by Bekjan

Created on: July 02, 2007   Last Updated: July 15, 2007

America could be host to over 76 million retirement parties in the next thirty years and while that may sound exciting, or even a tad trivial, it's what's had economists scrambling for answers for years now. The problem is that the Baby Boomers will be eligible for retirement by the year 2030, leaving behind a gaping whole in our workforce and our economy sinking like the Titanic.

With such a disaster on the horizon, experts have been scrambling for a way to re-inflate the labor force in a post-Baby Boomer era. The most widely accepted solution relies heavily on a huge expansion of the United States' immigration policy. The plan would essentially just replace the Baby Boomers with foreign-born workers, similar to the massive waves of immigration used to supplement the workforce in the early 1900s.

The problem with this is that, while very diligent workers, many immigrants tend to work in labor intensive, but rather unskilled positions - and as the merry-go-round of ever-improving technology continues to spin, these are jobs that, with time, will become obsolete, or at best, of marginal importance. The massive labor shortages in the future aren't going to come from these unskilled positions, so a massive influx of unskilled labor only creates a need for more low-wage positions, while leaving the real shortages unfulfilled.

A more twenty-first century solution involves the fast-paced globalization of the world's economy. This "flattening" of the world, as author Thomas L. Friedman calls it, lends itself to collaboration on a global scale. Outsourcing is a beginning stage of this "flattening," and a necessary evil when juxtaposed with the idea of over a quarter of the labor force reaching retirement age in the next thirty years. As businesses continue to broaden and reach the global level, global collaboration also reaches new heights. Growing economies such as India and China have incredible markets of talented, educated, and inexpensive labor, and newer and better technology continues to bridge the gap between American businesses and foreign laborers. Now US-based companies like Hewlett-Packard can easily connect with their manufacturers in Singapore, check in with their customer call centers in India, all while maintaining their sales and marketing in America.

In the future, overseas resources will only become more and more accessible to more and more people. As businesses continue to tap into the labor of India, China, and other developing nations, the American business model will continue to change. Entrepreneurs will no longer see America as their only source of employees, but will look beyond our own borders and see an entire world of talented, educated workers.
As the Baby Boomers reach retirement age and look to hand the torch to the next generation of workers, America will find its answer overseas just not in the form of immigration. So, to all those Baby Boomers shuffling through the party aisle of the supermarket, America says, "Party on."

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