There Are Plenty of Jobs Out There, America
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Trouble is, it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate, and it's unwise to train someone when they could get poached by the next company not willing to shell out for training.
I also wonder how sticky their wages are. If a business can endure not filling a position until they can find their person willing to work for peanuts, why offer more? It's amazing how little bargaining power workers have even in this extremely tight labor environment.
I'd be shocked if the Republicans that now control most layers of government will be willing to step in and help this situation, and I doubt they'd know what to do to help even if they were willing.
Does anyone here know a good way out of this situation?
Still, best get to training and educating people ASAP, because 2 years from now is coming sooner than most people think. We could complain about how much it costs to do this, or we could just shut up, do it, and then enjoy the sweet, sweet tax dollars that those high educated, high earning workers throw off.
The article talks a lot about under-investment in infrastructure like roads and bridges. I guess I'm making the same argument in the end, I'm just pointing out that people are infrastructure, in that you can't do business without them, just like roads. So maybe we should invest in them.
Of course there is and at least some Republicans at least claim they're going to take it: slash immigration, lower the labour supply, raising its prices.
I'm not a big fan of magic beans though, because I'm young enough I still have to live here for a long time, I'm not cashing out of this place next year. If the problem is not enough skilled workers, it would seem that lowering the labor supply is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Next up: solve hunger by setting food on fire.
Training makes sense for a job that has a career path. If you learned to drive a road tractor, you started by working for a transport company until you save up enough to buy your own rig, then you were a contractor for one of those companies until you got an agent to get you the loads you wanted on the routes you liked. Maybe eventually you got off the road to work in the management office for a transport company. With automated trucks on the horizon, young folks are less likely to even bother learning how to drive such vehicles.
No one wants to be told that the skill they already spent half their lives honing will not carry them through to retirement.
Big companies have been dismantling careers and repackaging them as cheaper and more fungible jobs for decades now. There is no consideration given whatsoever to the fact that employees are people that cannot spring fully formed from Zeus's brow when the company calls, nor store themselves in a closet and turn themselves off until needed again.
If you won't pay for people to live their lives outside of your workplace, they won't waste any of their finite time in it.
It isn't just training. The company needs an ecosystem that moves humans from graduation to retirement. They don't have to own or control the whole thing, but all the pieces have to be there. And if a piece breaks, it has to be repaired or replaced to keep other parts healthy. That hasn't been happening since the 80s, so now there are huge, gaping holes in the career pipeline, and what companies remain are often parasites upon it rather than contributors to the ecosystem.
So, yeah, good luck finding someone to install your auto glass, buddy. All those kids know that you will never be paying that $70k/year (with bonuses!) you teased them with, because three years from now, you might just replace the guy you hired this year with yet another sucker at $12/hr. What happened to your previous glass guy? Did you promote him, or fire him?
The reality is that unless you're doing something related to IT or got a cushy management job through nepotism, or getting massively subsidized by your parents, you're unlikely to progress to major life goals, like house ownership and starting a family, both of which require the ability to save a decent portion of your paycheck.
People just want jobs that leave them with something after rent+food+healthcare and the reality is that the pool of these "good" jobs is shrinking by the year and requires multiple years of expensive education and at least above average intelligence, because you're competing globally against the upper middle classes of other countries as well.
Few jobs disappear in a few years. A few decades, maybe. (Yeah, yeah, we'll have flying autonomous vehicles in 2020 putting all taxi drivers out of work.)
You are correct there is a shortage of skilled labor. Physicians, engineers, lawyers, accountants etc. have been and will continue to be in demand. Blue collar jobs too: mechanic, plumber, electrician, HVAC.
Sure, getting an psychology undergrad from a $40k/yr tuition school is a bad move, but there are plenty of reliably good moves out there.
When framed like that, IMO it's obvious--we need to focus on adaptability, not conservatism.
We are ineluctably bound by the laws of survival and natural selection, and if we can't sufficiently adapt to changes, then we will die (figuratively and literally).
There are certainly some jobs that are currently over trained, as evidenced by nurse practitioners taking over some common general practitioner roles. But I'm not convinced that's the situation in manufacturing.
