just coming alive again. I feel like I've been in solitary confinement all those years, and now I've been liberated." David Gernes, a 33-year-old electrical engineer who lives over a hill from Phil Blum in Lexington's Peacock Farm section, also feels liberated-so much so, that he is no longer looking for a job. In 1967, after working for several electronics research firms in the area, he and two friends formed their own company, Competition Associates. Working out of a garage in Harvard Square, they turned out high-powered telescopes. Soon they wanted to expand and needed capital. Unable to raise sufficient money themselves, they agreed to sell the company to Ealing Corporation, a large distributor of scientific equipment, which kept them on to manage their operation. In 1969, Ealing, along with the rest of the industry, began having its own financial problems. Although the telescopes were selling well, and Ealing's executive vice president had just told David he was considered "a valued member of the Ealing team," when his contract came up for renewal in November, he was laid off. He even had to fight for a month's notice. That afternoon he called home from the office and told his wife, Naomi, "Guess what? I'll be home early. I've been fired." The fact that David Gernes had set up and run his own firm did not seem to make much difference to the few prospective employers he located. The fact that he has no engineering degree did. Neither his own contacts nor the agencies turned up anything solid. For three months he sent out résumés and made telephone calls, with no results. Naomi noticed an obvious reaction to his father's situation in their elder child, 7-year-old Todd. "He was so used to David working all the time, he became a little worried when David began spending all the time around the house. I think he wondered if daddy was in trouble." David recalls those days clearly: "We'd be talking about some job possibility, and he'd hear us and say, 'Great! Are you going to take that job] When are you going to start?" After a while David gave up the job search and took the family on a threeweek driving trip to Florida. During that trip, and the days spent sitting around the house, he began thinking seriously about his career. "What the hell. It was pretty apparent I wasn't going to find any work in my field, so I began to ask myself if I really wanted to continue in this field, and if not, what were the other options." Fortunately for David, his financial position enabled him to take the time to consider his options. The sale of the Ealing stock he had received when they bought him out left him with more than enough to buy his $50,000 home. He also had rental income from two old houses in Cambridge that he and Naomi had bought and fixed up over the years. This led to one of his options. He had learned a good deal about building with those houses, and had also enjoyed it. In February, a friend asked him to help him find a contractor to construct a small studio, and when the bids came in they were so high that David offered to build it himself. He did, for half the price. It took two and a half months of hard work, but again he found he enjoyed it. The word got around, and he soon had a contract to build a neighborhood swimming pool, which took him through the summer. "What did your friends think," I asked, "when they saw you, an electrical engineer, hammering nails for a living?" "Most of them understood, but a few were kind of patronizing. They'd come around expressing admiration for what I was doing, and I'd get vibrations of disdain." Now, David and one of his old partners, who was also laid off by Ealing, are building a custom laser telescope for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Lab in Cambridge. And after that? "Maybe more consulting work in telescopic control systems, or maybe some more contracting. If I do get back into business again, I don't intend to get back into the kind of rut most successful executives are into. I've enjoyed this time I've enjoyed the manual labor. It's very satisfying, and low-pressure. "As you plummet out of the corporate cloud, you suddenly discover that you've never really had time to develop penetrating relationships with your wife and children. The same with your friends. You see them once a week for cocktails or a dinner party, but you don't really know them. I've learned that what matters is people, rather than things. Gernes is not the only engineer who has been doing some serious thinking about his career lately. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the largest professional society in the field, has been rumbling with talk of a union for engineers that would protect their jobs and standardize employment practices in the industry. One major obstacle, however, is that many of the I.E.E.E.'s leaders are themselves executives in this industry. Another obstacle, according to one of the society's officials, is that: "The only ones who are yelling about unions are the ones who've been laid off. The others don't want to make any trouble. They're too worried abut hanging onto their own jobs. Besides, engineers tend to be more management-oriented than labor-oriented, anyway. In fact, most of them hope to get into management eventually. They get paid well, and they tend not to grumble about working conditions. There's a bit more grumbling now, but with all these layoff's no one's grumbling out loud in the plants." When I asked Harold Goldberg, head of the Greater Boston I.E.E.E., why his organization was not set up to look after the