Posted on 08/24/2014 6:54:55 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
America has a deficit of workers. Willing workers. Capable workers. Skilled, or at least semi-skilled workers, who can do a job and do it well. There are at least one million jobs that go begging day after day if only employers could find workers to fill them.
This probably seems hard-to-believe. After all, how can America have a worker shortage when we have about 18 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed? When the real unemployment rate is 12 percent?
Well certainly the economy isn’t creating nearly as many jobs as it should – in large part because of regulatory and tax restraints on hiring workers. Obamacare’s anti-employment impact, including the rule that caps employment at 50 workers or less at many firms to avoid the law’s higher costs, is just one example of a law that adds to unemployment lines.
But there are also millions of unemployed Americans who don’t have the skill sets to match what employers are in need of. To make matters worse, a lot of these frustrated job searchers have college degrees that are about as marketable as the paper diploma they are written on.
So what kind of jobs are going unfilled?
* Manufacturing – We always hear we are losing good manufacturing jobs in America and those bedrock middle class jobs aren’t coming back. Gregory Baise, the president of the Illinois Manufacturing Association, tells me that there are “some 500,000 jobs we can’t fill. It’s the biggest problem our industry faces.”. The industry needs welders, pipefitters, electricians, engineers. It needs people skilled in robotics and basic engineering.
* Trucking – At any time over the last several years there have been about 30,000 too few truckers to run long haul routes. The American Trucking Association tells me the number could be closer to 50,000. This is admittedly a tough and high-stress job with lots of time away from friends and family. But they are jobs that pay $50,000 and up, and a lot more than that with overtime.
* Energy – Bloomberg reports that “Gulf Coast oil, gas and chemical companies will have to find 36,000 new qualified workers” by 2016. Many energy towns have unemployment rates of less than 3 percent – in other words, there’s a worker shortage.
These aren’t menial or “dead end” jobs. They typically pay between $50,000 and $90,000 a year and with benefits the compensation can climb to $100,000. That’s rich in most nations.
Bob Funk, CEO of Express Employment Professionals, one of the nation’s largest temporary employment agencies located in Oklahoma City, places more Americans into jobs than just about anyone. With nearly half-a million hires a year he tells me, he can find a job for “any American with a strong work ethic and can pass a drug test.” He also estimates that the worker shortage – those with skills to fill available jobs – “is at least one million and probably higher than that.”
Why is it so hard to fill these jobs?
One reason is the curse of the so-called “skills mismatch.” American workers with high school or even college degrees just aren’t technically qualified to do the jobs that are open. This is a stunning indictment of our school system at all levels considering that all in parents and taxpayers often invest as much as $200,000 or more in a child’s education. We’re not turning our kids into competent workers.
Some governors like Mike Pence of Indiana have moved to make vocational education more standard in the Hoosier State. It’s a great idea and it’s a start.
But this won’t solve the whole problem because many companies are already willing to offer 3 to 6 months on the job training for trucking and manufacturing jobs. They will teach them men and women how to operate the machinery, the computers, and the scientific equipment. These aren’t sweatshop jobs.
Mr. Funk cites figures that more than half of the applicants for these kinds of jobs in the temporary job market can’t pass a drug test. “They are unemployable in that case,” he says regretfully.
Then there is the issue that these jobs don’t get filled because the work lacks glitz and glamour.
Too many Americans have come to view blue collar jobs or skilled artisan jobs as beneath them.
Contributing to this attitude is the wide availability of unemployment insurance, food stamps, mortgage bailout funds and other welfare. Taking these taxpayer handouts is somehow seen as normal and a first, not a last resort. One owner of a major trucking company told me last year, “drivers who get laid off don’t come back until their unemployment benefits run out.” This is documented by research from my colleagues at the Heritage Foundation who have found that “4 million Americans laid off in the recession faced effective marginal tax rates near or above 100 percent [because of welfare benefits], significantly reducing their attachment to the labor market.”
There’s no doubt America needs millions of more jobs. But we could put one million more people in jobs tomorrow if we get schools to train our kids with core competencies and if we could instill in Americans an old-fashioned work ethic. The only dead-end job is no job at all.
More corporate propaganda to justify more immigration. We have a surplus of labor, skilled and unskilled. The indicator. Wages are going down not up. In fact, wages have been going down in real terms since 1969.
Yeah, but they know how to put on a condom.
The US has got to get serious about developing a generation of competent adults who have a work ethic and who want to take personal responsibility. Every generation has a good percentage of such people -- but, overall, our system seems less and less capable of producing the people we need. We have to fix our system -- and Common Core isn't helping.
So a kid with a 200,000 education is too unskilled to get a 0-100k job but an illegal sneaking over the border has the skills?
Why is it so hard to fill these jobs?
Too many potheads.
The one item in the article that isn't relevant to this discussion is the shortage of qualified truck drivers. There are many factors tied to that problem that have nothing to do with the labor force or the qualifications of workers.
I do agree that we have a "surplus of labor" in some respects. A big part of the problem is that we have an excess supply of workers in fields that really don't need them (lawyers, for example). One of the positive things that may happen in a period of long-term economic stagnation is that young people might sit back and take a good hard look at their career options before they pursue a career where they end up as just another one of hundreds of thousands of people whose skills and knowledge simply aren't needed.
In those states making marijuana legal, do employers in those states still get to screen for drugs? A person smokes legal weed and becomes unemployable for a whole range of jobs. And then, of course, the worker problem becomes worse and you need more immigrants. It is almost like a conspiracy. Also, how many companies will flee states where drug use is legal?
It's easier to find these competent adults in other countries. That's part of what is driving this whole issue.
One comment was that a long haul trucker making $50K has to spend $20K a year to live on the road (with all the attendant hardships).
Workers can lead Unless it is surgery or rocket science, most jobs can be productive from day one, even if not optimally so.
The kid with the $200,000 education isn’t competing with the illegal sneaking over the border.
If you ask an incompetent adult to become competent, you don’t win the popularity contest.
I can attest to the youth having terrible work ethic I can’t tell you how many youth seem to have an expectation of being valued because they breath.
When I was at a state unemployment office we’d routinely send people who didn’t have a lot of skills a few blocks away to a large, industrial bakery paying a bit over $10/hr to start with good overtime & benefits (this was in the 90’s when that was decent money) but 2/3rds of them would fail the drug screening.
That’s part of it, but that only applies to the over-the-road segment of the industry. The trucking industry is slowly moving towards a business model based on shorter hauls for most loads. Part of this is driven by the “shortage” of drivers, but rising fuel costs are a big factor as well.
I know a guy who owns a tile business. He pays $10/hour to unskilled labor which is high hereabouts. He can’t keep employees. The largest cause is they get DUI’s and lose their driver’s license. Some won’t show up after he pays them until they run out of money. They are unreliable. Some are functionally illiterate and can’t do simple math. There’s nobody he can just leave on a job alone and expect the job to get done. When he does get somebody good, he teaches them what they need to know and they go off and get a higher paid job. (Can’t blame them. But good workers are hard to find and other companies have deeper pockets than he does.)
I went in to look at my house when it was being built in early ‘95. The crew were smoking joints and drinking malt liquor. I mentioned this to the contractor. He sighed and said, “We fire them when we catch them. But it’s so hard to find help we don’t try too hard to catch them.”
Our politicians seem to say "let's import foreigners; screw the American citizens".
That's a pretty amazing approach for our elected officials to take.
It is true, though, that we have a skills gap and people aren’t doing much to increase their worth to the employers in many cases, since UI, SNAP, SSDI, Workers Comp and all the rest are so easy to get these days.
Stoners, sluts and other parasites.
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