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.
Just another example of political correctness and misplaced priorities in our “government schools.”
In my current job, I’m actively involved in workforce development and employee training. All of the figures cited in the article are true; there are more than 500,000 high-tech manufacturing jobs that can’t be filled because most American workers lack the education and skills. And they can’t be filled by illegals coming across the southern border, though you can find some qualified candidates through legal immigration and targeted recruitment.
This problem has been building for a generation. First, we took shop and vocational classes out of our schools in favor of self-esteem training and other worthless subjects. Then we de-emphasized math and science in middle and high schools.
I taught seventh grade for three years after retiring from the military; my subjects were history and career studies, but I helped tutor in math. In our school (a poor district in the south), we had scores of students who couldn’t do three-column addition and subtraction, let alone multiply or divide. If you haven’t mastered those basic skills by middle school (where I taught), you will never learn algebra and geometry, which are required for many of the high-tech manufacturing training programs. And with the dumbing-down of science curricula, very few high school grads have the basic knowledge of electricity and physics required for advanced manufacturing.
And it gets even worse; many of the young skulls full of mush lack basic “work” skills, i.e., no one has ever taught them you’re supposed to show up for work on time, properly dressed and follow the instructions from your boss. So, various community colleges are charging employers to train their entry-level workers on basic work skills.
There was an interesting article in “The New York Times” (oddly enough) about various government programs to train workers for vocational and industrial jobs. The Times found a couple of reports that determined many of the programs are missing the mark, because they are not focused on the needs of industry, or have low completion and placement rates.
There are a few good programs that produce trained workers with the right skills. Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia has operated an apprentice school for almost 100 years. The school trains young people in the various trades associated with building naval vessels; the apprentices get classroom training and on-the-job experience and they’re paid while they are in school. After two years, graduates are qualified for entry-level jobs and they are not required to go to work for Newport News Shipbuilding. Most do, however, and the company has a 10-year retention rate (among grads) of roughly 80%.
I disagree.
We need to pay what a job requires.
There are (plenty) of Americans throughout our entire nation, who do not have jobs. Tens of millions of Americans.
Americans who have tried everything, and eventually gave up. The problem is, we are playing the “Chinese labor” card far, far, far too much. This is the problem.
China. We need to compete with China.
We need to do something to protect jobs, right here in America.
What, I do not know, but we cannot continue to compete with China as things stand, so we continue to lose, and lose, and lose.
If this continues, China will simply take over. Everything.
Even militarily.
America needs to look out for ourselves.
That means, we need to support American manufacturing.
Bring back US jobs.
I am an IT guy in place that makes sausage casings and a new automated facility is being built and about half the people will be gone going into next year.
15 years ago even low-level entries were getting signing bonuses... remember those?
What has changed?
Households with children ought not have both parents slaving away outside the home to be able to afford having children. Bring back the stay at home mom.
I personally do not know a single person who wants to work that believes or thinks the statement above.
Legalizing tens of millions of criminal, illegal aliens is all about driving down wages in this country and making us more of a third-world nation with two classes of people: the politically connected rich and their crony political patrons, and the rest of us.
Funny, It was only two or three years ago that I laughed at people who said the above. Unfortunately, that statement seems to becoming more and more true with each passing day. I know too many people who want to work but are told their "too old", "too over qualified", "too under qualified" and other excuses.
Because American school kids are taught to be lazy
Are you suggesting that the elimination of those programs would boost employment? Where will the jobs come from? What do you think the job participation rate would be if we had a moratorium on legal immigration and guest worker programs and took measures to stop illegal aliens from taking jobs?
BS, most illegals are even less qualified for these jobs than Americans and they mostly can't speak English sufficiently well to be trainable.
They aren’t talking about illegal aliens. They want to boost legal immigration and guest worker programs. We have brought in 27 million LEGAL PERMANENT IMMIGRANTS SINCE 1990. It doesn’t include guest workers. There are over 2 million guest workers in the US at any one time.
I was in the flooring industry for quite a few years. If we didn't need the installers, we should put them up against the wall and shoot them.
It's true about them running out of money.
Unless you increase wages, most families can’t survive without two parents working.
A few observations from industries I am familiar with from my career.
There are a lot of commercial construction jobs that have a periodic work basis. Guys work at a craft for 35 weeks out of a 52 week year. Less in recession time.
These jobs require fit people that can work physically for a full work day as loafing is obvious when you are on a scaffold with five others.
They often are dirty jobs, cumbersome personal protective gear and are subject to bad weather, heat and cold. They also require compliance with elaborate safety protocol, require periodic drug tests and regular attendance without making a lot of false injury claims. They often pay a lot more than the local warehouse or delivery truck job for the same area — say double.
In many areas there are many more immigrants or first generation kids that will do the work meeting that standard than the locally youth who want to smoke grass, stay clean, miss work one day a week, get on work-comp, sell meth and not have to follow requirements.
