Solution to a Shrinking Job Market
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL ZANE PILZER by J.M. Emmert
Professor Paul Zane Pilzer has kept a watchful eye on the direct selling industry for more than 30 years. In the 1990s, the renowned economist who served in two White House administrations predicted that network marketers would help make the then-emerging $200-billion health and wellness channel the next trillion-dollar industry. The success of companies such as Herbalife, Medifast, Monavie, Amway, Nu Skin, ARIIX and Blyth are helping to confirm Pilzer’s theory.
As the current economic crisis continues to take a toll on people around the world and unemployment rates steadily rise, direct selling may be the answer to a shrinking job market. Pilzer warns that too many people today see unemployment as part of the economic cycle—that when the economy recovers, employment will naturally go up.
However, unemployment is not a macro-economic problem, he says. It is a micro-economic issue, typically related to a skill deficiency on an individual level. “The question lies not in economic recovery but employment recovery,” says Pilzer, who has written nine bestsellers. “We have a massive social problem.
What are we going to do with 30 million people who are now permanently unemployed? The No. 1 social need in the United States right now has nothing to do with the economy.”
The real challenge is to replace lost jobs with new earnings opportunities and provide much-needed training. The jobs that baby boomers and Gen Xers trained for years ago have disappeared. Technology has replaced millions of workers and demanded new skills that too many older Americans just don’t have.
“Instead of focusing on new methods of training, our politicians and news media are looking at unemployment and the economic recovery as linked—and they are not because most of the unemployed people today are skills-deficient. If they are over 50 years old, they probably don’t touch-type or e-mail, and that doesn’t work in today’s economy.”
So what happens to those displaced workers? Direct selling may have the answer. The direct selling business model has always had a competitive advantage in the training that it offers, both in business and personal skills. It allows people to be retrained while they pursue something new. It gives people an opportunity when no one else will.
The biggest need in every sector of the economy, says Pilzer, is intellectual distribution—the dissemination of information about products and services. “We have a huge backlog of better products and services that people aren’t buying because they don’t know about them. Direct selling is the most efficient method for the distribution of intellectual information that will improve your life. It is the ideal model that allows anyone to reach out.”
Direct selling offers people the skills and tools to create new income opportunities—to venture out on their own as entrepreneurs and grow in confidence versus being consumed by the fear associated with a shrinking job market. “Technology is available to everyone at home and is even better than what you can get in a large company,” says Pilzer. “When we examine the workplace, we often find outdated computers and data management systems.
However, the best tools and support needed to run a home-based business are now available to individuals at an affordable cost. This makes a home-based business—and a direct selling opportunity, in particular—very appealing.”
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Rick Billings |