Jobs will be lost, industries will die, money will shift--it's inevitable. How can we adapt? It's something I don't have a good answer for, but that I'm confident can be solved if we actually try.
My theory is that they're intentionally low-balling it so that no one will apply and they can hire an H1B.
Do those even exist anymore, in the US? In the UK I very rarely encounter UK-based DBAs, 99.99% are offshore.
If the skill is rare enough or the pay is low enough, they will simply NEVER get anyone.
The job ads and the "we can't find people" will stick though.
Does anyone here know a good way out of this
situation?
Machinist wanted (with decent level of understanding multiple machines, reading blueprints etc.) - 5 years experience - $25/hour in the Denver/Boulder area. e.g. http://boulder.craigslist.org/trd/5902683986.html (and you have to supply some of your own tools) ... this is not a cheap area to live in BTW. $50-60K is barely middle class for this area.
We've been praising the guy who hires 10 plumbers and then automates his back office (he is scaling), while looking down on the plumbers who do the actual work. Then we wonder why it's tough to find plumbers...
And for a list of requirements that takes up a full page, and frankly sometimes even requires skills that you would earn with a bachelors in mechanical engineering. All for $10/hour. And they wonder why no one has taken them up on their offer. And this is also in a major Southern city, with an ever increasing cost of living.
> a few good auto-glass installers, no experience necessary
and,
> commissioned a study of company shortages. Energy, water, and land came up, but the No. 1 answer around the world was skilled labor
Perhaps no experience is necessary for the auto-glass gig, but the metal stamping and machining? Are these all trades one can pick up on the job, by walking in from the street? Because if so, potential workers are leaving money on the table.
More likely, they have stopped looking for work altogether. Unemployment is often discussed, but the Labor Participation Rate is less so, which fell greatly [1] after 2008.
Even today's rate is only 3% or so lower than the 2006 rate, so if you add it to the unemployment rate it's still not very bad.
Just another perspective on this as it seems to be something that comes up over and over in these discussions.
But maybe it's not a question of insufficient demand for these skills. Maybe it's a question of matching up job opportunities, workers, and the capital necessary to train the workers for the jobs.
Imagine this: a site/app where employers post job openings with certain skill requirements, and where workers apply for jobs. These sites already exist. But add to it an element where workers can say they want to work a certain type of job but need additional training to do so. Then investors can put forward the money to train the worker, in exchange for 10% of the worker's future earnings until the loan is paid back plus interest.
Microfinance not as foreign aid but as grease for the labor market.
These types of articles are part of a stealth propaganda campaign primarily designed to push for more immigration for the purpose of driving down wages.
If people think there are not enough skilled workers domestically, they will support more immigration. Don't fall for it!
Employers can't find skilled workers... at slave-wage salary. That's the part they never include.
How is an app going to fix the problem of employers posting fake jobs domestically, in order to circumvent the immigration rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
But when he started, he was an apprentice for 5 years. And he worked with guys who taught him everything he knows.
Now, if you want to become a machinist, you have to pay your own way to a community college to become a trained machinist. It'll probably take 2 years. But I hope you've got money to support yourself with over those 2 years.
We have almost no real apprenticeship programs anymore. Companies want their employees to come out of the public education system full formed to be exactly what the companies want, but they're unwilling to really put down the cash to train them and educate them.
So we've created a system that once again privatizes rewards for the companies (not having to pay to train an employee), but "publicizes" risk (the student/community pays for the training.)
That, and we don't want to pay people a decent wage after they've done their training. Why should companies pay them barely more than minimum wage? The same thing is now playing out at the University/4 year degree level.
The article said (in the very first line) "no experience necessary". They still can't get autoglass installers.
Buying high skilled workers is not like buying gumballs, where prices and high demand can quickly stimulate supply, and the two meet in the middle.
Gumballs don't have to sell their house and move. Gumballs don't have to take care of their kids while going back to school.
What was the result? A flood of workers coming in how left their families, homes, and everything to live in trailers (or even the truck cabs) for the opportunity.
If the this had happened near a real city like Sioux Falls SD with available housing and had been long term (like the OP's scenario), people absolutely would have moved their families and put down roots.
You've already seen this play out in manufacturing: industries with high wages have tended towards automation and/or offshoring work to low wage countries. If you're building automobiles, there's a limit to what consumers are willing to pay for an auto.
