How are these employees going to learn the system?
The CIOs often want schools to teach them a particular software application. This doesn’t happen because the professors don’t have the time and inclination to be up on the newest tool. But, even more, if the schools did instead of teaching basic principles, in five years when the business moves on to a new tool they’d fire all their current people and hire a new crop. Maybe good for CIOs, not so good for students.
The alternative is that the CIOs want another company to spend money training the employee on a tool, and then hire him to get the knowledge for free.
Training is not just for software. We just had our hardwood floors refinished, and the guy who did it learned how in a rather extensive class, paid for by his employer. It worked in that the training lets the employer charge more for a better result. Everyone wins, even us, because we got a high quality floor out of it.
This argument makes sense if you don’t think there’s anything more to supporting, maintaining, or building a complex system specifically tailored to one enterprise, than there is to operating a mower. After all, a lawn is a lawn. If you know how to work the mower, you can operate just about any other mower, presumably, and you can mow any lawn in the world. Just as knowing how to drive a car enables one to drive nearly all of them.
That said, I agree it’s in an employer’s own, immediate best interest to hold out this expectation when there’s an oversupply of candidates. Whether it’s in their best interests over the long term is, IMO, debatable.
Who are these ‘certain people’ who said they would take a trip to Spain if they lost their jobs? Are these real or imaginary people?
Who are all the people saying (in the current economy) that extensions are unnecessary because being unemployed encourages people to be lazy? Are these 'dopers saying this? Politicians? Just people discussing it in your head? Do you have any specifics?
Every year, there is a new lawnmower that you have to learn how to use and if noone is teaching people how to use the new lawnmowers and only want to hire people who already know how to use those new lawnmowers, those new jobs go to people who will continue to be cheap after you train them. You end up training illegal immigrants because you know they will still be cheap after you teach them how to use that new lawnmower.
I remember reading the first sentence about Spain as if getting laid off was a vacation.
The point is not taht being unemployed breeds sloth but that the unmeployed are being encouraged to be lazy because the unemployment checks provide disincentives to work.
It takes about 5 minutes to learn how to use any lawn mower. 1 for me to learn the Briggs & Stratton 17.5 hp OHV that I own. (Off-topic: Research suggests 90% of their stuff is made in the U.S.)
The analogy does not hold. What we’re talking about in the real world are things like computer programming, which takes years to master. And just when you’ve mastered C-Sharp, you find C Flat has become the new big hit. You’ve got employers out there who were asking for 3 years of experience with the CELL PROCESSOR even as the PS3 was barely hitting the market.
Companies are asking for the impossible. It makes it impossible to retrain workers: it’s like trying to hit the USS Voyager with a bullet.
But they don’t provide disincentives to work. Unemployment pays too little. People are always made aware of the instability of unemployment payments and the requirement for getting payments is to keep looking for work! This is the most devastating logical flaw in the disincentives argument. Why do people keep ignoring that?
I was going to come in here and say something like ‘Well, that changes everything since it was a Republican that said it!’, but I wasn’t sure anyone would get that I was joking. So, I’ll just repeat myself…anyone saying that in the current environment is an idiot.
That’s not to say that there aren’t arguments against extending unemployment insurance. One of them might be ‘can we afford it?’. Personally, I think we had better find a way to afford it until the economy picks back up, even if that means that whatever recovery we get will be less when it comes. But anyone saying that extending unemployment insurance in the current crisis is bad because it will encourage people to no look for jobs is a freaking idiot, IMHO.
You’re both wrong. It’s a fact, and not particularly under discussion. You may think they good for a variety of reasons, but they do in fact discourage job-seeking. This isn’t even particularly contraversial, though many (no, I don’t have a good breakdown of how many) consider the effect relatively small. Many, and perhaps most, still suipport unemployment insurance to a degree. But there’s certainly strong arguments that they realistically can’t be extended any further, or they risk becoming a sort of permanent welfare program.
Now, back to the OP.
Err, well, yes, Le Jaquelope. If AMericans had all possible skills, they’d be ludicrously valuable as employees. Exactly hwo you’d shake out who would manage and who would run machines and so on would fall to personalities rather than skills, but productivity and standard of living would soar. Unemployment would probably vanish. Moreover, getting new jobs would piss-easy.
What worries some economists, such as Megan McArdle (who is a Libertarian, but I’m pretty sure winds up voting for flaming leftists and then regretting it) has noted that current unemployment has shifted away from cyclical causes to structural ones. Cyclical unemployment is the “recession = unemployment, end of recession = employment.” This is more or less what the Stimulus was supposed to have fixed with its quasi-Keynesian measures.
But that does nothing for Structural unemployment, which is what we have now. That’s much harder to fix, though it’s possible. Unfortunately, it’s also a much less tractable problem for government, because it involves making voters do something they don’t want to do - and in this case, most of the relevant people are probably Democrats!
