Glenn Reynolds is talking about outsourcing and permanent job market restructuring.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend and former co-worker. She's a production manager, and is finishing up a current series now. She's been hired by the company to manage a new production that starts in January. Being that hiring in this business has so much to do with who you know and who recommends and/or requests you, I have a very good chance of getting a job on this show.

There's one small detail: the entire series is being produced in Japan, except for script-writing and post.

So the rumors were true. If this is any indication, the studios are indeed really serious about trying to export almost all of production. What happens when it's no longer one show overseas, but half of them? Or three quarters of them? That's many hundreds if not even a few (low) thousands permanently out of work, with skills that are not easily transferable.

While I generally share--or try to share--Glenn's optimism, from my point of view in the business I'm in, it's hard to right now. In this business, there are a fair number of workers who have skills that have no relevance at all outside of animation. Some of these people are so highly and specifically trained that their skills don't even transfer to live action TV, let alone other industries. Not all of them are young, adaptable folks either. Some of them are real industry veterans, and not all of them are technologically savvy, which would make retraining even more difficult. Not impossible...but difficult.

I don't know what to think. I've generally had a fairly liberal point of view with regards to a company's right to do what it needs to do in order to lower its bottom line. I don't think intervention in the market by the government is right. But is it right that the majority of an industry that is quintessentially American--an industry that has created one of the towering icons of American pop culture: cartoons--disappear into overseas workshops, permanently displacing American workers?

My jury is out. Let me know if yours is in.

It strikes me as odd that the labor should be outsourced to Japan, of all places, where labor costs in general are high. But then I don't know anything about the animation industry, so maybe they just happen to crank out cheap cartoons for whatever reason. I'd personally be prone to say that the animation industry shouldn't be too high on the government bail-out list, except that our public welfare system is so poor, and there's this cultural tradition of marginalizing groups of people that recieve government services. Whatever else an animator is, s/he's not a bum, and shouldn't be made into one just because the industry picked up and split town. Don't know how you address a problem like that in the current economy though...