There are some ways the government helps people (in this case the Michigan state government). Retraining seems logical because public education has brought people from kindergarten on up, to their initial jobs. But face it, those community college courses are not up to the task of getting a person into the jobs they study for.
According to this study, retraining people who are forced out of the auto industry is basically not working. Job Retraining May Fall Short of High Hopes When new jobs are found the retraining was not the cause. In fact, it’s often not used in the new job and was thus a delay rather than an expediter.
To me the answer is accept the fact that most working adults are really quite capable of doing many different jobs. They just need to matched with them.
In the case of Michigan, those jobs may not be in their home town or even the state.
So the money would be better spent on placement companies, paid by the number of placements completed.
I think the only reason the money goes to schools instead is that states are already identified with education.
No, I mean the government should pay for full-time, not temp agency, recruiters.
Pay them directly, like they pay the schools. Pick up all the fees, but only if a placement is made.
The main problem is that people need to be matched to full-time jobs, without the wasted motion involved in thousands of workers sending out hundreds of resumes each.
It’s a system that already works, but it has to be speeded up. Less search and more placement.
And less money for retraining. I’d say government paid retraining should only be started if a job is guaranteed at the end of it, or if it’s on the job training.
Could you take a moment to distinguish your idea from an unemployment office? I’ve fortunately only had direct experience in Connecticut about fifteen or twenty years ago, so my recollection may be wrong and things may have changed. That notwithstanding, aside from providing benefits, there were a lot of resources devoted to placement. These resources ranged from the minimal (i.e., job boards) to skills testing, the setting up of direct interviews, and job search/interview coaching. Though a bureaucracy, most people seemed to enjoy their jobs and were enthusiastic about helping.
This was in addition to general training and schoolastic help.
My recent experience with the unemployment offices in both Illinois and Indiana is that there is zero effort given to placement, other than a listing of jobs in a notebook/website, most of which were already filled by the time I applied to them.
What little work I’ve gotten has been via finding an opportunity myself, or via personal contacts (i.e. friends).
I’ve been sending out dozens of resumes a week for two years. I still have not found a permanent full time job. Hell, I haven’t even found a temporary full time job - what I have found has all been both part-time and temp.
So in order to get people back to work all the government has to do is take the choice away from them as to where they will be working?
I’m not American myself so I don’t have that instinctive loathing of all things that smell of socialism or communism but having the government decide who is going to do what jobs in a society… that sounds like central planning to me and my understanding of central planning is that it leads to shitty, inefficient economies. Skill stops mattering if you just go where you’re told to. And what about the “or else”? The placement agency tells you your new job is to pick up deer carcasses off the highway. The idea makes you retch just thinking about it. So you say no. And what happens then? How much work do you get to refuse before the placement agency refuses to help you?
Nobody can look for a job for you. I believe that even in the worst economy there is always work for someone who is willing to look for it. Drive down a commercial street. Are the businesses open? Then people are working. But why in the world would they want to hire you just because some placement agency is out to make a buck?
Right now in my state, if you are collecting unemployment and you are offered a legal job you MUST take that job offer. You must take it even if it is a minimum wage job that provides less per week than your unemployment benefits. If you refuse your benefits will be cut off, leaving you entirely without any income.
Part of the problem in my area is that businesses aren’t open - our malls and shopping centers are running an average of 50% vacant, even more in some places. There are entire blocks boarded up with no functioning businesses. So, no, people aren’t working.
They are also quite capable of enrolling in classes on their own and conducting their own job search.
The OP shows a lack of basic understanding of how the economy works and IMHO, reflects a spirit of entitlement which is part of what is wrong with the country today. While a person may be capable to perform many jobs, are they the MOST capable for that particular job for that particular company? That is for the private employer to decide. If a company thinks it’s worthwhile to use a recruiter to find a candidate, they should pay for it, not the taxpayers.
Really what it boils down to is an attitude of “I can’t find a job so I want the government to make someone hire me.”
Well that sounds great for the theoretical placement agencies then. They get paid regardless of what happens to the individual. So instead of money going directly to people in need it goes a bureaucracy that by its nature has no reason to care about someone once they’ve been placed. These placement agencies would get to ride to government gravy train and ruin people’s lives at the same time and all in the interest of making things better.
The idea behind the OP seems to be to create agencies that use taxpayer dollars to tell you what to do with your life. And if you don’t like it you can starve. It’s the big spending, big government ethos of Democrats combined with the vicious, victimize-the-poor attitude of the Republicans! At least it would have bipartisan support.
Why does it have to be either/or? Is the unemployment office not charged with paying out the actual unemployment benefit and giving the person job offerings?
I have no big opinion of that US system of “colleges” with wildly difering standards, or on-the-job-training, since I have experience with the German system of dual training: you spend part of three/two years working in a company learning the practical aspects, and part at a vocational school learning the theoretical background. At the end, after you pass your exam, you are a fully trained professional and can find a job with another company in the same field.
