Posted on 06/17/2016 4:08:44 AM PDT by expat_panama
Throughout the seven-year old U.S. expansion, as the unemployment rate tumbled from a peak of 10% in 2009 to a low of 4.7% last month, policy makers have been focused on the slack in the labor market. Yes, slack....
...surprise to read this week that the problem facing companies is a shortage of workers, both highly skilled and entry-level.
Why not offer them a higher wage?...
...the Roaring ‘90s? That’s what a tight labor market looks like: signing bonuses; offers of free cars, even for mid-level managers; and a sufficiently attractive wage to entice some criminals...
...plenty of business owners who will tell you that they can’t find workers...
...Janet Yellen on Wednesday cast doubt on a significant interest-rate increase in the near future...
...monthly JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) revealed a record number of job openings...
...Can’t businesses tempt labor-force dropouts with a higher real wage? There is no sign of it....
...a wishy-washy attempt to fill the reported number of job openings.
Many economists have been waiting for that beast known as “wage inflation” to boost prices...
...Businesses do not bid up the price of labor (wages) only to find their profits squeezed...
...A more compelling argument to explain the large number of reported job openings going unfilled is that demand isn’t strong enough to support economy-wide price increases...
...6.4 million Americans working part-time for economic reasons...
...wake of the truly awful May employment report, did Yellen concede...
...pointed to the low level of unemployment claims, high level of job openings and modest wage increases as signs “of a healthy labor market.”
Maybe. Until I see signs that businesses are satisfying their stated demand for labor by luring labor-market dropouts with a higher real wage, I remain unconvinced.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
#1 is the hardest.
I haven’t had a single employee in the last 10 years that would show up consistently.
The list of lame excuses I have heard over the years is ridiculous.
I can give some insight into the tech industry.
Many of these “jobs” are designed to give the company an excuse to hire H1-B visa employees. They don’t advertise the job locally. They hire a recruiting company to look for people, but they only contact people outside the area. When they get 100 people rejecting their job 1,000 miles away, they can say “see, there is a labor shortage” and import an H1-B visa worker.
This is a known scam to play the H1-B program, but nobody wants to do anything about it.
Full-time/regular-employee jobs are shrinking. Instead, companies are going to contract employees. Or, they dangle a “contract to hire” position, where after working months as a contractor they might consider hiring you as a regular employee (a rarity).
I can see contract workers becoming the norm in the future as it allows companies to avoid all the government red tape associated with an actual employee.
Companies also don’t want to pay the prevailing wage. The old “we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t” line should really read “we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do AT THE WAGE WE WANT TO PAY.”
This is true for the H1-B visa workers and illegal immigrants. There is no shortage of American workers. There is a shortage of CHEAP American workers.
I see ads for tech jobs regularly that are marked junior, entry-level, or mid-level where the job requirements are clearly senior-level. Yet, the pay rate is 50 percent BELOW the market rate for a senior level person.
Again, they float the ad where the requirements are out of sync with the pay level. Nobody (qualified) responds to the ads, so they can say “see, we need to import an H1-B visa person, because there is a shortage.”
The tech industry is at the forefront of this, but I expect to see plenty of other industries use these same techniques to create artificial worker shortages. It’s the wave of the future. We’ll all (even grocery clerks) be independent contractors and competing with foreign imported labor.
This is exactly what the writer was saying but the original article may have explained it much better than the 300-word excerpt above. His point is that:
Voting for Bernie Sanders are we?
My company has a slightly seasonal demand. We use the dip to have a purge. We just have layoffs with no hope for return. It is much easier than trying to jump through all the beauracratic hoops.
What some people don’t understand is that the number of jobs is somewhat elastic with total compensation. Some jobs do not exist at higher wages. Take painting your house. At some point if the bids are too high you will either decide not to do it or do it yourself. On the other hand a low wage job can create demand. Think cutting grass. You may always cut your own. But It if someone offers to do it cheap enough you will find that there is some task more worth your time than grass cutting.
I think you’re right. These days, there is no way to tell how many job openings there actually are. Everyone (like HR departments) are adept at gaming the system.
