My point was why bother retraining if jobs don’t exist?
I have a BS degree. If I moved to a part of antartica with no people and couldn’t find a job in my field, I could retrain as a truck driver. But there are no trucks. So I could retrain as a nurse. There are no hospitals. So I could retrain to work in IT. There are no computers.
The point is passing of ‘retraining’ as a solution to a society with 20 million more laborers than jobs is largely pointless. Retraining isn’t going to create 20 million new jobs. Even ‘in demand’ jobs like teachers and nurses are seeing new graduates struggle.
As far as unemployment being structural, we are still tens of millions of jobs short. Almost no jobs were created in the last 10 years to keep up with population growth. And the recession was just the tip of the iceberg.
So unless the US economy can create an extra 30 million or so jobs (to replace the ones lost and hours cut during the recession as well as the lack of job growth in the last 10 years) it seems to be structural, at least for several years.
Wait; 30% unemployment and world depression that led to World War II wasn’t as bad as this?
Oh come on. I can match your secondhand anecdotes with my own, I’m sure. The Great Depression was awful to an extent unimaginable in a Western democracy today, by any objective measure. Unemployment was at least three times worse, wages for those who were employed were terribly depressed, and the social safety nets we have today didn’t exist then.
Every time we have a recession people think it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. In a few years the economy will be fine. Don’t et me wrong; this is a BAD recession. Much worse than the last few. But it’s not the Depression.
For the most part no, it is not. This recession is not caused by outsourcing. Free trade has been affecting job patterns for quite some time now. This recession is a monetary crisis. When that problem is resolved the economy will resume from much the same state it went in to it, in terms of the jobs and businesses that make the economy up.
Outsourcing overseas can certainly hurt people, no doubt, but that’s something we’ve been seeing for… well, for decades, to be honest. It’s nothing new, and has been happening through good times and bad.
Well, that’s the impression I got, and those people do exist.
I’d like to think that I have a wide enough array of skills that I could always get work. I graduated from college in a recession, and was lucky enough to have a job waiting for me in the Navy. I left the Navy in a recession, and was lucky enough to start a new job immediately. In fact, I had multiple job offers–as well as a number of companies that never called me back.
I’m sure that if the economy got bad enough, I could get laid off, and in that case, it would indeed be difficult to get work with another agency, and even getting work with a consulting firm might be problematic if all of the publicly-funded construction work dried up. In such a case, I might look at trying to get work at the local nuclear power plant–which is a totally different industry. (They were interested in me a few years ago.) I might also look into teaching again–something else I’m qualified to do. I’m also not averse to relocating to a different part of the country. I’m not even from New England, and my wife’s job is fairly portable.
I’m a fairly risk-averse person, and as an engineer, I believe in multiple backup plans. That being said, though, I’m sure the economy could get bad enough that I could find myself unemployed for an extended period of time–but I’ve always done everything I can to minimize that possibility.
Haven’t a clue - haven’t figured out how to call up the U6 number from back then, and for all I know it’s not even on line.
Let me illustrate - the “official” unemployment rate quoted all over the media is 9.5%, but the U6 number - the counted unemployed, the number of people who would work if they could find work, who are only working a part time instead of full time who want to work full time - is 16.5% but of course the media don’t advertise that number because people would freak out.
No, I didn’t say it was worse than the GD, I didn’t even say it was as bad as the GD, but that this is the worst that it has been since then. Meaning it’s a greater recession than any we’ve had since then, not that it is an identical situation.
The unemployment rate was about twice as bad, people are getting pay cuts (or hours cuts, which often amount to the same thing), and no one is bitching about the safety nets except the selfish Randroids.
I don’t think it’s as bad - but I think it could get that bad. I think people who fail to realize the possibility are sticking their heads in the sand.
It can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We’re 30 million or so jobs short of what we need to get the unemployment rate down to 3% again - where are they going to come from?
You might as well say that we have home foreclosures all the time, in good times as well as bad, so what’s the big deal? The big deal is the scale of foreclosures. Enough to bring down banks and put the economy on the skids. One foreclosure is a blip, a million is a financial catastrophe. Likewise, where a 3% unemployment rate is normal in a healthy economy or even boom times our current rate is large enough to have knock-on effects just from scale. And we’re not creating enough jobs to keep up with the expanding labor force. It’s become a game of musical chairs where there’s only 1 chair for every 5 or 6 people playing the game and the music just stopped. The ensuing scramble is MUCH worse than the normal game.
Job creation is not happening in the US, it’s happening elsewhere. In the past, if the jobs left Buffalo the unemployed could easily move to, say, Las Vegas if that’s where the new jobs are. But the unemployed of Buffalo can’t easily move to new jobs in China or India or Vietnam and there aren’t new jobs being created in Buffalo. So… guess those guys in Buffalo just aren’t going to have new jobs, right? So what are they supposed to do?