-- based on a real story
So let's call it $24k (not including bonuses) up to $70k (including bonuses). That's my interpretation.
So.
While you and I might scoff at whatever amount $70k is before bonuses, if you're unemployed in South Carolina you could do a lot worse.
Other 28k he would make in 17 hours of overtime per week (Remember you get time and a half for overtime), for a total of 57 hour weeks.
Not out of the question hours in a busy factory. I did some of those in college summer days...
But that is how some working class people make enough to sound their kids to private school. Working their tails off.
It used to mean "the amount of people currently capable of working, who are not employed in work."
The new definition is "the amount of people who want a job, but can't find one".
Basically the difference between structural unemployment and transitive unemployment. America used to track transitive unemployment, but through a series of reforms have narrowed in on measuring structural unemployment.
Originally if you were not employed you would be unemployed. Slowly this was altered so that if you were not employed and hadn't found a job in a month you were unemployed (because you were looking and not finding, and therefore there was no job for you). Slowly that got moved out. I don't have the most recent numbers committed to memory, but an not employed person is not considered unemployed unless they've been looking and have not found for a large amount of time.
This article hits on that theme. The argument/opinion it expresses is that the jobs ARE there - that structural unemployment is low - but that workers aren't finding good work ("transitive unemployment is high").
There's been huge moves in the labor market as middle skilled jobs are disappearing. The only move for the labor pool is down to low-skilled labor jobs, work that masses of the labor pool are not only overqualified for, but will be compensated significantly less for and which represent much less socioeconomic mobility.
EDIT: to expand on my point, in metropolitan areas that are experiencing a population boom, demand creates opportunities for businesses, and therefore opportunities for prospective workers. It's a virtuous cycle. Meanwhile, a large employer's departure in established areas will leave behind skilled talent, but some of those people will depart and disperse, making the area less attractive for new job creation in related fields.
Their main industry is RV manufacture. When the economy is rocking, RV sales go up, the Elkhart has a big lack of workers. When the economy is rubbish, they all get laid off and move elsewhere.
The metro area here has over 550,000 people. Not New York City, bit big enough that there SHOULD be enough glass installers, or at least a pool to train enough glass installers form.
More common, it is things like hail during thunderstorms or gravel from a road.
1) Inadequate pay.
2) Unwillingness to train.
If you don't have the exact skills that the company wants, they won't hire you. But they will complain that they can't find anyone even though they are really only offering unskilled level wages.
If you're 30/40, odds are you have a family, roots somewhere, and maybe a mortgage. Your ability/willingness to move - especially after being out of work for a while - is near zero.
* I'm late 30s with all of the above.
This is also true for someone like me as a recent grad with an older vehicle, a student loan to pay off, and lack of sufficient savings to move too far away from my hometown. One of the large issues of the education crisis that I don't hear being discussed is that a lot of students, like myself, often spend literally everything we have to get the degree after constantly hearing about success story after success story in the K-12 system. In these cases, it is implied that college is the only way to get ahead in life and we need to get there by any means necessary.
I mean, how the hell am I supposed to magically relocate halfway across the country (or even commute >50 miles away from my house on a daily basis) when the infrastructure doesn't exist and/or no benefits are offered besides "you should be glad that we're even paying you"?
But hey, I'm just a whiny millennial brat who should be glad that spanking/belt whipping is illegal.
4 years job experience and college degree required for entry-level job.
No training.
"We can't find anyone"
1: http://kff.org/report-section/kaiser-family-foundationcnn-wo...
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
It's only 5 million people or so, so I guess you're saying that's not "big".
US unemployment is at 4.6%
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
US growth is about 2%
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locati...
That's really pretty good. Most developed countries would be happy with that.
In this day and age it's whether you can afford health care, child care, and education - all of which are essential for a healthy society.
Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Iceland, Poland, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Spain, the UAE, and Israel (although there are more depending on your definition of a developed country).
I didn't include this either. Just curious.
That's why you have to include other data, such as the Labor Participation Rate. The LPR which shows how many of the working-age people actually seem to be doing so:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
So what do you see when both graphs are together:
Both graphs together: http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/201...
