In a line that stretched around the building, hopefuls queue up for free resume advice at a job fair at the San Mateo Expo Center on Wednesday.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET Networks)SAN MATEO, Calif.--The advertisement for the job fair boasted a list of desirable employers, including Kaiser Permanente, Southwest Airlines, and Wells Fargo Bank.
But when hopeful Silicon Valley job-seekers arrived at the San Mateo Expo Center here Wednesday, they found booths for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and the Army National Guard. The only non-government, non-education, non-security company to appear was Verizon, which was looking for sales representatives to work in local retail stores--previous retail sales experience required.
It turns out that the ad included fine print. It said the companies listed were "previous participating employers."
The reason for the remarkably low corporate turnout, according to an employee of the event's organizer, Jobs & Careers Newspaper, is that companies aren't hiring and that they've whacked the hiring staff and recruiters who would usually show up at events like this.
The shrinking number of prospective employers comes as the ranks of the unemployed are growing: San Mateo-based Jobs & Careers Newspaper expected about 600 people. By 2:45 p.m., according to its estimates, about 2,000 showed up.
A sergeant in the Army National Guard was on the phone with a probation officer about a possible recruit. The fellow had stopped by the booth a few minutes before to express interest but was worried his criminal history would get in the way. That may not be a problem, but it's hard to know for sure: the recruiter declined to be interviewed for this article.
The for-profit University of Phoenix arranged for a booth in the corner in hopes that people would be willing to pay to go back to school to finish a degree or add another one. Instead, people who stopped by just wanted a job.
The three people sitting behind the Verizon booth pointed to a stack of resumes a few inches high that applicants had left during the day. The pile was sitting on a large cardboard box--the size that photocopier paper comes in--with many more resumes inside.
The only non-government, non-education, non-security company to appear at this job fair was Verizon. The U.S. military had three separate recruiting booths.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET Networks)Still, one Verizon representative said that not many applicants appeared to have the necessary background in retail sales. "A manager has certain sales responsibilities and performance goals that have to be met," he said.
No wonder, then, that the longest lines formed in front of two adjacent booths: one offering free resume critiques and the other for a California state office called the Employment Development Department, which offers the CalJOBS matchmaking service and, perhaps more importantly, unemployment benefits. At some points in the day, those queues snaked out the door and around the building.
San Mateo could be called the northern border of Silicon Valley. Oracle's world headquarters is less than four miles away in Redwood City, which is also home to Electronic Arts, PDI/DreamWorks, Informatica, mobile software firm Openwave, and Web applications provider Broadvision. YouTube and Keynote.com are to the north, while most other large employers are south.
According to state figures (PDF), California's unemployment rate was 9.3 percent in December, a substantial jump from 8.4 percent a month earlier and 5.9 percent a year earlier. About 1,732,000 people in California were unemployed, up by 653,000 a year before.
By historic standards, these figures aren't entirely dismal; national unemployment hit 10.8 percent in 1982 and was far higher during the Great Depression. But the figures are hardly encouraging amid a sharp, deep recession that's accompanied by shrinking home values.
Unlike the dot-com bubble a decade ago, Silicon Valley isn't as hard-hit as Wall Street has been. And until the end of 2008, it almost seemed to be weathering the recession. Now it looks like the worst is still to come: Asia's economies are faltering, and high-tech jobs fell by 1.3 percent from December 2007 to December 2008. Another Silicon Valley company, flash memory maker Spansion, just laid off 3,000 people, or 35 percent of its workforce.
Silicon Valley residents may need to get used to more job fairs with more applicants than openings.
commentary The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved an $838 billion "stimulus" bill by a 61-37 vote, capping more than a week of political sparring between critics of the measure and President Obama, who claimed during a press conference that an "economic emergency" made it necessary.
What didn't come up during the president's first press conference was how one section of the convoluted legislation--it's approximately 800 pages total--is intended to radically reshape the nation's medical system by having the government establish computerized medical records that would follow each American from birth to death.
Billions will be handed to companies creating these databases. Billions will be handed to universities to incorporate patient databases "into the initial and ongoing training of health professionals." There's a mention of future "smart card functionality."
Yet nowhere in this 140-page portion of the legislation does the government anticipate that some Americans may not want their medical histories electronically stored, shared, and searchable. Although a single paragraph promises that data-sharing will "be voluntary," there's no obvious way to opt out.
"Without those protections, Americans' electronic health records could be shared--without their consent--with over 600,000 covered entities through the forthcoming nationally linked electronic health records network," said Sue Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom, a nonprofit group that advocates health care privacy.
The Democratic politicians pushing this bill have far-reaching ambitions. The legislation (PDF) (on page 244, for the curious) hands to a still-to-be-named health care bureaucrat the "goal of utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014." Selecting official standards will be left to the Department of Health and Human Services (page 265).
The databases will, "at a minimum," include information on every American's race and ethnicity. They will be used for "biosurveillance and public health" and "medical and clinical research," both of which raise privacy questions. They will become part of a "nationwide system for the electronic use and exchange of health information."
Plus, the federal government will use its vast purchasing power--think Medicare and Medicaid--to compel adoption of e-records that meet government "standards and implementation specifications."
"Congress must close a number of the unnecessary and damaging loopholes designed by industry that have been added to the economic recovery package," said Ashley Katz, director of Patient Privacy Rights. PPR is especially concerned with a section of the Senate bill, which did not exist in the House of Representatives version, that may permit marketing literature and direct mail to be sent based on the contents of a patient's e-records.