If you look at curent unemployment, you can pretty easily see where the worst of the housing and worst of the unemployment occured - mostly Blue states. And there are som substantial reasons for this, stretching back decades. A combination of old and poorly-considered regulation and unionism, but mcuh more cultural changes which don’t support business and entrepreneurship so much, have raised the costs of new business. Fewer people are starting business. And the old industries that supported many of the Blue states are dying.
This has put a lot of people in the bad position of trying to completely change careers at 45, never a fun position. Nor do I entirely blame Democrats for their policies - I’m sure it seemed like an easy, cost-free decision at the time, and we might face the same endpoint. I don’t precisely blame the UAW for wanting to stripmine the car companies when the management team was that incompetent. But at the same time, this means a lot of people are stuck in places with few prospects and few ways to grow new business. Those who can flee to growing places like Atlanta and Texas.
And skills are a HUGE part of this. A middle-aged union worker has virtually no useful, employable skills. His job was probably semi-skilled, other employers don’t want inflexible workers (ex-union people don’t have a very good reputation), and often can’t or won’t learn new trades quickly. And it’s not just union workers. Someone fleeing New York’s crashed financial firms has all inds of skills… which are completely useless anywhere else. But blue-collar industrial workers do form a huge problem pool and are a good example of the problem.
Of course, you can then add in questions about how they can sell houses if they do find faraway jobs, and whether they canb stand to move. Uprooting is painful. I don’t dismiss it. But it may be necessary.
*I will always argue it was a titanic, stupid waste of money on pork and waste, accomplishing nothing, because liberals apparently can’t comprehend that you can indeed waste money. We’ve wound up with viortually nothing to show for the wonderful Stimulus except a giant bill. However, that’s irrelevant to the argument here and we can discuss it somwhere else. Moreover, if it was trying for a Keybnesian solution it missed the fact that Keynesian solutions have never been shown to actually work, and that in any case completely failed to do what Keynes said anyway.
There’s not even enough jobs for all these skilled people. Their wages would go down because the supply of perfectly skilled Americans would far exceed their demand. Productivity would soar and as a direct result employment would go down: because fewer workers would be needed. If anything, unemployment would skyrocket because of the huge jump in productivity and the huge drop in the number of workers that are needed to do the same amount of work.
Workers are becoming redundant. The new state of industry now requires less people to perform the same, or even more work than before. We are seeing the end game of mass redundancy.
There are no new emerging industries, anywhere in the world, that are arising, or will arise, to absorb the growth of the American labor force - much less those who are unemployed. There are plenty of existing industries trying hard to make a pitiful comeback, but these will only pay rock bottom wages. They, too, are not keeping up with the growth of the workforce.
Yeah, it’s structural - in the same way that the sun is made of hot stuff.
What is the size of America’s class population? How many job openings are there? Compare. Discuss.
I gave his party for identification purposes only, and to show that as the whip he was not some nutty rep out in the corner. The execs who said similar things in the Times article might well have been Democrats - still idiots, though.
Actually it pans well, we just didn’t get the detail we need to see it. My day job is in the nursery/ landscape industry so I’ll explain it.
You are absolutely right that you can train someone to use most of that equipment quickly. Here is the issue:
Candidate A has been doing this type of work for years. Not only can he run the mower equipment, he can run chainsaws, gas pruners, telescoping saws, a front end loader, knows how move large trees, can ID lots of plants visually and knows their respective needs and diseases, He knows how to treat them too. More importantly he knows how to cut, shape, prune, and weed each of those different materials without damaging them or making them look idiotic. Candidate A can literally pick right up for you and do the job properly without training.
Candidate B is unskilled but a quick learner. You’ll have to train him and he’ll work hard for you.
Difficulty: Candidate A costs twice as much as candidate B because HE HAS EXPERIENCE. Employers want all of Candidate A’s hard won skills at a bargain price. THAT is a big issue with the current situation. Starting pay for starting skills, experienced pay for experienced skills and you’ll get no end of qualified candidates.
I see this claim made a lot, so I’m genuinely curious about which fields they’re in.
If we’re really seeing structural unemployment, then there must be some field with an incredible dearth of qualified personnel and trying like mad to hire. If so, which field(s) is it?
If we believe in supply and demand, there’s some lucky bozo who has a rare job skill that’s seen a massive increase in pay (to retain the bozo) or a new job that pays a lot better (to attract the bozo) because of these structural changes. Am I misunderstanding the idea of structural unemployment?
Also, some enterprising education and training companies must be shifting gears to attract new entrants into these fields, right?
I’ve seen the structural employment argument tossed around a lot, but it’s usually just the claim itself and nothing else backing it up.
This is incorrect. Structural unemployment doesn’t have the be balanced geographically by anything. It often is, but there’s nothing which prevents entire global industries from vanishing if people don’t want the products anymore.
However, I can points to some things. People do still hire for jobs, but not neccessarily jobs people want or like. Ridiculously well-paid autoworker jobs are vanishing, because most of the America auto companies suck. (Which is why the government is trying to cover up the fancy financial footwork keeping things going until it can stick to to the next administration after the coming election or the one after). Construction work is simply down across most of America.