This is one of the markets for immigrant employees but few illegals in most states in the last three years due to employers being able to easily e-verify for SSN.
I think that meat packing, feed yards, recycling and trash work, reclamation, shipping and the like hire a lot of illegals with the corporations turning a blind eye to the issue.
There really are jobs that we can’t get able bodied young americans to apply or qualify for and yes, these jobs are paying top dollar for their area.
My wife likes to talk about the freshman intern she interviewed a few years ago. He thought if he took a major in Healthcare Administration he could run a hospital after he finished college and had about two years under his belt with that undergrad degree. The concept of learning an industry from the bottom rung and using schooling to jump you through the first twenty years in ten is a lost understanding.
I am sure for many jobs (such as trucking) Federal statutes take precedence, so pot smoking is still a no-no.
Anecdotal information is fine, but here are the facts:
Among the findings:
Of the 472 civilian occupations, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans still comprise 46 percent of workers even in these occupations.
Many jobs often thought to be overwhelmingly immigrant (legal and illegal) are in fact majority native-born:
Maids and housekeepers: 51 percent native-born
Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 58 percent native-born
Butchers and meat processors: 63 percent native-born
Grounds maintenance workers: 64 percent native-born
Construction laborers: 66 percent native-born
Porters, bellhops, and concierges: 72 percent native-born
Janitors: 73 percent native-born
There are 67 occupations in which 25 percent or more of workers are immigrants (legal and illegal). In these high-immigrant occupations, there are still 16.5 million natives — accounting for one out of eight natives in the labor force.
High-immigrant occupations (25 percent or more immigrant) are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.
In high-immigrant occupations, 59 percent of the natives have no education beyond high school, compared to 31 percent of the rest of the labor force.
Natives tend to have high unemployment in high-immigrant occupations, averaging 14 percent during the 2009-2011 period, compared to 8 percent in the rest of the labor market. There were a total of 2.6 million unemployed native-born Americans in high-immigrant occupations.
Some may think that native-born workers in high-immigrant occupations are mostly older, with few young natives willing to do such work. But 34 percent of natives in these occupations are age 30 or younger, compared to 27 percent of natives in the rest of labor force. It is worth remembering that not all high-immigrant occupations are lower skilled. For example, 36 percent of software engineers are immigrants as are 27 percent of physicians.
A number of politically important groups tend to face very little job competition from immigrants (legal and illegal). For example, just 10 percent of reporters are immigrants, as are only 6 percent of lawyers and judges and 6 percent of farmers and ranchers. Estimates of Illegal Immigrants
We find that there are no occupations in the United States in which a majority of workers are illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants work mostly in construction, cleaning, maintenance, food service, garment manufacturing, and agricultural occupations. However, the overwhelming majority of workers even in these areas are native-born or legal immigrants.
Although illegal immigrants comprise a large share of workers in agriculture, farm workers are only a tiny share of the total labor force. Consistent with other research, just 5 percent of all illegal immigrants work in agriculture.
Those who get money from the government should have to be drug tested to get it.
My take on why American workplaces are hiring non-Americans:
Too many Americans are on drugs.
Too many Americans are pierced and/or covered in tattoos.
Too many Americans can’t speak and write standard English. They emulate ghetto street talk in their daily speech and mannerisms.
Americans are molded like children by believing the lying propaganda of the liberal new media.
Americans are molded like children by watching the poison that is on the television screen.
The U.S. is a degraded culture in serious and rapid decline.
May the Lord have mercy upon us.
Partially correct.
The reasons for the shortage:
Such jobs aren’t paying enough for blue collar workers to live today the way workers doing those jobs lived fifty years ago.
Fifty years ago, a carpenter working in NYC could afford his own home in a decent neighborhood and could support a non-working wife and children.
Pay blue collar workers enough to be able to live like that today, and you will find all the skilled help you need.
“Technical high schools, not colleges— to train highly trained blue collar workers in continuously upgraded skillsets to match technology needs.
NOT sending an illiterate barely passed high school “grad” to “college” on a student loan to learn.... “women’s studies” or
“interpersonal relations” or origami. 200k later no skills and a professional whiner and teat sucker.”
I am of the opinion that many of the kids who go to college who should not be there are doing it because it seems like EVERY damn job requires a Bachelor’s Degree.
I see postings for Receptionist positions requiring a college degree. Of course the pay is no better than it would be without the degree. I see many other job postings for jobs that do not require a degree in the real world specifying that the employer wants someone with a Bachelor’s Degree. Many companies want their people to have a degree, in any discipline, just to acquire an entry level job. This is why all of these idiotic degree programs exist.
Not everyone has a bad work ethic. In fact I would say a majority of young people want to work. Yes, sometimes their expectations are unrealistic, but that does not mean they are all drug addled lazy sloths.
This “skills gap” is conjured up by government and businesses in lock step with each other. One wants more power, the other wants below market value slave labor.
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