to work.
As the Journal indicates, labor historians say the pace at which telecom grew and then went bust - is unprecedented. It is compared to the oil, steel, and automobile industries, all of which had massive layoffs during their downturn. It took two decades for the U.S. automobile industry to lose half of its 1.5 million United Auto Workers. It's barely taken two years for "the well over 500,000" telecom employees to be out of a job. A good portion of those worked in Richardson. The layoffs continue.
And there isn't a whole lot of demand for these highly-specialized optical engineers. Families are losing their homes and unemployment benefits are running out. Foreclosures in Collin County, where many telecom employees lived, are up 79% from last year, especially for homes over $250,000. The executive director of the homeless shelter in McKinney told the Journal, "It is a whole new breed, what we are seeing here." As one of the engineers, quoted in the article, said, "It's frustrating." This engineer earned seven patents in his thirty-year career. He might become a teacher. For KERA Marketplace Middays, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m. To contact Maxine Shapiro, please send emails to mshapiro@kera.org.