Which leads me to believe this is a bad approach. If people aren’t trained properly, and your plan is only to place them into any kind of job (so they stop “leeching money from the state”?), this is a very short-time solution, because the two-weeks on-the-job-training jobs that would be the only thing open to untrained people are the first to go (overseas in todays time). So training people for a mid- or high-level job is the better long-term option.
Why do you want to throw out the baby with the bathwater? If the current system of training isn’t conductive to solving the problem and finding new jobs for the people, look closely at exactly where the problem(s) are that block success, and eliminate them, instead of switching the whole system.
Beside blaming the problem on “The state” (those lazy unemployed/ this ineffective bureaucracy), you could also look at real barriers caused by the businesses. For example, anybody over 40 years can’t get a job no matter how qualified, because HR people have for some reason decided that they are too old, and don’t want to hire them. No matter how many studies show that 40+ people are far from outdated and too old to function, HR will not hire them. Similar problems might hit people from minorities.
If companies get 100 applications for one position, as happens today, then it’s very easy to throw away 90 for superficial reasons.
First of all “HR” doesn’t do the hiring in most companies. Usually you interview directly with the hiring managers.
IMHO, older people face several problems that inhibit the effectiveness of their job search.
As you gain experience in your career, you are expected to rise and advance in the organization. And there tend to be fewer jobs at the Senior Manager or Vice President levels as you move up the pyramid.
There are diminishing returns for hiring someone with more experience. Someone with 20 years experience as a computer programmer is generally more expensive than someone with 5, but that premium is generally not worth it for most types of jobs.
From what I’ve seen with my companies last round of layoffs, many older professionals have absolutely no idea how to conduct an effective job search since they may not have done one in 10-20 years.
Unless you have a perfect career of promotions every 3-5 years at 1-3 employers in your lifetime, the longer your resume the more ammunition you give a potential employer to reject your resume. Too many jobs, too few jobs, why did you get let go from this position? why did you leave that position?
Many older candidates just don’t present themselves well. They can appear bitter or jaded or may come across as desperate compared to brash and arrogant younger candides who haven’t yet been beaten down by decades of corporate bullshit.
Some jobs just aren’t for some 45 year old with a wife and family. The last consulting firm I worked for, we don’t say it, but what we really want ideally are stupid kids who will work 14 hour days and respond to 24-7 Blackberry summons for shit pay and beer as compensation until they burn out in 2-3 years.
Exactly where did TheMadHun say people under this system weren’t allowed to find jobs for themselves?
You certainly sound like you have an instinctive loathing of socialism, given that you are reading all sorts of government oppression into a jobs clearing house. If you go to a temp agency today, and reject every job they offer, I assure you that you will be low on their list.
Today, the business is open but they just cut back the hours of the people working there. That won’t help. I work in Silicon Valley, and people with PhDs and tons of industry credibility aren’t finding jobs, since just about every company here, including Microsoft, has done layoffs. There are a lot more people looking for jobs than there are jobs, so your fantasy about anyone finding a job is just that.
BTW, plenty of people look for jobs for other people. I got my second job through a headhunter who called me, when I wasn’t even looking for one. Friends can look for jobs for you. And, to give an industry where you are incorrect, when my daughter was acting she had a manager who looked for jobs for her for a 15% cut, and well worth it also. If she or any actor looked for jobs themselves they’d be kicked out the door - that’s not the way the business works, at least not in New York.
I agree with you about retraining. It seems people are always getting retrained for the latest hot job, and someone with 6 months at best of retraining winds up competing against someone with a degree. Not to mention that some people are better suited for some jobs than others.
The big problem with your plan is that it would need to have an up to date list of open jobs across many companies. I don’t know of any high tech companies who can do that even for internal jobs. But I think the concept, of a central job bank replacing job posting split across a million agencies, job boards, and internal sites is a good one. If it cut unemployment payments by matching people with jobs faster it might even pay for itself. (I’d like companies to pay something, maybe with a guarantee, to be serious.) Another benefit is that the state would have a real time measure of what jobs were really in demand, which would be very useful over time.
And you will run into problems where people will REFUSE to relocate. They are so vested in where they are that they can not conceive of moving away, they will not leave the ‘family homestead where we have been for the past 150 years’ or ‘all my family live here, I can’t move away’ or ‘I bought a house, I cant leave’
Same reason that there are so many people living in relative poverty in slums. I don’t understand why, if you have nothing the idea of leaving to some other smaller place where you can afford to live on a minimum wage income and not be in a crime laden slum … at one point my dad was trying to get kids who had just graduated HS in Buffalo to come out to Caledonia to work for his company, to get them out of the slums. No takers at all … and he was willing to ignore minor criminal records to help them bootstrap themselves out of their situation.