Is the Time Coming When There Just Aren't Enough Jobs to Go Around?

Great Debates
1

I hate to admit it, but I have been entertaining some neo-luddite thoughts lately.

I was laid off back around Thanksgiving, and I have just finished a three month temporary stint, and am now looking for work again. I happened by my old workplace to straighten out some COBRA stuff, and in the idle gossip I heard my old boss who has just turned sixty and who had found another job about a year ago, has been laid off again, and is again looking for work. And another ex-co-worker is out of a job and not finding anything, and the girl I was laid off with? She’s still unemployed too.

Yup, and at that temp job? When I was told my stint was over, I asked if I had disappointed anyone. Oh no, oh no. We’re merging our offices. There will be more cut-backs in staffing soon. Nothing you could’ve done to stay on.

I’m an office worker. Many years ago, I was told, oh yeah, go into office work. Every business needs office workers. You’ll never have to worry about getting a job.

Yeah, well, I never thought I’d see this, but in my opinion, the white collars are going the way of the way of the blue collars, and doing it mighty fast.

Today, with the computers and blackberries and e-business and such, I don’t think we’re going to need all those secretaries, filing clerks, accounting clerks, (payable or receiveable) or purchasing agents or payroll people, or maybe even people in retail. Hell, just put your catalog out there on line, and let people e-mail in orders. Maybe we’ll need a couple of warehouse folks and some truckdrivers, but that’s all.

Transfer your payment, or if you’re a vendor of ours, e-mail us your bill. Our computer will mark it against what the warehouse folks say came in or out, and the system will transfer payment to your bank when the pre-entered terms come due. It’s all automatic! Yay!

Of course, maybe one or two humans will be kept around to see it all goes smoothly, but otherwise, let 'er run!

I guess the rest of us will all just have to learn to build windmills and solar panels in the booming green energy factories that are sure to spring up. Unless they give all of those to China. I mean, they gotta work too, right?

Maybe then, we’ll all be nursing home attendants instead. Or morticians. It’s the wave of the future. And I think a lot of us are gonna drown in it.

Am I wrong? Feel free to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Because I sure hope I don’t.

2

They are still offshoring jobs at a fast rate. It will not stop. In America , the job market will not recover. But it will be worse for your kids and even worse for your grandkids. Wages will continue to drop and benefits will evaporate. That can’t be too comforting.
Corporations owe nothing to America. Patriotism is for the poor. Take your work to the Philippines where child laborers will work for practically nothing. Move your corporate headquarters to the Caimans to avoid taxes . Pay the politicians to pass laws leaving the people exposed. Kill Medicare, Social Security and fight health care. There is nothing pretty in our future.

3

No. In fact, there are more jobs today than there were 10 years ago…and more jobs 10 years ago than 20. And so on. Now…they might not be GOOD jobs (depending on perspective), but there are and will remain plenty of jobs to go around.

First off, I sympathize…I’ve been there and done that. When the dot com bust happened a LOT of network engineers and IT folks were out of work and being laid off in droves. There was a glut of IT people and not enough jobs to go around, and it was pretty bad all around.

When you are on the inside it’s tough to see that not everyone is in the same boat you are, however. There are industries that are actually expanding right now as yours is, perhaps, contracting. IT, for instance, seems to be still going strong and seem to be hiring new people, while other industries are facing budget cuts and lay offs.

No…we might not need all those folks (though, ironically perhaps, my company just hired an administrative assistant to boost productivity in the IT division). But consider…when manufacturing first got started, we didn’t need all those cottage craftsmen anymore (you know…where the Luddite movement came from originally). We didn’t need horse handlers and coachmen and all the other stuff associated with using horses as transport. When the whale industry collapsed we didn’t need all THOSE folks anymore either. So…what did all those people do? Were there not enough jobs to go around then?

Yes, but it’s hard to see when you are on the inside of things looking out, instead of being in a position to be dispassionate about things and looking in. As I said, I sympathize with you and wish you all the luck in finding something stable…I’ve been there and done that and I have the scars to prove it. My advice, FWIW, is keep the faith, keep looking, seriously review your job, quals and skills and the industry you are in, and if necessary, spend the time you have off to retrain, retool or update/upgrade your current skill set. Good luck!