No it is not the problem, it is the result of the problem of the left's war on business. These hard core left-wing Marxists running things love wages and hate profits, and it's the hating profits that prevents the wage hikes. The left hates the rich more than they love th poor so they just double down on class their warfare.
“My own company is looking to lay off staff in some departments, even while other departments have a desperate need for talented workers. The simple problem is that the employees in Group A don’t meet the company’s needs for Group B.”
Agile.
Heard of it? Companies used to promote and retrain from within, that is, until the agile mindset hit.
Agile is short term thinking. You hire someone with the skills to do the job TODAY. If they job changes, you let them go and hire someone else that already has the skills to do the job TODAY.
Agile treats people as if their skill sets are set in stone; as if they can’t change, grow, or learn new skills. So, workers become replaceable cogs.
The irony of the agile mindset is the most important aspect of an employee isn’t skills, it’s attitude. Something agile completely misses.
Answer: You just can’t get them off the couch anymore for ten bucks an hour, part-time with no benefits. Obama welfare is far more generous than that.
Yes, but businesses - especially smaller ones - can no longer afford to pay American workers the salaries they got used to a decade ago. The cost of government is now too high. And bigger companies have zero respect for the IT profession, anyway - they would fire every computer person in sight as unnecessary overhead if they could get away with it. Part of why I left IT behind in 2008.
I am in the exact opposite situation in that I am trying to find an old school IT mentality where I can find someone that is not an expert in any one thing but competent in a lot of things and willing to learn/try anything we assign to them. Salary is not great since I am not looking for someone with a Masters degree and 14 certifications but it is pretty good and yet I cannot find anyone that is interested because all of the younger ones want to be a specialist and only a specialist. The older people are in higher level jobs or want more money than I can afford for this position at least up front until the prove themselves. Through in that we require travel and sometimes last minute travel due to the fact that we support sites across the US from one central location and no one wants to do that either.
I cannot afford specialists. I need generalists that have the old school attitude of I will jump in and learn whatever is necessary. Heck I am a VP and just cleaned up someone else’s mess in the break room that obviously does not know how to make coffee. Grinds and coffee everywhere. Had to meet with the Fire Marshall and take him around the office and fix a couple of minor things like an electrical outlet that did not have a face plate. Not my job but I do it because that is how I got to where I am by jumping on problems and working them.
Attitude is gone from most of the younger generation now and everyone wants one easily defined job and nothing else.
Agile is great for young workers with trendy skill sets - and terrible for the old dogs. But it was supposed to be implemented as an approach to software development - a form of rapid prototyping - not an HR philosophy.
Depends.
Literate, numerate, capable of focusing for long periods of time, willing to work the wages offered?
Maybe.
A few years ago, I was hiring for an entry level Help Desk position. We started the process with a long list of qualifications.
After a few fruitless months, we would up with "Must show up to interview on time" and "Must not curse at us". Seriously. We were really scraping bottom there.
FWIW, and contrary to some of the other comments on this thread, I've seen the caliber of applicants go *up*, roughly since Obama took office. I'm thinking that people who want to work are stepping up their game, and people who don't, are getting all of the welfare bennies that they want. But that's just my opinion.
I’d estimate that NOW around 30% of all job listings are absolutely fraudulent for either that reason outright or they stick up ridiculous requirements for supposed ‘entry level’ positions.
There desperately needs to be some truth-in-advertising laws applied to job listings.
I jokingly told my husband I was going to open a head shop that sold synthetic urine. Seems everyone down here smokes weed.
NOT just welfare——all the different kinds of DISABILITY have produced the same thing-—
Woman near me collects disability-—has since about age 23. Over 10 years with no end in sight.....
Her disability? She drinks—used drugs—and is a chronic gambler. She won’t show up for work, so she is ‘disabled’.
So the taxpayers pay her to drink—use drugs—and gamble.
Her 3 kids ‘live with Grandma’ and Grandma collects state/Fed support for those 3 kids. Where does the ‘disabled’ mother live? IN THE SAME HOUSE with Grandma.
A complete scam top to bottom.
My guess is about 28%
What’s preventing you from starting YOUR OWN BUSINESS? Sounds like you are old enough to have experience.
I went self-employed in 1980 and haven’t looked back.
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