welfare of its members, he explained: "Up until now, there was never any reason to. The industry was doing well, and all the engineers were happy. Many people even feel we've had this coming to us for a long time. Since the days of Sputnik, engineers have been the golden boys of industry. People always hear about those wonderful starting salaries for the graduates of M.I.T., but no one hears about what happens to those salaries over the years. They don't increase the way they do in other professional fields. There's sort of a ceiling on engineering salaries." The average starting salaries for last June's M.I.T. grads were still wonderful about $17,000 for Ph.D.'s, $12,000 for a master's, $10,500 for a bachelor of science. The problem was finding jobs. According to one of this year's crop, some companies that used to hire Ph.D.'s took people with only master's or bache lor's degree this year, because they were less specialized and cheaper. They might not be as highly qualified as Ph.D.'s for certain work, but for a saving of $5,000-$7,000 apiece, the companies were apparently willing to take that chance. Dean Robert Weatherall, director of M.I.T.'s placement office, reports a sharp decrease in the number of available jobs, and admits that some of the listings he does have were "given to us only in a routine sort of way. Unless a particularly brilliant student comes along, many of these companies are not really actively searching." The tight job market has even affected the students' life style. “We have many more students these days with long hair, who are used to working in blue jeans and sandals. They're not willing to compromise their individuality in order to get a job, but they're finding this is a difficult year to make a stand on clothing or hair. Last year the firms needed their talents so badly they were willing to endure some of these personal traits. Now, there's such competition for the jobs, the firms can choose what they consider the 'normal' applicants." Even the "normal" graduates had trouble this year. Of the seven new Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics, only three have some prospects for jobs in industry. One of the others, Bob Hughes, says: "Many of us had several promising interviews, but we all got the same letters back. The standard line was: "The budget squeeze has forced us to re-examine our manpower requirements.' There are days when you get two or three letters back turning you down, and it's pretty depressing. Then somebody at lunch asks you, 'Well, how's the old job hunt going?,' and you feel like telling him to go to hell." With no prospects for a job in industry, Hughes fell back on a research associate position in his department at M.I.T. His salary of $12,500, though much less than the going rate for Ph.D.'s, is hardly a hardship wage. His colleague, Leonard Tocci, 28, has yet to find anything, but Tocci's wife earns $9,000 teaching second grade. Asked about his plans, Tocci says, "I'll just keep sending my résumés around, I guess, and wait for them to contact me." He may have quite a wait. Students and deans at engineering schools around the country are beginning to wonder about the wisdom of training more and more highly specialized Ph.D.'s at a time when the country, or at least industry, has less and less need for them. Should the schools restrict the number of students in each field according to the number of jobs available? Should the engineering curriculum be revised in order to turn out more generalists? Perhaps. But such moves will do little to help the thousands of engineers now out of work. Many of them now recognize that they have no future in their former specialties, and are willing to retrain for another, such as the power industry, which in addition to its shortage of power, also has a shortage of trained engineers. Everyone agrees such retraining programs should be available, but no one has any idea where the funds would come from. The electronics industry, whatever its responsibility, is in no position to do much with the current budget prob lems. This leaves the Federal Government, which both the engineers and the companies hold largely responsible for the current glut in the technical job market. As one former Raytheon engineer says: "The government has supported these areas for years with fat defense and space contracts. In many fields it was the sole source of funds. Now they come along and say they don't want this expertise any more. They just up and pull out all the funds, and leave us high and dry, with no jobs. What the hell are we supposed to do now?" Even if the Federal Government did create a retraining program for engineers willing to switch fields, there is still some doubt as to how effective this would be. Manny Sugarman, whose placement agency has been dealing with the technical job market for 15 years, has little confidence that the electronics firms would hire retrained engineers. "Industry today just doesn't accept the idea of transfer of skills," he says. "A senior engineer is just kidding himself if he thinks he can transfer." Talks with personnel men along Route 128 confirm this view. As one of them told me ("but please don't quote me on this"): "Sure we favor a Government retraining program, but let's face it, why should we hire a radar engineer who has retrained as a computer man when we can get hundreds of guys who've been working with computers for years? I know that sounds cold-blooded, but that's business." It may be good business for the companies, but not for the engineers. A growing number of them