-XT

4

I work in post production-- or DID work in post production in LA. I was laid off 02/09. Still looking. My industry has never been reliable though. I’ve been in PP since '01 and I’ve had four lay-offs.

Even if I get a job in post again, I think I’d be better off at Target or Wal-Mart. Might not pay much but I’m sure I’d still have a job in three years.

Out here in CA, the jobless rate is still around 12.5% (!!!). That equals, what, about the population of the five boroughs of NYC? As far as the left coast goes, I can confirm it’s not any better than '09. :mad:

5

First of all, let me express my sympathy about your current position. Now, let me address the key parts of your OP:

  1. Advice give “many years ago” doesn’t cut it today. Things change, and we have to change with them. You can fight the change, and lose, or go with the flow and win.

  2. Somebody has to design, build, market, sell, service those blackberries and computers. Remember the days when every telephone call was handled by a switchboard operator? Would we be better off if that never changed?

There are lots of sources to tell you which careers are on the upswing and which are on the downswing. Yes, “office workers” are probably on the downswing, although FedEx Office workers are probably on the upswing. As are web designers, Ap developers, etc.

6

I work in software in the digital maps and navigation field. Business is booming. In fact, 2009 was one of the best years in the company’s history. Although our office isn’t hiring now, we expect to be very soon.

7

A job is, by definition, an activity which manufactures money. Essentially, it’s like the goose that lays the golden eggs. An employer wants gold laying gooses. There isn’t a limit to how many he wants, he just wants moar.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/MOAR.jpg

Ergo, there will never be a time at which there aren’t enough jobs to go around.

What happens during a recession, though, is that there’s deflation and people aren’t willing to go out on a limb and offer decent salaries. Between both of these, a job is worth less than it had been previously. But the minimum wage doesn’t shrink and more importantly, people sit around waiting for prices to come back to what they were, instead of accepting that their old wage was based on an overly inflated economy.

8

The thing is, I’d argue that “A job which doesn’t pay anything like enough” is the same as a non-existent job for the most part, especially at the mid-higher end of the jobs market.

Sure, McDonalds will always need people to make McBurgers and hotels will always need people to change the sheets, but people don’t generally go to university to get a job at Starbucks.

So, if you interpret the OP’s question as “Is the time coming when there just aren’t enough skilled jobs to go around for everyone with a qualification?” then I think the answer is “Yes, Unfortunately.”

9

A job is a job. If it doesn’t make economic sense to take a job then either you need to get a second job to augment your first or you need to change fields. I guess I don’t understand where this concept that a job has to pay you enough to make everything work out comes from. When I was a kid, lo those many years ago, I worked two jobs AND went to college. When I was first married and just breaking into the IT field I worked a night shift job for Southland (sort of like a 7-11) and worked during the day as a programmer analyst, because the programmer job paid something like $8k/year (I actually made more as an assistant manager at the Highs store).

Would depend on what their major was and what other skills they have (or don’t have), doesn’t it? Besides, not every job at Starbucks involves making Venti Mocha Lattes, no?

What do you base this assertion on, exactly? Are you saying that, across the board there are less skilled jobs available today than 10 years ago, and that this number is decreasing over time?

-XT

10

Let’s say you work as a Widget Officer at Widget Ltd, and you make $50k a year doing so. One day, Widget Ltd announces mass layoffs due to the terrible economic crisis, and decides that the Widget Officer position can now be undertaken by the Widget Inspector. You’re out of a job. But you still have to pay your rent/mortgage, buy food, pay the power & phone/internet bills, and put petrol in your car and maintain it.

That means you really need another job that will pay perhaps $42k or above (let’s say you make some pretty drastic lifestyle changes and more or less cease to have a social life). If you can’t find a job that pays that, then for all intents and purposes there are no jobs for you to apply for. Because if you were to get one job that pays $20k and another job that pays $24k (for example), then you’re actually looking for two jobs, and getting one is hard enough at the best of times. You’re likely going to end up with a job where you just don’t earn enough to make the ends meet and it all goes downhill from there.