Sure, there’s a cyclical component. But the basic fact is that when the economy does pick up again, you’re still going to have a lot of unemployed autoworkers and home builders. New York is unlikely to see the same demand for financial services for a very long time, and they won’t be the same services in some cases.
Yes, I think you misunderstand how it works (or in this case, doesn’t). Some industries will do well even during downturns. Others will do badly. That’s a given. But our problem started with an asset bubble and spread from there into credit markets and only then into other industries. Both housing and credit are major sectors that got punished badly. But the recession utterly halted the ability of some companies to cover things up and keep going.
In short, it exposed the rot. that was already present. GM wasn’t just kicked while it was down. It was kicked while it was slowly bleeding from a gut wound. It’s not coming back like it was.
Basically, let me put it like this. Atlanta has a cyclical downturn, but is adjusting and even thriving despite some hardship. Detroit has a structural downturn and it isn’t coming back without a complete overhaul.
Job training is useless. No, I’m serious. It’s does almost nothing for the students and does not, on average. We’ve been trying training programs for decades and they simply do no work no matter how they’re targeted, where, and to whom. In fact, some companies do attept just that, but they don’t produce employable workers.
This is because getting useful skills is hard. Even if we’re not talking about college, we’re still looking at years or development on workers who aren’t worth much in the labor market right now. It’s (sometimes literaly) the difference between taking a month-long evening class on Spanish, and speaking the language fluently enough to converse with anyone. The former is a fun intro which goes nowhere without a lot of additional investment. The latter is the investment and it can take years.
Because it’s more or less obvious if you look at who gets unemployed and whether they get re-employed. This isn’t a general recession that affects most people and places. It’s rough on otherwise-healthy regions. But some places and industries have been absolutely destroyed, no less than if a horde of Mongol Corporation-Hunters came charging in to massacre firms and take trophy-heads of trusts.
This can be solved. But it’s going to take time, geographical relocation, and a lot of pain. People who expected to have a relatviely secure middle-class exisatence aren’t.
Don’t be daft. Imagine what we could do with hundreds of thousands of new chemical and mechanical and electrical engineers, software programmers, super-lingual translators, carpenters, electricians, doctors, and artists. Prices would crash, it’s true. But you’d be paid in super-valuable currency. Everything from customer service to rock bands would improve. We could afford to vastly increase the lifestyle of everyone in America and have wealth left to burn on whatever we like.
Good God, man! You’ve just handwaved away a new Golden Age for all America, if not mankind!
Possbly, but in that case you’d have an America so productive that people simply had no need to work. That would not prcisely be a bad thing. In any case, it’s implausible at best. People more or less find work to do if they can, though it it may take a long time. I’m sure that dirt-farming peasants when Christ was born would be shocekd to hear that 90-95% of the population wasn’t farming, and couldn’t imagine what else we might do with our time.
How do I put this? You don’t seem to know or understand much about economics. You seem to think of productivity improvements as a bad thing, when they are the reason we have so much prosperity to lose in the first place.
Job training outside of a job is pretty useless, in part because the people doing the training don’t know what is really needed, in part because the training runs in fads, so it produces an oversupply, in part because it is taking time to train for a shortage now which might not exist when people graduate, and in part because it attract conmen. Job training within a company is hardly useless. It is quite common in some countries for companies to hire the best they can find, assume they know nothing, and train them. I know several younger people who got hired and trained. In the old days it was called the apprentice system.
I agree with some of your overall theme here, but disagree with the conclusion you draw on this part. ‘Ridiculously well paid autoworkers jobs’ are ‘vanishing’ because of technology and automation, not because US auto-companies ‘suck’. Even if US auto-companies were doing great (and some are doing better than others), you aren’t ever going to see them re-hire all of those people back as in the past because they aren’t needed anymore…where you would need hundreds or even thousands of workers in the past, today you only need a handful to do the same job. Heck, a better job really. Automation and technology has made each individual worker more productive, which means you need less workers to do the same work…or, in many cases more work with less workers.
That’s going to be the norm, and I have no idea what we’ll do about it in the future. You see it everywhere. My wife works for a law firm, and she tells me that these days you can get a secretary to look up information that in the past you needed interns, associates or para-legals for. Expert systems in networking make it so that one guy can administer hundreds or even thousands of VM servers or workstations, apply security policies and have the system automatically tell you where you are not complying and, with the click of a button make them all compliant! You can keep OS and firmware up to date with patches and security updates and see all of this stuff by just scrolling through it. One guy can do the work that would have taken a team of admins many days or weeks to do…and he can do it all while doing other stuff at the same time. Sometimes it boggles my mind what I’m able to do today building or engineering new infrastructure, setting or applying security policies, creating new networks…it’s unreal when I stop and think about how things were when I first entered this field and where things are at today.