It seems safe to assume a large part of the drop isn't because satisfied people are finding jobs, but because fewer people are trying.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/labor-force-par...
Until the 70s, the US really had no competition. To compete, you need a stable (legal) system - No one would invest money in a country where it's not far-fetched that someone will overthrow the government, nationalizes your company and throws you in jail.
Oh, and because of geo-politics, one couldn't invest in USSR friendly countries (both from the US side and the other side)
So no one would invest in the USSR, Africa, the Middle East, China or India, Europe and Japan were in shambles. So who built up industry? The US.
After the 60s, different countries started stabilizing. First Japan, then China, now most of the world is actually quite stable, so now the average US worker has to compete against all of India, China, Bangladesh, etc.
You have more supply and the same demand (the world).
And the problem is nothing can really be done about it.
"Free land" from genocided native Americans. No equivalently armed and organized opposition from Virginia to California.
"Free labor" from slavery.
Poverty wages during the gilded age; easy-to-access industrial fuels like lumber and coal, and later oil. Again, all available on stolen land.
Early 20th century, Europe was beating itself up so often America became a superpower by pure virtue of being the only power not bombed to shit by 1945.
Through mid 20th century, America artificially suppressed the domestic cost of living at home through economic imperialism by, among other things, overthrowing other regimes - including democracies - that threatened America's economic dominance and control of natural resources, like Guatemala for food and Iran for oil (although the U.K. started it).
So this is the first time the US has ever had to compete on anything close to an even footing.
I am also having trouble hiring people: I need a senior software engineer. Pay is $12/hour. It's taking me a long time to find workers. I guess people are just lazy and don't want to work.
I don't know what's a fair price in every area of the country for all of these jobs, so beats me if $12 is good or bad, but beyond this one anecdote, people have been saying for years that there was a shortage of skilled labor in the country. So aside from whether this one guy is paying fairly or not, it does appear to be a real issue.
It's just that engineers and scientists are typically trained to know that anecdata is a very poor way to reason about the world, it consistently leads you into the wrong conclusion, making you feel like you have support for a fact when you actually don't.
If the good journalist has hard underlying data, I would not at all begrudge them the anecdotes, and yet I'd still like to see their data thank you very much.
If I say something and I make $N per year for believing that.
Why would they stop saying it?
The truth is, the "shortage" is largely in the poor quality of hiring screens and and a desire to pay the real market rate (rather than the lowest # they can hire the bare minimum of workers to function and work them 50 hours a week).
If a shortage genuinely existed, you would see substantial wage growth.
We don't have such wage growth.
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Similarly, when labor organizations get too powerful you see the opposite effect that creates an artificial shortage:
https://members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/The%20Complexities%20of...
> The rapid expansion in medical education was halted twenty years after it started as researchers, policymakers, and the educational community reassessed the need for further growth. This change recognized that the doubling of medical school graduates would lead to a growing supply for at least 35 years. In 1980, the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee (GMENAC) reported (based upon the number of physicians needed to provide “necessary and appropriate” services) that a surplus of 70,000 physicians would be likely by the year 2000.20 With the promotion of tightly controlled managed care in the early 1990s, many groups reaffirmed the belief that the nation was facing a surplus. The national Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME),21 the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM), the Pew Health Professions Commission,22 the AAMC,23 the AMA24 and other national physician associations expressed concerns about an impending potential surplus of physicians.
> The medical education and training community responded to these recommendations. The number of graduates from U.S. medical schools remained virtually unchanged between 1980 and 2005. Despite this stagnation in medical school enrollment, the doubling of medical school enrollment during the 1960s and 1970s led to a steady stream of new physicians entering the workforce at a rate greater than those leaving the field. Consequently, the ratio of physicians to population increased steadily from 1980 onward. However, few health policy experts in the year 2000 would have argued that this constituted a surplus of physicians, even though this number grew from 202 per 100,000 in 1980 to 276 per 100,000 in 2000. 29 Bureau of Health Professions projections had estimated that physician demand - not a defined need - would increase over time. In fact, per capita utilization of medical services did rise as they had suggested it would.30 Other analyses had assumed major cost and utilization controls in health care.31
https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/newsreleases/458074/2016_workf...
