Microbusinesses Will Rise To The Outsourcing Challenge
Jobs with larger U.S. firms will continue to flow out of the country, but American workers need not despair. The nation's smallest businesses will take up the slack, employing 85% of the nation's workforce by 2024, predicts Dawn Rivers Baker, editor of The MicroEnterprise Journal.
Sidney, NY (PRWEB) February 20, 2004 --Post-primary exit polls and stump speeches in battleground states bear witness to the overwhelming concern among American workers about the trend toward globalization of the labor market and what that will mean for jobs here at home.
But this trend is only one of a host of seemingly unrelated circumstances that is pushing the humble microbusiness to the forefront of the U.S. domestic economy, according to Dawn Rivers Baker, editor and publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal.
"Those larger companies will continue to send jobs overseas because that's the path lined with dollar signs for them," says Baker. "Here at home, displaced workers are already creating their own jobs through self-employment and that is another trend that will continue."
Some of the circumstances that continue to move Americans toward self-employment include:
- an increased connection with home and family after of the tragedy of 9/11;
- a surge in new technologies that lowered the barriers to business ownership;
- widespread worker distrust and dissatisfaction that was exacerbated by corporate accounting scandals such as Enron and WorldCom;
- a growing sense that the concept of "job security" is now twentieth century history.
Currently, the nation's small businesses employ a little more than half of the U.S. workforce and 90% of all U.S. businesses are microbusinesses. Baker believes that, as more jobs with large employers leave the country, the share of the American workforce that is employed by microbusinesses will continue to grow.
"Within the next 25 years, at least 80% of all American workers will either run their own microbusiness or they'll be employed by a microbusiness," predicts Baker.
"Policy makers need to come to grips with where the jobs are really going to come from in the 21st century, so that they can stop spinning their wheels with 20th century solutions," she adds.
About The MicroEnterprise Journal
The MicroEnterprise Journal, the flagship publication of Wahmpreneur Publishing, Inc., is the nation's only business news and policy analysis periodical written specifically for the nation's 20 million microbusinesses ? a small business with fewer than five employees and less than $500,000 in annual average revenues. The MicroEnterprise Journal is written and published by award-winning journalist, Dawn Rivers Baker, and has been live online continuously since 1999.
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