There is a macro level - and the macro level is - there are almost never enough jobs for people and for the economy to hum along, there shouldn’t be.
There is the micro level - what about ME. And the answer to that is life is competitive, pick a good bet, and retrain. Maybe truck driving in Antarctica isn’t a good bet. With no people, maybe being a penguin hunter is a good bet. Don’t worry too much about the other 19,999,999 people out there, look after yourself. Then when you get in a spot to help yourself, you can give others a hand up. But don’t sit and wait for someone else to give you a hand, it may or may not come.
There is the NOW level. The now level is that currently unemployment is a LOT higher than it should be and that is really tough. People ARE going to have to scramble - Brooomstick has done an admirable job of scrambling and although I completely understand that she is sick and tired of it, she has scrambled and hasn’t starved and has managed to keep a roof over her head. Some of my Girl Scouts live with relatives, some have relatives living with them - because they can’t afford housing any longer. Some of the kids on my son’s baseball team have parents who are laid off, and mow lawns and their moms have gone back to work in minimum wage jobs (which are available here, apparently), budgets are cut down to the bone and they do almost nothing that isn’t necessary to feed and shelter themselves. I know a LOT of people who gave up cable and internet access, who keep the house at 58 degrees through a Minnesota winter and wear sweaters.
EVENTUALLY, the jobs will be created. History and economics tell us that is the likely outcome. History and economics also tell us that it might be 3-5 years OR MORE for employment to catch up. By the way, that doesn’t mean a lot of people will be unemployed for five years (although certainly some will) - but there will be higher than normal unemployment for that long. As RickJay says, many of the jobs will be the same job that was here before - no need for retraining. Other jobs will be things we haven’t dreamed up yet.
It’s not elitism. You know what is elitism? Thinking that you are too good for a particular job because of your education or previous employment.
Yes, we can argue hypothetically about economics or what leaders should do or what’s wrong with the country. But ultimately that is a pointless exercise. If you are unemployed, bitching and moaning about it does not help you find work. All you can do is continue getting training and certification in your field or general skills to make you more competetive, network with people, or try to branch out into other areas.
You can always look for something better down the road.
Really 5% is considered the “natural rate of unemployment”. Lower than that you start to hit an inflationary barrier, prices start to rise and you start seeing labor shortages.
But more to your point, the jobs will come from where they always come from. Typically not some new MegaCompany that is going to hire 30 million workers. It will be a mix of small companies, large corporations and start ups spread across the entire economy increasing their workforce when and if demand increases.
First of all, where is this 30 million number coming from? 30 million unemployed would give a BASE unemployment rate of 18% or so.
Secondly, jeez… where do you think the jobs came from to start with? Jobs will be created from exactly the same places they did before; businesses will re-expand their workforces, and old businesses that went under will be replaced by new ones.
The businesses are out there; what’s happened, for the most part, is that they’ve temporarily shrunk their payrolls. Lots of places went from having 80 people to having 65, or from 40 to 25, or from 180 to 120. Again, this was a monetary crisis; credit dried up, businesses reacted by panicking and not buying anything, and so other businesses had to cut back to stay alive. The extent of the recession is as deep as it is because it was a BIG financial crisis, but the capital and base demand remains, and so they’ll hire back as the money begins to flow.
I was just at a customer in Toledo. They make structural steel, a manufacturing job that simply cannot be outsourced to China or Vietnam. They’ve cut from 90 employees to about 70 to deal with the recession. They’re already making plans to go back to 90 and likely more in 2011, because they’re seeing the money start to flow and orders are coming in. I can tell that same story about two dozen companies I’ve visited in the last six months, virtually all of them manufacturing. That will happen in company after company after company, plus you’ll have startups to fill the voids left by the companies that didn’t make it, and I’m seeing that happen, too.
Recessions are almost always monetarily caused. They’re crises of confidence, not of structure. Monetary instruments are the grease that makes it possible for the economy to run. What happened in 2008 was the grease was suddenly yanked out of the system. The engine’s still fine; it will just need some time to get going again.
I still think you’re missing the point. Msmith talked about retraining as a solution, but that is pointless if the demand doesn’t exist to create jobs in those fields. Fields which supposedly have a high level of demand (teachers and nurses) are themselves struggling. So I don’t agree with retraining as a solution. Job creation is a solution, not retraining. After the jobs are created, then retraining matters. But not before. You need demand, then job creation, then retraining. Passing off retraining as a solution when there is no demand or job creation is just a distraction and a way to encourage people to go deep into debt when they can’t afford it.
Telling people to go thousands of dollars into debt to get retrained into a field where job applicants outnumber openings, and where people with more experience are themselves struggling is pointless. All it is is encouraging peopel to take on heavy debt with no real reward. Retraining will only work if the jobs and demand actually exist that you are getting retrained for. And the jobs do not exist.