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. says he believes PPR "is right to be concerned that the Senate bill would allow for the commercialization of confidential medical information. It changes the incentive structure in data collection."
Short-circuiting a gradual move toward e-health records
Many physicians are moving toward electronic health records for reasons of their own, including market pressure, convenience, and efficiency. This happens as old systems are being replaced or upgraded, questions about security find better answers, and doctors and their staff become more familiar with the technology.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, in response to a mail survey last year that 38.4 percent of physicians reported using full or partial e-records system, not counting billing. This is up from 25 percent in 2005.
In the absence of the so-called stimulus bill, doctors and companies have been gradually moving in that direction, individually weighing the costs against the benefits and choosing the technology that best suits their needs.
This is the gradual process that the Democrats who wrote the legislation, and sent it the floor without the benefit of a single hearing, hope to short-circuit. The bill punishes physicians who are not "meaningful users" of a government-certified e-record database, and specifies certain procedures and information exchanges that will "satisfy" the requirement.
Starting in 2015, government reimbursements to physicians who are not participating in the federal e-record effort will begin to decline.
HHS would be required by law to improve the adoption of e-records "over time by requiring more stringent measures of meaningful use."
Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and an adjunct fellow at the free-market Hudson Institute, wrote an opinion article this week that argues the e-records idea comes from Tom Daschle, who withdrew as a HHS nominee amid questions about his lobbying and nonpayment of income taxes.
"What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment?" McCaughey wrote. "The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the 'tough' decisions elected politicians won't make."
Twila Brase, a registered nurse and head of the Citizens' Council on Health Care, a grassroots group in St. Paul, Minn., says the "stimulus" bill should include explicit informed consent before sensitive and confidential patient records are injected into a national database.
"To protect the human, patient, and privacy rights of all Americans, the final stimulus bill must include an informed consent requirement," said Brase, who also warns that allowing federal officials to define "effective" care will lead to rationing of it.
There are two pro-privacy components of the "stimulus" package. The first says that e-records holders "shall have a right to obtain" a copy of their data in an electronic format. The second includes a notification requirement in the case of a data breach if the information is not encrypted--although, according to the definitions used, no notification is necessary is the unintentional disclosure was made "in good faith."
Also, a "policy committee" will be created inside HHS to devise "the implementation of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure." But of the 18 members, only one is required to have any knowledge of privacy and security matters.
Because the House version is different than the Senate's, negotiators from each chamber will meet to draft a final version, a process that has already begun.
Two Silicon Valley leaders have been appointed by President Obama to a 16-person committee that's charged with offering economic advice during what has become an unusually sharp and deep recession.
John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, is one. Doerr was involved in funding companies including Google, Amazon.com, Sun Microsystems, and Cypress Semiconductor; he currently serves on the board of companies including Amazon and Google and has recently turned his attention to green tech.
Kleiner Perkins investor John Doerr speaks at the MIT Energy Conference last spring.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News)Charles Phillips, the president of Oracle, is another. Phillips became president in May 2003 and previously was with Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Division. He's a Linux aficionado and said in 2005: "On demand is the future of software for many years to come and we are building it on Linux."
On Friday, Obama said he hoped the group, called the Economic Advisory Board, will provide him and his staff with independent advice. The board's chairman will be Paul Volcker, the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
"I created this board to enlist voices that come from beyond the echo chamber of Washington, D.C., and to ensure that no stone is unturned as we work to put people back to work and to get our economy moving," Obama said. We will meet regularly so that I can hear different ideas and sharpen my own, and seek counsel that is candid and informed by the wider world."
Both Doerr and Phillips have given to Democratic causes in the past. Doerr and his wife are some of the nation's largest political check writers, with $209,680 handed out through the 2006 election cycle, garnering a "Solidly Democratic" rating from OpenSecrets.org. Phillips handed money to Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, and the exploratory senatorial committee for New Hampshire's Katrina Swett.
Oracle President Charles Phillips
(Credit: Oracle)Also appointed to the economic board is Laura D'Andrea Tyson, the dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.
Still unclear is how much influence the board will have, especially because the president has so many other economic advisors. There's the Council of Economic Advisors, the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, and the Federal Reserve.
On Friday, Obama used the announcement to call for the swift passage of the so-called stimulus package, which started with a price tag of about $300 billion a few months ago and has swollen to nearly $1 trillion. "It is inexcusable and irresponsible to get bogged down in distraction and delay while millions of Americans are being put out of work," he said. "Every day that Washington fails to act, that recovery is delayed."
But many economists have argued the opposite, including in an advertisement in The New York Times, saying that the United States can't borrow its way to prosperity. And the current stimulus has been larded up with random spending projects like $870 million for flu prevention, $6 billion for drinking water projects, and $19.5 billion for school modernization--which is why the Democratic-controlled Congressional Budget Office estimated that only 8 percent of the proposed "stimulus" spending will take place in the 2009 fiscal year.
One of Obama's appointees, Doerr, has argued in favor of a massive diversion of taxpayer dollars to green tech. In March 2007, Doerr gave a speech at the TED conference approvingly citing Al Gore's views on global warming. "I'm really scared--I don't think we're going to make it," Doerr said. "There is a time when panic is the appropriate response. And we've reached that time."
Three years ago, Kleiner Perkins created a $100 million green tech fund, which has invested in technologies including solar cells, fuel cells, smart grid, ethanol, and synthetic fuels. Not-so-coincidentally, Doerr has lobbied for laws at the state level--and, more recently, as part of the "stimulus" proposal--that would benefit his portfolio by moving toward smart grid, solar, and other technology.
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