I suspect when you were working your way through university those many years ago, a significant percentage of the country- including “qualified” people- weren’t out of work and looking for the same jobs as you, no?

Most of them do, and I think it’s fairly clear from the context those are the sort of “Jobs At Starbucks” I was talking about- not being International Marketing Director or Head Of Accounts there.

I base it on the assertion that more people today have degrees than they did 10 years ago but that skilled job numbers haven’t risen in line with that, and that also in many fields- notably the Media- there are fewer jobs than there were 10 years ago, but exponentially more degree-qualified applicants chasing those reduced job numbers.

11

Reality happens. I’m not denying that. However, if all you can do in life is be a Widget Officer, then it’s going to really hurt if the only company on earth that will employ you goes out of business. I imagine that the guy who was the senior buggy whip quality control officer faced very similar problems.

Sure they were. It was the 70’s and early 80’s. The unemployment rate was higher, and the economy was sucking MUCH worse than it is today. And the jobs I had were things like janitor, construction worker and assistant manager at a Highs store.

Yeah, but it’s a fallacy, unless you think that as a corporation like Starbucks or McDonald’s (since that is a perennial favorite around here) grows that it only expands it’s burger-flipper job category, instead of all the administrative and executive (and management) positions that ALSO become available…for those with the proper education and skill set. For those without…well, their options are limited to making that Mocha Latte. This has more to do with the skill set and education of the individual, however, and less to do with there being more or less skilled positions available.

Taking your word for it (I actually have no idea), my counter would be to ask what fields people are getting all those new degrees in. Having a degree doesn’t automatically take one into the realm of Big Bucks™, or even of a nice steady job. There are plenty of fields where having a degree means you might get that assistant managers slot at the Starbucks…if you work hard and do a good job. But in and of itself, having a degree doesn’t automatically mean you are going to get a skilled job. If ones degree is in basket weaving (or, say, political science or Sumerian History) then your job potential is going to be pretty low, despite having the sheepskin.

As an anecdotal for instance…one of my cousins has his masters in architecture. He was pulling down probably $150k 5 years ago. Today he’s working for MAYBE $40k as a facilities manager in Tucson because the market in Phoenix went into free fall. He has his degree. He has the skills and the experience. But the industry he’s trained in is doing poorly today. By the same token, I know people with no degree who are in expanding fields who are doing VERY well right now.

-XT

12

There are also more PEOPLE than there were 10 years ago, too. If the rate of job growth is behind that of the population growth, there’s a problem.

13

All of what you’ve said is true, and yet, I can’t help but think that it’s a little different this time around.

When the cottage crafts people were made obsolete by mass production, they had factories come in where they could get a job. Or they could immigrate across the oceans, or take up homesteading on free government land. A coachman can learn to drive a car or truck. A whaler could find work on a merchant vessel, or join the navy.

But white collar workers, paper shufflers like me, our numbers are massive, because we are a part of every single business. Not just one or two, like blacksmithing or woodworking. But that white collar part is getting smaller, and it’s only going to shrink more and more.

Okay, so all those folks will have to be retrained to do something else. But do what? What boundless new technology is arising that is going to employ all these people who once processed invoices, counted up inventories, worked in brick and mortar stores, ran paychecks for long lists of employees? And so on. This isn’t just a few switchboard operators we’re talking about.

And specialized training takes money. And specialized talents. Could I learn to fly airplanes well enough to be hired by a global freight company? At my age and financial situation from my lay-off, could I go to med school to become a nurse? Could I get through all the college courses it would take to become a green energy engineer, even though I have no aptitude at all for it? Frankly, I don’t see it happening.

As businesses make do with less and less, there will be more and more people left behind. I don’t see any great push to get retraining schools established. I don’t see swarms of job guidance counselors for adults. Or for seniors, which is what I would be sneaking up on once my retraining is through.

14

I really despise the “Buggy Whip” analogy which seems so popular on these boards. People didn’t wake up one morning and read the paper with a headline “Motorcar Invented; Horses & Related Industries Obsolete Effective Immediately!”

