American Firms Want to Keep Older Workers a Bit Longer
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Knowledge transfer should be baked into the day-to-day culture of work, not something desperately scrambled for during someone's last week. Those few companies with meaningful training and mentoring programs know this.
> The plant [...] has an apprentice program for millennials, but there’s a shortage of Generation X workers. “We’ve got a big gap in the middle, so we have to keep talented people in their 60s a little longer,”
Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good. Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price--That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just offer a little more money to find skilled mid-career workers nowadays.
With so many people under-employed or out of work, it borders on insulting to claim there's a shortage of workers.
Pretty sure they mean they have plenty of 60 years who have been working there for 40 years and plenty of 20 year olds who just started but not a lot of 40 year old with 20 years experience to keep the transfer of knowledge smooth.
which unless some one has a time machine is a thing you can't find at literally any price.
Look at the short term, do what you need to achieve those objectives. Oh, the long term matters now. Ooops, I'll add get some "20-years experience guys" to the next sprint.
You can't say shortage without factoring price. For enough money (probably not even that much compared to what I've seen business waste on frivolities) there'd be a line of retirees looking to get back into the biz.
The excesses of socialism are never lost on me, because of this story.
I'd say that this is still the case. Last time I visited India, when I was exiting the parking garage at the airport, there was an automated machine to let you out. Give them the ticket, put money in, the barrier opens, and you drive out.
But there were also five people by this machine. One to take the ticket, another to take the money, and then another three to watch this process.
And it wasn't just that instance - there were quite a few instances during my travel when I noticed significantly more people assigned to a job than required.
Yup, completely agree.
> Would you prefer three of those five people being engaged in a riot and the other two, on gov't payroll, beating the shit out of them?
To clarify, in this scenario, are you saying that there are three unemployed people rioting and two other people on a government payroll (presumably po-po?) who are beating the shit out of the rioters?
Honestly, _ideally_, I'd want to see universal basic income so that people who don't have jobs don't feel the need to riot. I'd want to see everyone's basic needs supported.
Having said that, that's my idealism showing and I don't know how this would realistically work. My background in economics is weak to put it simply and I don't know if this could scale to a population the size of India's.
> Mr. Rushdie has a book with short stories on that.
Taking a look at his bibliography[0], he's written quite a few novels, any specific one(s) that you'd recommend?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie#Bibliography
East, West is a nice collection of short stories that would give you a taste of his writing style. Also The Groung Beneath her Feet is quite popular.
I'd prefer them doing something productive instead of standing around wasting tax money.
In the end, it's a lot of troubles and it may be more expensive than getting one locally.
[Note: I'm still talking about getting that car, the comparison with labour, if any, is purely accidental.]
http://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fr...
I remember in the 80s and early 90s it was common for a salaried worker to stay at the same company for decades. Since the 2000s, it appears to be less prevalent.
The solution would appear to be to make conditions good and wages competitive for the newly-trained junior workers to improve retention. However, some industries risk their competitiveness with labor costs above a certain level. I wonder how much of the shortage is due to the intransigence of capital versus true limits for competitive pay. I suspect the former for almost all specialized positions experiencing shortfalls, such as pilots, machinists, CNC operators, and millwrights. For unskilled labor I suspect that the wages cannot climb much higher without harming profits or risking competition from overseas.
What happened? When they had layoffs, the machinist union rules specified the ones with the least number of years of service got laid off first. This left Boeing with a very unbalanced workforce.
It probably would have been prudent to do a long term ROI on those layoffs. Slashing the executive bonus pool may have reduced those layoffs significantly and saved the company far more down the line.
So, the managers kicked the problem down the road and hoped that someone else would take the hit.
> Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors.
Everybody gets old, you know.
Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare.
> Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.
Agreed. But the same anti-union people are also against anti-monopoly regulations.
This is essentially what GP is saying. Unions kept the expensive older worker at the expense of firing the younger workers. If the workers they keep are more expensive, then they have to fire proportionally more younger workers to make it up.
Arguably the older workers are the more-vulnerable section, since they have fewer opportunities (and lifetime) to re-train.
In some, end-of-life organizations, burning people out can be a ... semi-rational decision, but .. it's an end-of-life company...
See also college athletes. A lineman at a top-tier football school in the U.S. ends up with all sorts of chronic injuries, possibly including brain damage. Very few of them make it to the pros. None are supposed to be paid at all except in kind for degrees, room, and board.
This is exactly why I think those football programs should be professionalized. The program should be licensed by the school - logos and all - but completely financially independent. Obviously, the money says otherwise ( football donors are a very significant stream of income ). And you'd quickly develop a "New York Yankees' problem - wealthy programs would have more money.
I have a Son In Law Candidate who is physically arranged like a left offensive tackle. Even in high school, the six hour practices put him off it.