I would agree with this as I see it in my industry. Architecture was devastated by this recession but it was by the last one too and it came back. Most firms were easily halved or quartered. My guess is that nationally 30-40% of Architects are out of work right now. Once banks stopped lending, we went dead very quickly. If developers don’t have money, they don’t hire us. If we don’t design something, then engineers and then contractors have no work. If contractors don’t have work then widget makers have no one to sell widgets too. So each of those industries do what they need to do to stay in business and cut back on staff–but once things pick up there will be a rehire by almost all of those industries. The jobs aren’t being outsourced, just aren’t there because the demand isn’t there.
But I see things starting to pickup, we have hired back 10% of the staff we have laid off and each day are getting busier and busier. That is small consolation to those Architects currently unemployed but I do think that things are picking back up just slowly. We were one of the first professions hit and we will be one of the first back and it is slowly starting to happen. Hang in there!
I work in a U.S. engineering and manufacturing plant. We have three new employees I work closely with. We’ve been hiring overseas like crazy, but we’ve ALSO been hiring in the U.S.
Jobs don’t come back. American standards of living drop. Along with an increase in poverty comes a corresponding increase in crime, drug and alcohol addiction. We “fix” our issues by blaming immigrants (we have already started) and eating the rich. The rich start to move themselves and their investment dollars outside the U.S. to more tax friendly nations, the situation gets worse, the U.S. collapses, people are willing to work for Chinese slave labor wages, and in 40 years the jobs come back.
That isn’t terribly likely.
Now, what would you like to do about it? Tariffs are a horrible idea - they cause retaliatory tariffs and set off an inflationary cycle - both which will make the situation worse. Taxing the rich and corporations will cause their investment dollars to leave faster than they are now, making the situation worse. The best bet IMHO is to sit tight and ride it out.
I’m not a competitive person by nature. I don’t LIKE it that life is competitive. But right now if you are unemployed, YOU are unemployed. If you are going to help out others, you need to figure out how to help yourself first - and that will require being competitive.
I have a friend who does community organizing - very liberal socialist stuff. He needs to compete for grant dollars. He needs to compete for donations. He needs to compete for government funds. He needs to compete for people’s attention in what they will write letters to their elected officials about and their time in showing up at community forums. Its a VERY cutthroat business - community organizing. And when he manages to get his $5,000 grant from some do gooder foundation, someone else didn’t get a $5,000 grant.
[QUOTE=Beware of Doug]
Dang, I forgot. Since things have never been perfect, all questioning is whining.
[/QUOTE]
It’s whining to say, in essence, that it’s too hard to retrain, and why should you, since businesses should (presumably) just protect your job (forever) and you should be able to work it throughout your life, regardless of circumstance…which is what good ole gonzo was basically saying there, and what you were seemingly agreeing with.
One of these things - retraining - you can control. My husband is currently teaching himself Ruby off free downloads and websites. He already works 50 hours + a week by the way - this is going to SERIOUSLY eat into his World of Warcraft time. So retraining doesn’t need to cost thousands of dollars. Many of the folks in this thread would benefit from the retraining that is available by reading business books available at the public library - learning a little bit about why companies make the difficult decision to lay of 10% of their workforce. Having interviewed during a recession, you’d be surprised - or maybe you wouldn’t - how many people talk themselves out of a job because they don’t understand the basics behind how a business functions. Another form of free “retraining” is volunteering. I know a number of people who turned volunteer jobs into opportunities to get paid - either through their volunteer job or through the contacts that created.
One of these things - job creation - is outside your control. If I could make Broomstick’s 30 million jobs drop out of the sky, I would. So would the vast majority of Americans. But they aren’t going to drop from the sky this afternoon. Or tomorrow. Or next month…or probably within the next three years.
ETA: Even if retraining gets you no where, if you are sitting across the table from me after a year of unemployment and I ask what you’ve done with your time and you say “well, I went to the library, read most of Peter Drucker’s books, learned a little business analysis and taught myself how to do some more advanced stuff in Excel then I had before. I joined the several professional organizations for networking and regularly attended their meetings, becoming the treasurer of the Women in the Arts organization.” you are now a way more competitive hire than the guy who looks at me blankly, but got his Paladin up to 80.
I agree with most of the above, except the part about job creation being out of your control.
I wonder where some people think jobs come from. Jobs come from other people. Certainly, jobs are created by giant corporations, but most of them have streamlined the process to the point that they know exactly how many jobs they need, and hire only when one of them is open.
Jobs at this point generally come from small business owners - say, a plumber who opens a plumbing service. At first, it will be just him, and then maybe his wife. Then, he’ll need some plumbing helpers and a receptionist. Then, his HVAC friend joins him, and they need more staff, and maybe a warehouse manager, and on and on.