are beginning to question the entire system they are caught up in. The Rev. Scott Paradise, director of the Boston Industrial Mission, has talked to many of them and senses "a marked change from the almost universally held view only a few years ago that at these military and space projects are new, exciting and vital to the national defense. What I hear more and more is that most of these projects are counterproductive from the standpoint of society's needs." Some engineers would like to see part of the energy, money and skill that have gone into these projects diverted to pressing social problems like pollution, housing and mass transportation. In many cases the skills involved are too exotic or specialized for such conversion, but a number of engineers and research companies would be willing to try-if the Federal money were available. They can't switch fields until it is. While these men ponder the value of technology, others, like Jamie Chapman, a 33-year-old Ph.D. physicist at E. G. & G., consider the current unemployment crisis a threat to the very future of technology. "The first wave of layoffs," says Chapman, “was partly a housecleaning operation at most companies. But now some firms are getting close to the critical stage. They're beginning to lose people who give them their technical competence. If you let too many of these people go, you are forced to close down a whole department. Some of these research teams took years to assemble. Once you close them down, you just can't build them up again quickly when market conditions change. In some fields we are systematically dismantling entire areas of technology. This is a very real danger to the country's scientific competence." [From the New York Times, Jan. 24, 1971] U.S. NEEDS A STRONG FINISH TO WIN WORLD TRADE RACE (By Emilio Q. Daddario) The United States is in the final phase of an international competition that deserves more attention than it is getting. We might even classify this competition as a four-man medley relay race, in which most of the stakes are riding on the anchorman, whom I shall call our technologically intensive products. After the first leg of this race, involving agricultural products, we find ourseves slightly ahead. However, we lose the lead on the second leg where the categories are minerals, fuels and other nonmanufactured and nonagricultural products. In the third leg we fall even further behind the Japanese, Europeans and Russians in the field of nontechnologically intensive products. And now we appear to be banking heavily upon the strength and stamina of our fourth runner, the technologically intensive products, for a come-from-behind finish. In past competition, we have done pretty well in this world relay race and perhaps, have now grown complacent in our confidence that our final runner will cross the line ahead of others. We haven't even given serious thought to what would happen if we lost the balance of payments race. Strangely enough, the American public does not find the race particularly exciting. It is much more interested in those local contests involving such domestic issues as law and order, environment and urban blight. It could very well be, however, that our ability to win these other races might well depend on how we finish in our world relay race, and by what margin. Let's look at the statistics. In 1962 our exports in all commodities in world trade amounted to $21.4 billion. By 1968 this had grown to $34.2 billion. However, our imports in this same period have increased from $16.4 billion to $33.2 billion. It is this growth in imports that has practically eliminated our favorable world trade balance. When we break this down into the four parts that I included in my relay analogy, we can see the importance of our trade in technologically intensive products. In this category, our exports amounted to $10.2-billion in 1962, and our imports to $2.5-billion-a margin of $7.7-billion. In 1968 our margin had grown to $9-billion as exports increased to $18.4-billion and imports to $9.4billion. We have increased our lead in this category, although our over-all favorable balance decreased from $5-billion to $1-billion during the same time span. We can take some hope by forecasting an improvement in our favor during 1970. Yet, we must recognize that the margin remains narrow and the competition fierce as imports to the United States continue to rise at a rate of growth that is predictably steady. This is because of improved developments such as the expected entry of Great Britain into the European Common Market, intense economic activity and growth on the part of the Japanese and a plodding upswing by the Russians. When we analyze the data in more detail, the picture becomes even darker. It is our transactions with the nonindustrialized world that have given us this small over-all favorable balance of trade. Our exports of technologically intensive goods to those countries grew from $0.5-billion in 1962 to more than $7-billion in 1968. During this same period, our margin over Western Europe shrank from $1.6billion to $1.2-billion. And with Japan a small favorable balance turned into a $500-million deficit. These figures show that we are not winning the race for markets in the industrialized world as we did in the past. This has the effect of reducing the resources available to cope with our domestic needs at a time when these needs are enormous. Today we are cutting down on our expenditures for science and technology, although only more science and technology can permit us to meet the challenge of