I lean in favor of the Democrats usually. However, I have some questions about this latest promise of Gore’s. Check out the article here: article
Doesn’t the country have the lowest unemployment rate in years? Isn’t there currently a scarcity of skilled workers? If you are a skilled high tech person who is unemployed and would be willing to move to Minnesota, send me an email and I’ll find you a job in the Twin Cities area. It looks like they consistently pay well here too.
What would be the results of adding 10 million jobs? More immigration of skilled foreigners rather than unskilled? Is that what he’s going for?
I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here because I want him to be smart. I don’t get this though. Maybe I’m misinformed about the state of our economy. I’d rather see 1 million new teachers hired for twice the salary. Saving money and making a career as teacher more enticing to good people. Gore does mostly push for education so I’ll vote for him anyway because that is the issue I key on.
Hmm… Autoparse didn’t work properly. Well, rather than botch it further let me just assure you that the address is correct as it appears above. It’s at the Baltimore Sun site. (Apologies to the Trib, who may have a similar article. This is the one I saw first.)
Gore promises jobs because it sounds good, no other reason. I mean, who doesn’t like to hear that we’ll have 10 million new high-tech jobs, or whatnot? I’m sure he has no idea what the implications are…
…'s why my vote’s going to Nader.
FWIW, almost all of the jobs that have been created by this economic ‘boom’ of ours have been low-wage, low-skill, and low-status. Wanna know one of the reasons we’ve got a low unemployment rate? Let’s say someone is laid off of a full-time job, and takes two part-time jobs to compensate. The unemployment rate goes down. Gotta love it…
Gadarene, I’m sure that’s not the ONLY reason. Surely the influx of computer-oriented positions over the past several years has had something to do with the rise in employment rates.
Exactly. Gore seems to rely on the short-term memories of the voting population to gain his support. He claims responsibility for the notion that there are more people employed than ever before, and five minutes later claims that America desperately needs more people to be employed.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that I said it was the only reason, SPOOFE.
“Wanna know one of the reasons we’ve got a low unemployment rate?”
You should cut down on those speed-reading classes.
And in fact, the declining manufacturing sector and expanded base of low-wage service jobs has been offset only partially by the rise in technology jobs. Temporary, part-time, and contingent work abounds while for many people the twentieth-century construct of a “modern” job–full-time, stable, with benefits and a living wage–is eroding away.
It’s also worth noting that real hourly wages are less now than they were in 1973.
Now hold on. You mean that there are skilled high tech workers out there who are currently employed in low tech jobs? If this is true, I really need to get in the head hunter business. Don’t they know how to use the internet?
My company has taken to recruiting from Europe because we can’t find skilled people. We only have 100 employees but we need 150 and can’t find qualified people. Looking around the twin cities area I see lots of other companies in similar situations. Also, health care workers are incredibly scarce. These are good, high-paying jobs. Low paying jobs are also readily available but I think that is largely because the poeple that would normally have these jobs are in higher paying jobs that they are not really qualified for. I know that this area has lower unemployment that most of the country but I thought that the whole country was in a similar, if not as drastic, situation.
“Real hourly wages are less than 1973?” Really? What exactly does this mean. If true why does the economy seem so strong? Am I just very lucky to have this great job? I thought it was no big deal and that skilled people were almost universally employed these days.
Actually I managed to track down some data regarding 1973 wages vs. current wages. In 1982 dollars a 1973 private worker earned about $8.50 in average hourly earnings.
Today that is about $7.90. So it is true. However, the current wage is the highest since about 1979. In fact most of the decline since 1973 took place in one year, 1979 to 1980 where the real wage fell almost 50 cents. (all in constant dollars)
This is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And this of course assumes no distortion in measuring real dollars.
This is the claim I asking for a cite …
Also, this next is just plain wrong. Unemployment rate counts people, not jobs.
At the risk of invoking the spirit of Pheadrus, I can
more comprehensively answer this question when I get home. Meanwhile, you can putter around the Economic Policy Institute, which talks about this sort of thing, or you can check out the books I listed on this thread.
Those same books, particularly Yates’s Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: The Future of Employment and Unemployment in the United States, have information regarding the calculation of the unemployment rate.
I’m pretty sure it counts jobs, past a certain part-time threshold–or, at least, that it did in the very recent past. Do you have a cite which could enlighten me further?
Adybody have any statistics on how adding tons of women to the job pool affects things?
I am really amazed at Gadarene’s numbers. Where in the country are all these unemployed skilled workers? Why don’t they move? I hate the midwest and plan to get out soon, but three years ago I needed a job. So, I moved to where I found one. I don’t regret that decision. Is it that people are not willing to move? What gives?
If we create 10 million high tech jobs and they are all in places where no one wants to live, it’s going to create more problems than it solves. On the other hand, why won’t people move? I need more info on this. I don’t understand why a skilled worker would be unemployed in today’s job market. I look on the web and see so many job opportunities I’m afraid to put my resume up because I’m afraid of the massive amounts of email I would get from headhunters and prospective employers. And I’m just a tech writer. I’d think a DBA or a Unix administrator would have to have a bodyguard to keep away the headhunters at happy hours. Is it that the skilled workers that show up in these statistics have obsolete skills? Are they COBOL programmers who didn’t keep current? I just can’t put any real stock in these stats because I look around and see jobs everywhere. Somebody help me to understand?
There may be tech jobs open; that doesn’t mean that people have the appropriate training. Those without that training–the vast majority of Americans–are finding their new jobs increasingly in low-wage, low-skill positions, especially as the manufacturing sector declines. Does that make it any clearer?
New jobs in declining industries, how does that happen?
I don’t have a cite for the how the unemployment rate is calculated. But it simply measures the percentage of people not working. So a person is either working or not working when the sample is taken. It is the same whether they have one, two , three, or seventeen jobs.
Non-skilled jobs are not as high paying as they used to be. OK. That’s interesting.
This makes me again think that we need to put more focus on education. And I reiterate what I have said in many other posts, I think we should start by improving our ELEMENTARY Schools not our high schools and colleges. Start at the beginning folks, much easier to teach counting to someone who doesn’t know what numbers are than it is to teach calculus to someone who doesn’t know algebra.
Also, I reiterate that I think creating 10 million new high tech jobs would be sort of futile. Perhaps we would get a influx of trained immigrants. That could be a positive thing. Is some other country treating their unskilled workers better than us? Can we send them a few million to offset the immigration?
May I point out that bringing in 10 million new residents and giving them high paying jobs would bring the real hourly wages number up a bit without actually helping any of our current residents.
It seems the low skill jobs are in less demand and so low skilled workers are getting paid less. This doesn’t bother me as long as the low skill people have a recourse (i.e. a way to acquire a skill). Do they? I think it’s not too hard to get loans or grants to technical colleges. I know that, in this area, if you want to be a medical support person the hospitals will gladly pay for your training. It takes some hard work to support yourself while you train for a new career. Fine. I am not unsympathetic to people who have children or whatever and can’t find time to improve themselves. It’s hard. I’d like to help you. Resources are limited and I’d like to see the focus on helping our NEXT generation not fall into this trap. Let’s educate our children. If we can do both, then great. I’m all for it.
None of the candidates seems to have ideas similar to mine on this, so I’m out of luck. Guess I have to vote Gore because of the Abortion issue. Dang it. why can’t more people think like I do?
