Madeleine Jacobs, the CEO of the American Chemical Society, last year in her "2010 highlights" C&EN column:
We are well into 2010, and I would like to share what we are emphasizing this year. When people ask me what keeps me up at night, I tell them it is the fragile economy and high unemployment rates that our members and the U.S. in general are experiencing. I have lived through five major recessions in the U.S., and there is nothing more heart-wrenching to me than to talk with talented chemists and chemical engineers who have lost their jobs and wonder what the future holds for them. ACS will continue to focus on the needs of all our members, with a special focus on our unemployed members. In addition, we are actively pursuing opportunities to work with Congress and the Obama Administration to keep valuable jobs in the U.S. and to help our chemists start and be successful in new businesses.Madeleine Jacobs, this year (emphasis CJ's):
We are already well into 2011—the International Year of Chemistry. I am thrilled that chemists finally have our year to celebrate, but my elation is tempered by the continued sluggishness of the economy. Many sectors of the economy are improving, and the chemical industry is showing substantial profits, but we are still not seeing hiring of chemists at a fast enough pace. I have lived through five recessions in the chemical industry, and, until this last recession, we always experienced a reasonable recovery that involved adding back jobs that were lost in R&D. In this recession, everyone in the chemistry enterprise suffered, but unlike previous recessions, many people agree that we have experienced a paradigm shift and that jobs in R&D will not be substantially recovered in this country.
We will continue, therefore, to coordinate, prioritize, and enhance ACS services to help members succeed in this rapidly changing and globalizing workplace. Efforts will likely include offering an integrated package of prioritized career development services, disseminating enhanced market intelligence to members on workplace trends, improving member awareness of services, and exploring new efforts to facilitate chemistry-related job creation via small-business and start-up innovation.
As always, I am interested in hearing from you. What do you think ACS should be doing to help our members and the chemistry enterprise thrive? Please write me at m_jacobs@acs.org.While I could offer snarky comments, I won't. I'll just say that I am glad that Ms. Jacobs is seeming to face the music that her members have been dancing to for about 2 years now. I also await (with eagerness) the changes that are to come to ACS' member services with regards to solving the employment problem. See you (on this subject) this time next year.
Do you think the ACS should be more activist on jobs?
ReplyDeleteLook at the polished corporate Newspeak she is spouting (even when the euphemisms describe the ACS members being squeezed out of their profession). She just cannot hep it...
ReplyDeletePretentious diction is a good indicator of insincerity. As Orwell once wrote, this kind of language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Depends on what you mean by activist. Lobbying for government policy change? I'm less enthusiastic.
ReplyDeleteMaking ACS Careers more active and more effective? Yeah, I could go for that.
ACS does do some activism in Congress - at least I get alerts to contact Congress about science funding on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that has been rather amazing throughout this recession is how little the governing and elite class has responded to it. A lot of them shrug their shoulders and talk about structural changes.
Yes, I'm thinking more along the lines of changes to ACS Careers.
What changes would you like to see?
My understanding is that ACS chooses its own list of candidates (via the Nominations & Elections committee) for board elections. From that kind of undemocratic arrangement, why on earth would you expect ACS to care a lick about its membership?
ReplyDeleteACS is a publications company first, a blanket industrial organization second, and a professional society last. You should be happy they provide career services (meager as they are) at all!
The government is secondary on all of this. The ACS should really be lobbying chemical corporations on this issue.
ReplyDeleteAs far as survival goes: the ACS should know that it is in their best interest, and indeed a necessity, to have a healthy and happy employment for chemists. This should be their utmost priority.
Matt,
ReplyDelete1) As evidenced by the Jacobs quote, the board is quite disconnected from what the world is really like for most chemists. They didn't even realize there was a problem; they likely don't realize its severity.
2) They're not really set up to advocate for chemists. It's not what they do, and expecting that they'd do it well...in a hurry...is asking too much. (Although, one could argue that they should have been doing so all along.)
3) ACS's survival does NOT depend on its membership. It depends on income from Chem Abstracts and its publications. (Yes, you need chemists for publications, but they need not be U.S.-based chemists.)
4) ACS is set up to be a static organization. Expecting rapid change (or any change) is unrealistic.
I have to conclude that any salvation for domestic chemistry will not be issued by ACS. In fact, I don't know from where it could possibly come...short of international disasters that make our concerns look pretty small.
5) At least lower my yearly dues, since I never did get that sweet six-figure job promised to me when I got into this biz back in the late '90s!
ReplyDelete@ 7:38AM
ReplyDeleteMy comments were never meant to reflect what I believe to be the reality of ACS. My comments reflect what I believe the reality of the ACS should be. I don't know if the working industrial chemists of the ACS need to band together to form a lobbying power within the ACS in order to get 1 working chemist on the advisory board or some such thing.
And, while employment may not be the major concern of the ACS (publishing, etc), I believe that it could be with the proper sorts of influence. (Full disclosure: I am naive.)
there were RnD jobs?
ReplyDelete" R&D will not be substantially recovered in this country.
ReplyDeleteWe will continue, therefore, to coordinate, prioritize, and enhance ACS services to help members succeed in this rapidly changing and globalizing workplace"
Does anyone else read this as an alternative way of saying:
Prior to 2011, ACS has found that it sells the majority memberships/journals to scientists in America. To do this we had to keep the illusion that there are opportunties for science in the US.
Now that our members have discovered the truth by talking to one another in unemployment lines and career fairs, we have sought a new target market. We have found that we can sell services and electronic journals to our global partners (i.e. China and India) therefore will shift our focus to this more promising source of potential revenue.
All the same to ACS... US scientists were a bit snarky for our tastes anyway.
Even if the ACS became an activist organization overnight, I'm not sure what they could do, from a practical perspective. Lobby chemical organizations? "We think you should hire more US chemists." "We're not going to and if you don't like it, there are plenty of chemists in China we can hire instead." I'm not sure ACS has any leverage at this point in time. They could lobby the government, but the U.S. government has shown no interest in restricting companies from moving operations overseas, in any industry, so I don't see how ACS could persuade them to treat the pharmaceutical industry any differently than they've treated any other industry. Maybe they could get them to stop referring to the "scientist shortage" but that's mostly a semantics issue at this point.
ReplyDelete" I'm not sure what they could do, from a practical perspective"
ReplyDeleteThey could stop providing advertising to foreign CROs. Could you imagine? American CROs advertised in CE&N!!!
ACS should think long and hard before they start trotting out the 'scientist shortage' rationale when they lobby Congress for more research dollars. Why don't they find some other reason(s) for all the dollars they want to see appropriated.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous from 7:38 am is correct - at this point ACS derives most of its income from Chem Abstracts, their journals and books. They have little economic incentive to change their focus and concentrate on the employment situation of chemists in the US.
That being said, at least there is an acknowlegement from Jacobs that a problem exists, and that's a step in the right direction.
Did anyone hear that the ACS is contemplating differential world pricing for their goods and services? They seem to want to charge chemists and organizations in low cost areas of the world less for ACS G&S than they charge rich chemists in the US.
ReplyDelete@747pm anon
ReplyDeleteIf that is true about differential pricing, that will just perpetuate the trend won't it?
I bet biotechs/startups in CA or MA wish they could get differential pricing from ACS. Pretty soon they will be pushed out of existance all together.