Part of me says that "the love of the game" should be encouraged, but as you note... the costs are substantial. And I think the real money in sports is trading on the player's name, anyway.
I am sure it's a cause of pain for people but somehow, game dev. work being that way seems inevitable. My own exposure to the antediluvian music business ( back in them '80s ) was that it was The Island of the Lost Boys from "Pinocchio".
Well yes, but there are many ownership models that indeed impose top-down orders on the management to implement totally stupid labor decisions.
It's going to sound cliche but younger folks are more attracted to work that looks attractive. Everyone wants to be able to tell others at a party that he works a respectable job for a well-known company. The media doesn't idolize craftsmen and truck drivers as much as tech whizzes, so something drops under the radar.
Despite what conservative propaganda would have you believe, nationalized health care does not preclude private health care on top, and in fact it makes the market for that care much more competitive and reasonable for individuals who seek it.
In my observation, it's very few companies. Also, I don't think it's as easy as just saying it should happen. For one thing, hiring has changed. A lot of tech workers from my generation tended to be fairly multi-disciplinary, but as a company matures, they tend to hire from standardized skill sets such as the mainstream branches of engineering.
Case in point, I'm 52, and I was hired kinda by accident because I had a connection and was in the right place at the right time. Nobody ever asked for my skill set. My knowledge is based on having a pretty good understanding of optics, electronics, mechanics, math, computation, and so forth. But we haven't ever deliberately hired anybody like that, so there's nobody whom I can even transfer my knowledge to.
My job involves solving a lot of really weird problems under pressure, such as when a production line goes down and nobody knows why. I kind of thrive on it, plus it's a niche that I was able to carve out, to make myself employable without a mainstream engineering degree. But I can't think of why somebody would even want to learn my job.
The best thing to do with us old guys, is let us keep working, to do the stuff that you don't want to burden the bright young kids with.
Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good.
Indeed. A labor shortage is the same as wage inflation. Show me the money.
Now there's literally a platoon of BAs, java programmers and others maintaining the successor system.
You see it with old timer SEs from companies like IBM and HP and even Apple... these are folks that love solving problems and are adept at it. They are also always fighting management who is completely clueless.
One guy from one of those companies figured out a huge problem and probably generated $30M of sales. They laid him off in a random culling of the herd.
The only place you see those types of folks getting developed now are in cloud services where some of the cast off junior SEs from the big companies are doing similar things there.
The concept of "under-employed or out of work" is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're willing to take for that work. Unless they're saying they literally can't find work at any price-That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just accept a little less money to find work nowadays.
The price argument works both ways.
That is actually the truth for many niche skilled labor positions. Manufacturing plants are starving for a lack of experienced E&I (electronics and instrumentation) technicians but they can't even attract the next generation despite offering ~$25/hr to apprentices.
Being an E&I tech in a chemical plant is a dirty job but not in a back breaking way. Someone willing to take the apprenticeship will be making ~$35/hr plus as much overtime as they want since the shortage isn't likely to dry up anytime soon.
The only logical reason why younger generations are refusing to consider these jobs is that they know what their ultimate income cap is going in to such a position. The next, and usually only, rung on the ladder is that of maintenance manager and there can only be one manager for their team of ~5+. Their proven skillsset is also less transferable to another role at another company like those of a typical office drone. Therefore, ~$75,000 without overtime is about all they can ever aspire to without channeling an entrepreneurial spirit that just isn't part of most people's psyche. That said, the career ladder of an office drone is nothing like what it used to be. Most of the people sacrificing that stable F~$75,000/yr as a skilled laborer will earn less over their lifetime as they'll eventually get stuck one rung under somebody who likes to kick down.
Now let's talk about railroads, utility companies, and other "blue collar" work that requires an apprenticeship. First of all, layoffs happen quite often and seniority determines who is laid off. Not horrible and expected in a wide range of professions, but my neighbor is laid off way more often than I would be comfortable with (Union Pacific). Such is the ebbs and tides of business.
Then there is the rampant nepotism and other forms of preferential treatment to even get these jobs. To work for the Electric company, you had better know someone that is a respected IBEW member who will vouch for you. Same goes for the natural gas utility and just about all the people I know who work for utility companies in my city.
I say all that to say, these are still dead-end jobs unless you are lucky enough to pass the subjective management tests. Like you said, there is an upper limit on the wages you can earn without overtime. That sucks because you are going to absolutely destroy your body working most of these jobs. Why settle for that? The outcome is predetermined... additionally the work may be boring as shit after 10 years or so, then what?
If I had to do it all over again...
A senior IT guy makes like $110k where I live. Sounds shitty, but then again you get primo healthcare that costs $100/mo for family, retiree health coverage, 60% pension at 55 in many cases, high PTO accumulation, etc.
I helped a friend calculate total compensation when he was looking for a job. The pension present value alone was $4M. When you combine it with the PTO, it made total value of his compensation more like $190k. If you price in the retiree healthcare, you could probably add another $10-20k of value.