the Russians, Japanese and Europeans. Moreover, our competitors are accelerating expenditures for research and development while we are cutting back. The Federal Government alone reduced spending for research and development by over $1-billion between 1968 and 1970. This reduction is even more severe when one takes into account the effects of inflation. The United States faces intense competition in motor vehicles, computers and scientific equipment. For example, half of all calculators sold in the United States are made in Japan, as are 70 per cent of the world total. The amazing thing is that the Japanese did not mass-produce calculators until 1967, and it is the electronic sophistication of their equipment that gives them the competitive edge. Foreign advances in the fast breeder reactor field threaten to put us at a significant disadvantage in the production of electric power in the future. To meet these challenges and to better prepare for the future, I have proposed that we formulate a National Science Policy for the United States. Only through such a policy can we improve our ability to compete in the technologically intensive sector of world trade. I am convinced that development of knowledge and its application by trained manpower to the goals and needs of our democratic society will eventually determine our continued existence as a free society. A National Science Policy would allow us to shape our research and development enterprise to stay ahead in the technologically intensive lap of the world trade race. Only a wide margin of victory in that race can provide our nation with the resources to improve the quality of life for all citizens. We are a confident people. Our record of achievement is spectacular. Over a relatively short span of history we have become the most powerful nation on earth. On the nation's shelves an inventory of knowledge has gathered, and there exists within us the ability to apply that knowledge to assure American leadership in the world of the future. No other nation has had such human and material resources, providing it with the opportunity to lead the rest of the world to permanent peace and economic stability. Science and technology must be nurtured carefully, since they hold the key to our future and the destiny of mankind. That destiny is now fleeting from our grasp because we are retrenching fearfully when we should be advancing boldly. [From the Evening Star, May 5, 1971] JOBS LACKING FOR ENGINEERS A space agency consultant has predicted that, despite all current efforts to reverse it, the unemployment of scientists, engineers and technicians will double by the end of 1971. The consultant, Ellis Mottur, of George Washington University, estimates in a report recently submitted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that the number of jobless in the technical field is now 100,000 and will increase to 200,000. Included in the higher figure are 27,000 June science and engineering graduates who may fail to find jobs. The Labor Department, meanwhile, was set today to announce further details of President Nixon's recently announced $42 million program to alleviate the situation. Among these details: An unemployed scientist be assisted by up to $500 to cover out-of-pocket expenses to travel to job interviews. He could get an average of $2,500 in training for a new kind of job. Much of this training will be on-the-job, with the federal payment covering up to $100 a week of his wages. He could be reimbursed for up to $1,000 in moving expenses if he were to get a new job in another city. The Labor Department, under strong pressure from the White House to get the program rolling, has identified 14 areas of high aerospace and defense unemployment where the program will get under way. They are Huntsville, Ala.; Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County and San Jose, Calif.; Cape Kennedy, Fla.; Wichita, Kans.; Long Island, N.Y.; Atlanta, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Dallas and Seattle. In his 200-page report to NASA, Mottur argues that this kind of program, while constructive, will not go far to easing the problem. The $25 million allotted in the program to retraining could reach 10,000 technical personnel over the next year. While that is happening, said Mottur, "the second and third order effects" of cutbacks in defense and space spending have yet to be felt. They are likely to put out of work more than 70,000 additional scientists and technicians over the course of 1971, he said. The administration's position, he said, is based largely on the hope that "current economic and fiscal programs will revive the economy, and that once the economy picks up, the scientists and technical personnel will find jobs along with everyone else." "Unfortunately," Motur said, "a general economic recovery would not automatically produce jobs for the unemployed scientists, engineers and technicians. . . . Only through federal funding of R&D and engineering in the civilian sector can such jobs be produced." [From the New Scientist and Science Journal, May 20, 1971] GLOOM IN U.S. HIGH TECHNOLOGY "An estimated 65,000 scientists, engineers and technicians are out of (By Dr. Steve Liebmann, computer correspondent of Electronics Weekly) Currently, the comics in California comment that you cannot expect everything. You've got sunshine-do you expect a job as well? Overall unemployment in the U.S. is rising to about 6 percent, but in some of the hardest hit areas such as Northern California unemployment has topped 10 percent. On 25 March the |