Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Say Hello to Full Employment

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 348 posts

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#51

Post by desireco42 »

sbjs wrote: post #4

"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." So what? If there's a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that's a mismatch. You may say beggars can't be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?

You would consider yourself lucky if it was dentist jobs. Most likely it is crappy jobs in service industry.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#52

Post by sbjs »

pkaye wrote: post #43
sbjs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about the job market, but it seems weird that they push people throw college for degrees they can't use. My friend got a masters degree in pharma and he didn't get a job for about 2 years, his wife had to work as a retail manager to support their whole family, and he had a mental breakdown because of it. That's the point I was getting at.

> masters degree in pharma Is that a pharmacist degree? Don't those need a PhD equivalent to be most beneficial?

It may be a PhD for pharmacist, yeah. We lost touch a few years ago when they moved away, but he went to school for something like 10 years. So I think it is a PhD. But there were no jobs. Last I heard, even the job he has now doesn't cover insurance, so he pays for that himself and they're still living like he works at Burger King.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#53

Post by Kerrick »

TheLoneAdmin wrote: post #41
bayfullofrays wrote: post #22

I hate these kinds of numbers because they hide the fact that most of these jobs do not provide a living wage.

The article says the exact opposite. "employers bidding more to attract new workers and offering raises to retain their existing staff." "The rate of wage growth has doubled of late"

It also says:

> Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions

> Indeed, across the economy, companies have shown a remarkable unwillingness to boost wages

> Low wages continue to be an extraordinary problem preventing workers from connecting with a good job and keeping potential employees on the sidelines — in Iowa and across the country.

> “But there’s still this cliff, around $13 or $15. If you are making less than that, you can’t take a job. And we are not seeing too many companies go over it.”

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#54

Post by adventured »

lainga wrote: post #28
wgerard wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The openings seem to be largely in trades or nonskilled labor: > Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they're still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.” >…

The last sentence is the big problem. I feel like a lot of industries didn't just make the best of the advantageous labour market in the last 10 years, they reshaped themselves to become dependent on it (i.e., on cheap and easily-replaced human capital). Now that labour's tight again, they're finding that they've worked themselves into a hole they can't get out of.

Business just got a massive tax cut. They can dig themselves out by spending on increasing productivity and paying higher wages. The economy needs to be run very hot for an extended period of time, instead of getting crashed by an obnoxiously over-eager Fed that likes to kick the economy into a recession to dampen wage growth for the benefit of businesses in the guise of controlling inflation.

Businesses need to be made to squeal in pain here. Run the economy as hot as we can get it for as long as we can and shove wages through the roof at the cost of business margins (which were just considerably boosted via the tax cuts).

If the Republicans and Democrats weren't collectively so stupid, they'd be cooperating on hammering out a massive infrastructure spending plan paid for by a trillion dollars printed by the Fed across 10-15 years (or similarly constructing an infrastructure bank filled courtesy of abusing the global reserve currency while we still have it). And doing that would juice things that much more right now and for the next decade.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#55

Post by shados »

sbjs wrote: post #4

"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." So what? If there's a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that's a mismatch. You may say beggars can't be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?

If your thousand "node developers" aren't at least willing to drop the "node" part (assuming there was saturation in that segment) to use their skills in other languages/environment...then they probably have a problem.

(I know that wasn't really your point since you were comparing with something more different like dentists...but the fact that the example specifically said "node developer" instead of just developer is scary)

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#56

Post by mmt »

> Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions — not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job.

I think this sentiment has been repeated time and again here on HN.

I suspect the tech community is particularly attuned to it, as our sector has something like this employment situation even when the economy as a whole isn't doing as well.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#57

Post by Animats »

wgerard wrote: post #8
sbjs wrote: post #4

"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." So what? If there's a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that's a mismatch. You may say beggars can't be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?

The openings seem to be largely in trades or nonskilled labor: > Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they're still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.” >…

“There are not a lot of welders sitting around looking for work."

That's a good thing. Welding is hard to learn and takes a lot of practice to get right. There shouldn't be people sitting around idle with that skill.

Ask employers who are whining about a shortage of skilled labor "how many people do you have in training right now?"

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#58

Post by pmiller2 »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #27
exclusiv wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Wage growth has been non-existant for a long time. Every administration is basically like "hey we're doing great - look at these unemployment numbers" and then you talk to people and they're saying the opposite. Savings is atrocious too. Some of that is people being bad with money but a lot is that the lack of wage growth and rising expenses on things like healthcare, education and home ownership makes it har…

>Wage growth has been non-existant for a long time Wages grew at the fast rate on record in 2015. [1] Nearby years are similar. Here's FRED real median household income [2]. Real wages have been growing for several years. [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/13/the-m...

Look at the MAX chart on your link [2]. We’re barely above where we were in 1998. Hell, look here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Real wages have been stagnant since the mid 60s. The short term picture is most likely a blip.

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#59

Post by Animats »

wgerard wrote: post #8
sbjs wrote: post #4

"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." So what? If there's a thousand Node developers like me looking for work, and a thousand job openings for dentists, that's a mismatch. You may say beggars can't be choosers, but do they expect Node developers who went through CS courses to throw that away and take dentist courses?

The openings seem to be largely in trades or nonskilled labor: > Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they're still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.” >…

The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in.

Now that's a good point. The job could be much better if the employers were better organized. Employers want to send someone out on the road for weeks at a time. With better scheduling, the first driver drives for four hours, stops at a truck stop, and swaps trucks with another driver going the other way. Both drivers end up back home at the end of their shift. Where's that Flexport guy who's always on here when you need him?

Re: Say Hello to Full Employment

#60

Post by adventured »

spir wrote: post #47

This article seems to use the terms "unemployed" and "jobless" interchangeably. People who stop searching for jobs (eg. due to despondence or poor health) are excluded from the official unemployment rate, yet they are jobless. On a recent EconTalk, Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 mont…

Arguably most importantly, the labor force participation rate for prime age workers continues to move up.

It persistently fell from 83.3% in January 2008, to September 2015, where it bottomed out around 80.6%. It has been climbing since then, and is now up to 81.8%. Getting that back up near 83% would be a big win for the economy.

The highest that has ever hit, is 84.5% in 1999/2000. Healthy has historically (in the last 30 years) been anything around or above 83%. I think it's plausible the US can return to that figure in the next year.

We've struggled with the prime age unemployment due in part to the big loss in production jobs since ~2000. The continued recent (curved upward again at the end of 2016 [1]) boom in manufacturing jobs (exports are at an all-time high) should pull a lot of blue-collar workers back into the labor market. The manufacturing sector unemployment rate is incredibly low at 3.1% (lowest since June 2000, other than the 2.6% it hit before Christmas 2017).

Trump, were he wiser on macro strategy, would resolve NAFTA, close out the trade conflict with Canada & Mexico soon, come to a deal with the EU, and then focus all the trade war on China. US manufacturing will continue to boom, cheap energy and improved margins will largely ensure that. The only serious threat is some really bad trade moves with the non-China trading world.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001

Post reply on HN