Most people didn’t have cars until probably the 1940 or 1950s or so. That’s a 60-odd year period where Buggy Whips could be considered “Obsolescent”- the writing was on the wall, everyone could see they were on the way out, and so people would either start re-training or just not replacing positions as people retired. There are still buggy whip manufacturers today (for racing, primarily), and I doubt Buggy Whip Manufacture was ever a major, international concern employing millions of people whose job it was to manufacture Buggy Whips.

So you were different and/or lucky. But if everyone is trying to hold down three or four jobs, then that option isn’t available since there aren’t three or four times as many part-time jobs as there are people who want them.

I speak from experience when I say it’s entirely possible for a retail business to expand its “front-line” operations (ie by opening new stores) without expanding the administrative side of things. In Australia, Managers and Assistant Managers in places like supermarkets and retail stores do not generally have degrees (or if they do, it’s because they got the degree whilst working there and it wasn’t undertaken to further their career with relation to their job).

So if WidgetCo Australia Ltd wants to open new stores, then they can quite easily expand their operations by anything from 5-10 stores without needing to hire a single additional “Administrative” (ie Head Office-based) person (They just parcel the new stores out amongst the existing Admin staff).

Now, those 5-10 additional stores will create another 25-50 jobs, but only 10-20 of those jobs will be “Management” jobs, and only 5-10 of those jobs will be “Store Manager” positions paying the sort of money that someone with a university degree would consider worthwhile.

The thing is, in retail, many (perhaps even “most”) employers here- in my experience- value “experience” over “having a degree”, so a fair number of those “Management Positions” are going to go to people already working for the company or a similar business anyway.

Oh, I don’t disagree with you, but as I said earlier, having a degree isn’t generally going to give you an edge in that Retail Store Management Position Application here, unless your degree is in Business Management, in which case you’re unlikely to be trying to get a job as a store manager at (say) Tandy.

So, if you take a bunch of qualified, White-Collar professionals in any industry- doesn’t matter if it’s underwater basket manufacture or aerospace- and put them out of work, you’re going to have a lot of people who were on good money suddenly realising that the best they’re going to do anytime soon is a Nightfill Manager at the local supermarket, and you end up with bored, over-qualified, unhappy employees all along the line.

There are thousands of students graduating in Australia with Media degrees every year, but there aren’t thousands of Media jobs being created every year to employ them.

Also, I agree with Two Many Cats.

15

I can’t find the exact stats, but I think we have 129 million jobs now. We had 132 million in 2000 and roughly 110 million in 1990. However our population has grown dramatically in that period too. The last 10 years have been horrible for job creation. We lost 3 million jobs while our population grew by 35 million.

Nonetheless, the ratio of jobs to population has grown dramatically since the 60s. Back in the 1960s usually only the husband worked. Now it is not uncommon for both parents to work full time with one of the kids working part time.

The generic impression I get is that there are job shortages in the developed world (the US, western europe, etc) but a flood of jobs in China and India. Supposedly in China the manufacturing jobs are so plentiful that there are almost 2 million unfilled positions, and workers feel comfortable leaving and working somewhere else if they feel underpaid or mistreated.

I was also watching an episode of ‘30 days’ recently where a US IT worker goes to india, and when he gets there he says that in the US you are lucky just to keep your job while in India it was raining jobs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/business/global/27yuan.html

So is there a lack of jobs? Yeah. In the developed west the youth unemployment rate is 20-50%. However that may change soon. The world is becoming elderly and a country with 25-40% of its population in retirement will not be uncommon soon. After you exclude kids and the disabled, that only leaves about 30-50% of the population who can work in jobs to support 100% of society.

So we are in a job shortage right now, but I think in 20 years the developed world may be a labor shortage instead and start having to rely on immigrant labor.

Then again, when that does happen the tax rate will skyrocket to cover entitlement programs. And people being asked to shoulder heavier and heavier tax burdens and work loads isn’t going to go over well in a world with a labor shortage.