I’m currently a small business owner, with a staff of one. Hopefully, I will need a bunch of employees someday soon. If so, I just created jobs. Brand new jobs. My husband and I are discussing investing and managing real estate. If things go well, we will create even more jobs - once we have X number of properties, we will need to people to answer phones and show properties and run credit reports.
I know that not everyone has the resources or skills to hang out a shingle, but that’s really where things are headed, IMO. And I believe that most Americans would rather accept the risk of running a business than the risk of civil unrest.
This is very true on a micro (i.e. yourself) level, and a suggestion I already made above. Create your own job. Although I know Broomstick has tried but been limited by location.
And it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of skills - the neighbor started walking dogs a year ago, and while she won’t get rich, she makes better money than she would as a cashier at Target.
That is skill aquisition, which is different than retraining in my view. People can and do do that for their entire lives in areas that are both work related and have nothing to do with work (like parenting, socialization, budgeting, home repair, introspection, psychology, etc). I learned tons of skills both related to and unrelated to work and my degree when I was in college by going to the local library. That is a lifelong thing that people should do no matter what their employment situation is because it pays off in the long run.
Retraining in the sense of going to college and getting a new degree probably isn’t going to help people in this economy because there are already a flood of applicants who already have that new degree and more experience who can’t find jobs themselves.
I’m not currently unemployed, thank god. I was, but my old company hired me back part time after being laid off. I am hoping to ride the recession out and when things are better, find a better job.
I admire your self-efficacy and internal locus of control. And I’ve never heard of Drucker but he sounds like an interesting writer from what I can find on him.
However there is a fine line between having an internal locus of control and expecting people to be something greater than they really are. I didn’t deregulate the financial industry until the global economy collapsed. I didn’t drastically increase the gini coefficient over the last 30 years so that productivity increases and GDP growth mean most people just tread water. And asking people to constantly take personal responsibility while the environment around them is starting to structure against them isn’t going to work long term.
If people are going to take personal responsibility and action, it’d be better if they used that responsibility to try to change the economy as a whole to work for everyone rather than use that power to do better in their job interviews.
If someone became an activist or organizer to combat large scale injustices that created these problems in the first place, I would admire that more than learning a new skill to find a job that probably doesn’t exist. With one you are trying to fight the problem, with the second you are trying to make the best of it. It would be better to use self-efficacy to lobby for job creation friendly legislation than to try and outcompete people for the handful of jobs that are out there.
Self-efficacy can be a powerful tool of productive change, but it can also be a tool to keep people blaming themselves for things that aren’t their fault, which prevents them from recognizing and combatting system wide problems.
My parents have degrees in history and chemical engineering. She works in finance and before he left his job he had cycled through ceramics and metallurgy to avoid being laid off, which as I understand it, are completely different fields from chemical engineering. I remember him teaching himself metallurgy while I was studying for my SATs. He developed about 15 patents for metallurgical products and processes before he left.
Also, before he took early retirement his company had started hinting around that they didn’t want to keep him-he was the senior scientist and primary inventor for this multi-national organization and they wanted his salary and very very generous benefits policy off the books (he sells them his patents for a pittance in return). So he took their bronzen ticket, got the hell out and started his consultancy. He now makes more money than he did, and has contracts across Brazil, China and India (including with the gigantic corporation that just bought his company). He’s actually turning down work because my mother doesn’t like to be left alone. Personally I have to wonder at the management geniuses who try to push out a guy who has 80 patents, but whatever, their choice and his gain.
Now under monstro’s definition, my father, who’s 65, is apparently too feeble and elderly to do anything else with his life other than trudge through his remaining years in a protected job. Yet, he’s turning down social security benefits because he’s ineligible and pushing the companies he now works for to expand certain N. American operations.
Isn’t it fair to say that there have always been people who have adapted and people who haven’t? 29 years ago my parents fled India because of the socialist economy. There may come a time when I have to move back…why do Americans feel they’re so special that shouldn’t have to leave their home for a better opportunity?
Which is a very, very important part of maintaining the status quo. The idea that being “realistic” or “real world” means keeping your head low and minding your own business is vital to any powerful interest that wishes to remain in power.
It ties in with another important principle I alluded to upthread: all responsibility is personal. The individual in trouble should not have the means nor the right to turn to anything bigger than himself. Kindness and charity must only be one-on-one, because when undertaken on a larger scale, they weaken everything they touch. It’s a metaphysical belief that conservatives hold as a natural law, and back up with cherry-picked numbers and anecdotes.
Reasoning even further back, deep down in places they don’t talk about, one may surmise that it’s the nature of organizations to care nothing for the individual; that they work best for all concerned when they care nothing for the individual; and that doing anything about that spreads a moral cancer that could destroy civilization.