This article was conceived as something like "3 Million American Jobs Dumped Overseas (Foreigners Get American Jobs)".

The lead in idea was these jobs would be lost at the rate of about 200,000 each year for the next few years. Well, this has already been achieved in just four years; nothing like it since the Depression!

What's happening?

Blame is being laid in many places and all of them are deserving.

We all want the very best (including highest quality) but we absolutely won't pay for it. This causes us to support the likes of Wal-Mart; right by itself Wal-Mart is solely responsible for Levi-Strauss closing all its North American operations. Those designer jeans you love now are all made in some substandard manufacturing plant in the third world.

And any operation not requiring personal, on-the-spot, in-your-face service will soon leave for India or China.

All these manufacturing and high tech jobs have escaped the extremely high cost US labor market. In the US we are burdened with safe workplace demands, saving the environment, high employee health expenses, and a plethora of other expensive benefits.

Most developing nations have inexhaustible numbers of workers willing to do the same jobs for much less than half the US cost. You may expect most jobs to soon go this way.

But all these factors aren't the problem.

What is it, then?

It is the threat we have ignored for years. The real culprit, which won't go away, is productivity gains resulting from technological innovation. We've stuck our heads in the sand for too many years and scoffed at the doomsayers who prophesied this all along.

The productivity catastrophe has finally arrived.

The lost jobs will never return and we must all prepare for being unable to talk with a real person again about anything. Soon few people will be required, even in the third world, to manufacture the products we use.

It's beyond the scope of this article to go into all the social and economic aspects of how this catastrophic transformation will reach equilibrium. We'll act on the assumption that everything will be worked out eventually, as it will.

Meanwhile every employee must begin to act and think like an unemployed person. In fact everyone doing any kind of work must consider this as a real possibility.

Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals need also to prepare for this possibility. Even health care professionals are being replaced by innovations that greatly increase productivity by allowing all manner of procedures to be performed using a lot fewer people.

Increasing computer technologies have the potential to replace other professionals as well as customer service workers.

What we can do is begin some kind of small entrepreneurial business perhaps of the home based variety. These are real business ventures capable of generating many thousands of dollars each month. This does not happen overnight and no profitable business can be conjured up as if by magic. There is real work in a home business; but there is also a lot of work in conventional employment.

The productivity disaster is here now. You can't afford to wait so you must begin your search and organize your business at once!

This will be a wonderful adventure for you. In the end you'll be working for yourself. You may even put in fewer hours than you worked in your former "real job" before productivity got it.

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