16

“Soon” = 20-40 yeas from now

You also have to take into account the % of society devoted to caring for the elderly. If you have a large segment that is retired, you need another segment devoted to providing them with shelter, health care, food, transportation, entertainment, etc. So that will pull people who could work in other fields (scientific R&D, engineering, etc) and make them caretakers for the elderly. So people who could have jobs involving educating children, or providing laborers with goods/services, or engaging in scientific research, etc. will instead be caretakers for the elderly. So maybe 30% will be elderly, but another 10-15% of the population may be devoted to caring for them in one way or another, leaving a really small fraction to keep society as a whole functioning. Of course there is some overlap between the elderly’s demands and societies demands. But you can’t have a society where everyone is either an elderly person, an elderly person’s nurse or the guy who makes uniforms for the elderly person’s nurse and expect society to function.

So there could be a severe labor shortage in the next few decades. Hopefully it’ll lead to revolutions in robotics which will hopefully increase standards of living. But loosening immigration is another idea people have looked at to help.

But either way, over the next few decades we in the west could go from a labor surplus to a labor shortage.

17

Where do you think jobs come from? How do they come into being in the first place?

18

If you have a large family now the odds are that many, or even perhaps all of your children will never have a real job (as opposed to government funded “make work”) on reaching their majority.

The old chestnut that we need lots of kids to fund our longer living eldery population is a myth.

Those kids will on adulthood, be in competition with you and your contempories, for what financial resources are available.

The other chilling thought is that you’ll have a large population of bored, able bodied young adults with time on their hands.

Apart from the effects on the crime rate its likely to breed a whole new generation of recreational, political and religious “rebels”.

19

Yeah, we’re much better off using a more modern example, like the Personal Computer. Most people (in the US) didn’t have one until the year 2000 or so. People had 30 years where they saw the writing on the wall and people would either start re-training.

20

30 years ago I was told that an office job type career was a way to financial stability. After all, businesses would always need secretaries, right?

Well, it worked for 25 years…

Sure there are lots of job openings… but nothing for which I am qualified. I have no funds to finance my own retraining. When I looked into getting help I was told that since I already had a college degree I was not eligible for help in retraining - I guess, when that rule was put into place, the assumption was that someone with a college degree would never need retraining, it was only blue-collar types with just a high school diploma, or not even that, who would ever need retraining.

I looked into temp agencies, which had worked very well for me in the past, but since so many office worker bees were being set loose they were glutted. At least 2 of them had the honesty to tell me that, but one strung me along for months and almost cost me my health insurance on top of it (long story, will not go into it here).

Right now I’m working for the census. I actually like the work for the most part. I am also doing construction work. I was only able to get that work because I have a friend in the business. Yesterday I was literally digging a ditch (technically, a trench) which, of course, is a job that can’t be outsourced but there isn’t much of that work around. And very, very few of my contemporaries - former desk jockies in their 40’s - have the physical ability to do this work.

I’m scrambling to survive here. A job opening in the IT industry does not exist for me as I do not have the qualifications and no means to get them. So those of you who say “There are plenty of jobs out there!”, are YOU willing to fund the retraining of all those tens of thousands of office workers who will not be getting office jobs again? If not, then STFU because it’s like telling someone with a broken femur to stop whining, the ER is right over there, it’s just a short walk away. An obstacle that seems trivial to someone with money and access to credit is nearly insurmountable to someone who has fallen into poverty and can’t get financial aid of any sort beyond food stamps.

And keep in mind, may of the people facing long-term unemployment are NOT young people in college, they are middle-aged. While I am fortunate to retain good health and bodily strength that is an exception. Someone my age with diabetes or heart disease can not do the work that I am doing (by which I mean the construction work - the census work could be done by someone in that situation). What are they going to do? Age sucks, and it really does make one less and less capable of physical labor, the ultimate fall-back job. It’s a very different situation than being 20 and unemployed.

Not that I came here to whine - I’m currently working two jobs for a total income of one fifth of what I made three years ago with just one job, and no benefits or pension any more, which I also had three years ago. I’m looking for alternatives. I keep trying to figure a way to finance retraining. But the blithe dismissal of very real problems with “But there are lots of jobs! Just change industries!” makes me want to puke.