> Washington, D.C., April 5, 2016—Under every combination of scenarios modeled, the United States will face a shortage of physicians over the next decade, according to a physician workforce report released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). The projections show a shortage ranging between 61,700 and 94,700, with a significant shortage showing among many surgical specialties.
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We don't have such wage growth.
Actually we'd have growth in compensation (wages + benefits). And we do, in fact, have that growth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
The fact there is a consistent 50+ year trendline of compensation growth is simply caused by a combination of productivity gains and inflation.
You'd see a 5%+ jump in a single year if a legitimate shortage existed.
https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm
2007-2015 : +1.3% (nonfarm productivity gains)
2007-2015 : +1.8% (manufacturing productivity gains)
2007-2015 : +1.2% (total compensation)
Notice how similar these numbers are? That is a sign of normal compensation growth.
I can't imagine why no one is taking the position. It sounds like a fulfilling opportunity to install auto glass while living on the poverty line.
It's like employers don't even attempt to think about anything from the employee's perspective -- even after they've struggled to fill their own positions. "Cheap business owners" couldn't be a more accurate byline.
There have been a number of headlines recently about how corporate profits are near record highs.
Isn't paying employees enough to buy the product considered capitalism 101?
Or maybe the job their trying to fill isn't worth that much to them (the employers, that is)?
As an example, let's take a speech-writer for a presidential candidate.
Company X (let's say it has 100 billion in the bank) wants a website, so it looks for an SEO firm, but it's cheap and not interested in investing in the website.
X doesn't get skilled SEO consultants.
X now has three choices - get minimum quality workers, drop the website project or pay more for better workers.
Obviously, workers would prefer if X choses 3, but there are times when it just doesn't make sense to do so (or the company doesn't _think_ it needs to do so, and goes out of business):
What if a company has a small audience comprised of people who don't find things online.
Let's say the company runs a program only senators would use. That's a hundred person market which practically requires personal connection to their staff to make a deal.
Hiring someone for $250,000 website is just not worth it.
Practically, in a capitalist environment, workers are "contractors" selling themselves.
The same way I would not pay for a big-iron computer when all I need is a laptop, companies don't want to pay $200,000 when they can find someone for less.
Just imagine the businesses that suddenly become profitable if employers could provide nothing beyond room and board and employees weren't allowed to quit!
In the US you can quit and look for another job, the same way how MS can exit the OS market.
The same way MS doesn't leave the OS market (too lucrative), most people don't walk off on their jobs.
But companies also have non-compete (or other exclusionary) clauses which are legal outside of anti-trust laws.
I agree it's not a fulfilling job, but I wouldn't characterise it as "living on the poverty line". The job pays $24,000 per year but for a single person the official poverty line is $11,770 [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite...
[0] Based on the recommendation your housing cost you around 30% of your gross income.
Cities are becoming larger, small towns are disappearing. Agglomeration is playing an ever larger role in where people live and work. People are tending to cities which have more opportunities, entertainment, etc.
So my point is this, why would you want to live in North Charleston? Of course as I alluded too in my brief definition of advantaged millennial, not everyone has the choice/ability to move to wherever they want. But given that choice, why not move to another larger city where you have more options for better jobs with better pay?
I think in some places, even thouguh cost of living is low, employers will need to sometimes pay more to attract the talent they need, and not just say, "cost of livng is low, live with the $12/hr wage and like it." But of course, that's how capitalism is supposed to work. If you can't find employees, it simply means you're not paying enough. Literally Economics 101.
Granted, all of the above argument is a bit simple, and there's a lot of nuance involved in reality. Especially when it comes to peoples decision making about what job they choose and where they live. I also have little evidence to support my contention about less desirable places to live meaning higher wages, but it applies to jobs, so I don't see how it won't apply to places in the near future (well I do, it may never happen, but I think it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on).
I agree with the article in that there are plenty of jobs out there. Just not good paying jobs.
There is not really a talent shortage. Instead there is employers who pay good salaries shortage.
The article isn't claiming people are lazy and don't want to work. It's claiming that plenty of jobs exist and people are already working at them. It's also claiming that if you really are having a hard time finding one, there are plenty of people willing to hire you at a wage possibly lower than you might desire.
I.e., no shortage of jobs.