191–200 of 348 posts
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…
Yep, there are plenty of people who could be sucked up back into employment. I’m excited to see if after decades of atrophy, the blue collar worker of yesteryear can have another go at it. With enough demand, we may begin to see employers willing to retrain these workers and bring them back into the fold.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retrain...
"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?
As for mismatches, what is your solution?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of Silicon Valley in the rest of the country -- look at the job reqs.
Job reqs are a lie, and a lot of jobs (I almost want to say most, but I don't have data to back it up) never even make it as far as the job boards. The ones that do are often not even drafted by the hiring manager, and just written by someone who asked "So, what kind of skills would be nice?". Most companies will absolutely hire outside of what's written. They don't have much choice unless they're looking for entry l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is one of the most insightful comments I’ve seen for awhile. Perhaps this is why low wages tend to create recessions as inefficient businesses start to fail. One could argue that these system stressors act as a cleansing agent.
Also, all kinds of stressors can create recessions - from a supply shock (the sudden increase in oil prices in 1979 forcing the US economy to restructure to adapt), to a demand shock (a sudden drop in consumer access to credit in 2008), to sudden shifts in the type of demand (both WWI and WWII ended in steep, short recessions during the switchover from wartime to peacetime production).
"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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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?"
FWIW, I sit around idle all day long as a 6g certified welder. By "idle" I mean sitting at a desk writing python and trading commodities. Welding is for the birds, and humans that want to lose their sense of smell and eventually degrade their vision. Welding is not fun over any stretch of time.
When people talk about higher wages for these jobs as a solution for the labor shortage, I always bring up improvements in working conditions (safety, hours, etc.) as a perhaps more cost-effective way to make these jobs attractive.
The national unemployment rate has always been political fodder and not a good indicator to the heath of people employed. Statistical smoke and mirrors considering they do not count people who've stopped looking for work because they cannot find it, those who are under-employed, or those who are earning less this year compared to last due to inflation and wage stagnation.
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…
We're also 9 years away from the end of the last recession. The longest we've gone without a recession in the past 100 years is 10 years.