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Keeping Research and Leadership at Home
The Rockefeller Foundation's Judith Rodin is one of nine leaders who offer their opinions on what the U.S. should do to hold onto its braintrust and stay on the cutting edge of innovation
January 18, 2007
Source: BusinessWeek Online
By Vivek Wadhwa
From the introduction:
Globalization is reality. U.S. businesses see tremendous opportunities abroad and will increasingly locate their operations closer to growth markets...The risk with this is that the next jobs likely to be outsourced are in research and design, and the U.S. will lose its ability to "invent" the next big technologies.
Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin believes a highly motivated, productive workforce confident in, and committed to, employer success is crucial to U.S. competitiveness. She believes that the solution starts with the workers who make the U.S. what it is. She prescribes a comprehensive look at Social Security, private retirement savings, and health care.Judith Rodin, Rockefeller Foundation president
top of the pageA highly motivated, productive workforce confident in, and committed to, employer success, is crucial to American competitiveness and to increasing returns on critical business investments in human capital. We at the Rockefeller Foundation believe that reestablishing the economic security of U.S. workers is one key to achieving this objective. Moreover, our society has a long way to go in strategically redressing the balance of responsibilities for maintaining economic security between government, industry, and workers themselves.
Evidence that these responsibilities are out of balance today is all around us, but sometimes we overlook it. Here are a few basic, but deeply troubling facts:
- Fully 59% of all U.S. workers lack any employer-based retirement savings plan.
- For those with a 401(k) plan, the median balance would translate into a monthly income of less than $100. Even for those nearing retirement, the average balance would yield only about $385 per month. And for some groups, this sad story understates the issue: The net worth of the average African American is less than one-tenth that of the average white.
- More than one in six working Americans lack any health insurance. For low-wage workers, the figure is one in three. For Latinos, it's two in five.
- And even if our leaders often gloss over these realities, our workers know them: A survey we sponsored on Election Day found that half of all voters lack confidence that their own retirement plans, along with Social Security, will provide an adequate standard of living when they retire. In part as a consequence, 74% of voters described themselves as "worried" about their overall economic security.
For too long, policymakers have considered the problems of Social Security, private retirement savings, and health-care costs as separate issues, to be considered only in their silos. If we are to ensure the competitiveness of the U.S. workforce in our own time, and our children's, we need to begin considering these questions of economic security comprehensively, and in the whole.