At my employer, that means that the good senior people are in their 50s and 60s and retiring away, being replaced by 20-30 somethings. The people in their 40s are left behind as they got stuck in the middle too long.
By that rationale, there's no food shortage in Venezuela. "There is food, people just need to offer more money for it."
Put more experienced with less experienced workers working together and it does happen magically.
This is what consulting/contracting lets you determine, but I hear you, it'd be nice to have the option coupled with the safety and job opportunities of employment.
Take better care of your employees, pay them their market value, factor in some work-life-balance, and they will stay.
I wish I remembered more details about the experts themselves, I believe one was a specialized glass worker.
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassbl...
If there were a severe drought and only enough food to keep half of us alive, but prices weren't capped... That wouldn't be a food shortage?
If there are only 10,000 people in a field who are under the age of 70 but have at least 20 years of experience, and the industry needs 50,000 of them to function efficiently - that's not a shortage of experienced skilled workers?
Not everything is a commodity. Not every commodity experiences a drop in demand as the price rises. Some things are needs that people continue to have demand for even if they can't afford them due to shortages. Even commodities have limits to their production. And some things can't be produced quickly enough to address a short or medium term shortage.
Markets aren't magic. They have inefficiencies and externalities and logic limits. Econ 101 deals only in simplifications and spherical cows. And people with specific skill sets aren't spherical cows.
Doctors may not be the best example. Where I live, at least, the government really does set a price ceiling for doctors, so a shortage is very much possible. Ignoring that, simply not being able to afford a doctor does not mean there is a shortage of them. That means you cannot afford a doctor. Which is a problem in its own right, but not a problem defined by shortage. Not all problems are shortage problems.
> If there are only 10,000 people in a field who are under the age of 70 but have at least 20 years of experience, and the industry needs 50,000 of them to function efficiently - that's not a shortage of experienced skilled workers?
No, because as price rises, that 50,000 number will decline. There is only so much money willing to be spent. At some price point, businesses will only be able to afford 10,000 people and the demand will be met exactly by the number of people available to work. Or if the job really requires 50,000 people absolutely, they will decide it no longer needs to be done, leaving the the need at 0 people.
> Not every commodity experiences a drop in demand as the price rises.
How can that be? Not everyone has the same resources available. Like the businesses above, as price rises, some can no longer afford the good or service. That takes them out of the market. Demand does not simply mean what you want to have. Price is always a component. Like that great earlier comment here about Porches, there isn't shortage of Porches because every poor man who admires the car can't afford one. They are simply not in the market for one in the first place, no matter how much they dream about owning one.
> Markets aren't magic.
Nobody said they were. The scenarios you point out, where price is able to rise, are something, but not shortages.
When the supply of something is insufficient to support effective operation (or to support existing life), that's a shortage.
Yes, perhaps prices will rise until no more people can afford it than the supply will support. But perhaps that supply isn't enough to keep the industry from collapsing or to keep the population from collapsing, etc.
Regardless of whether the price rises to keep the resource out of the hands of everyone who needs it, the insufficient supply for effective function is still damaging - to a population, an industry, an economy. I would most definitely consider that a shortage.
Well, that's its definition, for better or worse. I didn't write the economics dictionary. I only can repeat it.
Is there reason to overload this particular word? While the implications of the scenarios you describe are clear, I'm not sure why it has to be "shortage" that represents it. Why not another word or term that encompasses those cases – unaffordable, perhaps – while leaving shortage to mean what it means?
In the long term I agree. In the short term, the markets are not perfect and goods and labor are not perfectly fungible. It takes time to retool, even if prices are sending signals.
Hypothetically, if there was only one programmer in the world, the price would rise to the point where that programmer is no longer willing to change jobs with the offers being given. At that point, the additional demand goes away. Those businesses are no longer in the market for a programmer. It really doesn't matter if it takes time to retool, as far as shortages go, because the demand has met the supply. A shortage does not mean not being able to get what you want at a price you are willing to pay.
On the other hand, where I come from the government sets the price that doctors must charge. We really can run into the issue of doctor shortages. I can't go to my doctor and say, "I know you are completely booked and can't see me, but here is $100,000 above your regular rate to cancel those appointments and take care of me instead". The doctor is required, by law, to reject my offer.
If price was able to rise, the doctor would be able to take my offer, allowing me to get what I want as indicated by price, and those who aren't willing to pay $100K more to have the doctor look at their common cold exit the market. Equilibrium is reached. That scenario certainly comes with its own set of issues – and why our government defines the price to not allow market-based preferential treatment – the issue would not be that of a shortage.
What I'm arguing is that, because many goods (in particular labor) aren't fungible and liquid, that an increasing price doesn't (in the short term) solve shortages with these types of goods.