What’s happened in recent years is that even though the number of people working has increased to the highest level ever, the number of jobs, both filled and open, increased faster. That’s why it’s harder to fill jobs.
Once again, unemployment, specifically U-3, has people in the labor force (i.e., people who are working or seeking work) in the denominator, and says nothing about people who are not seeking work. The unemployment rate can increase at the same time the number of jobs increases.
Right, that’s why we also talked about labor force participation.
As for unfilled jobs and job growth, yes, that’s how you get a graph like this:
Yes, there are many cases where a couple decides they can live on only one income.
But the bigger issue is as @Maserschmidt pointed out, most of the people quitting work are near retirement age anyway. They figure they have enough savings to stop working, or at least to tide them over until their social security/pension kicks in. What the pandemic did was it created a big incentive for people to quit working if they were able.
I think Bordelond was talking not about this particular person you referenced who “did not know what the fuck she was doing”, but rather the applicants for positions that " we gets tens of applications where nobody is qualified."
How unqualified are these applicants? In my observations, many companies are asking for stupidly high qualifications for jobs with low remuneration and skill requirements.
Eg. Clerical worker needed
Duties: Reports to office manager. Fills out pre-prepared spreadsheets. Ensures electronic files are in correct folders. Answers basic email enquiries. Manages front counter. Pay band, basic clerical entry level.
Required Qualifications: Must have bachelors degree in business and 5-7 years experience at a law firm, with exemplary skills in creating budgets, managing workflow and creating complex documentation."
Wahhh, none of the applicants have those required qualifications! People just don’t want to work anymore!
Since Bordelund specifically mentioned HR work being suited to being learned on the job , I think it was about that particular person. Although an incompetent HR person might be the one who is putting out the ads with stupid high requirements.
I know that happens, that companies are unrealistic, but it works in both directions. People apply for jobs that require supervisory or people management experience when that “experience” consists of managing a one person function or department or a HS dropout applies for jobs that require a diploma or equivalent. Now, these things have always happened but if there are fewer qualified applicants than in the past, it will increase the proportion of unqualified applicants.
Part of the problem may be that the economy has fundamentally changed in ways we don’t understand, and our standard measures and data collection techniques are failing us.
When you shock a complex system, what do you think happens when the shock goes away? If it’s very transitory, the system will likely return to its previous state. But if the shock is extended, the system adapts to the shock. Then if it goes away, the system finds a new equilibrium, but it’s almost guaranteed to not be the same as the old one. We still haven’t figured out all the changes.
When we extended the lockdowns, we started breaking things. We’ve been recovering from that, but there are still huge sectoral shifts we haven’t factored. For example, commercial real estate is 40% vacant in many downtown cores. People’s attitudes towards work changed during the lockdowns, and didn’t change back after.
It’s simultaneously possible that employers can’t find the workers they need, and people are unhappy with their jobs, but there’s still full employment. That’s what can happen when you get huge mismatches between labor capacity, capability, and demand. Lots of people employed in low productivity jobs or jobs they hate while better jobs go unfilled.
Graduating a lot of people from programs with poor job prospects also leads to dissatisfaction. Those people may be employed, but to them it’s underemployment if it’s a job that doesn’t require a degree.
Oh, undoubtedly true, in the past and now.
I remember a posting for the Academic director of a marine biology institute. The job called for someone with a tenured faculty position who had research experience in the field, as well as experience managing an academic university unit (eg. someone at the department chair level)
Dude applied who had a high school diploma and experience running a fishing lodge. (“Can’t be too much different.”) He was choked not to get an interview.
I don’t know. I haven’t perused the job descriptions of my agency lately. I suspect we just aren’t paying employees enough. We’ve tried, believe me, we recently froze a position in counseling so we could give substantial raises to all other counselors, but not a few months later the director of counseling is coming to me saying, I need more positions open. Meanwhile VOCA (government) funding is being drastically reduced nationwide. I just said this during a meeting with our finance person: How do you tell someone, “I know you need more people but we’re struggling to retain the positions we already have.”
When you’re hemorrhaging employees, it’s a lot harder to take risks on people because what you need most is organizational stability. It’s very hard to devote additional staffing resources to training when you don’t have enough staff resources for basic organizational functions. We experienced a crisis in late 2022 that required experienced, highly skilled people to address, and we are still dealing with the ripple effects, and the funding cuts, and all of it.
I know we are a nonprofit which is different from a business in many regards, but it’s more similar than you’d think. The experience has given me some empathy toward small business owners trying to make things work.
Exactly. I have taken several management training classes over several decades and several companies, and they all said that the number one reason someone quits is their boss, not money, not working conditions. Certainly true for the one job I quit (without getting paid to quit.) I made lots of money, but my boss was a psycho. Not just my opinion - of his 17 reports (all managers) when I started, I was the 16th to quit in 1 1/4 years.
I mentioned I saw the same thing. We expected to train people on the way we did things, but they needed to know something about our specialty. We couldn’t send them to grad school for two years to learn. I would understand if we hardly got any resumes - it was quite a small specialty - but we got tons of spam resumes nowhere close to being qualified.
See my post #220
I have never crunched any numbers, but I see many many claims for disability benefits for minors and young people in their 20s. Trends may also differ in different locations.
I am comfortable saying that the majority of children’s claims I see are from low income families, with the most common complaints ADHD, speech/language deficits, or behavioral problems. Low birth weight is an automatic award at birth, and is more prevalent in low income families. The parents vary from hard-working and responsible, to apparently simply looking for income. Many of the parents are also on/seeking disability. A lot of the kids (but far from all) have really messed up home situations with lousy role models. It really is hard to imagine what chances such kids have as they mature…
Claims of social anxiety seem divided among low and higher income.
Kids receiving benefits are automatically reviewed periodically for improvement, and at age 18 under adult standards. I see a good number of those continuing disability reviews.
I also see a lot of initial claims for young people aged 18-25. A major share of those are from relatively high income families. The standard is a kid who has mild autism or anxiety/depression, who has graduated from high school. (The severely impaired cases don’t get to me. They are receiving benefits without question.) The parents are realizing their kid may have difficulty living alone, or working anything other than a menial job. And the parents wonder what will happen to the kid when the parents die. A typical claimant will drive, attend community college (with accommodations), and even work part-time (keeping earnings below the level that would preclude benefits.) And it is not uncommon for someone to claim to be unable to work due to social anxiety, but they are able to be social enough to hang with friends, and meet people who will impregnate them/bear their children.
Judge for yourself whether those young people are “disabled”, but it is not uncommon for me to conclude that someone such as that can perform at least menial work. In many such cases, it seems the claimants are able to do quite a number of things they wish to do or feel necessary. But for whatever reason they feel they are medically prevented from doing things they don’t want to do. Curious how that works.
I do see a number of cases in which someone applies in their 30s or 40s, not having been married, but never having worked. It always kinda makes me wonder just what kind of a lie they have been living, and how they have maintained it.
I have a 10 year old with “mild” autism. Scare quotes, because it is a spectrum, and autism is still autism even if the person is verbal and doesn’t just sit in the corner rocking back and forth and making strange noises.
My kid absolutely fits the description you give. Things they want to do are lots easier than things they don’t want to do. Some things they want to do are still extremely difficult, and some things they don’t want to do may be impossible right now.
Lots of the problems are organizational rather than motivational. We are working on teaching some of these skills, but some of it might never get there. There is a deficit in executive function, so some things, like learning from consequences and planning ahead, do not operate as they do for someone neurotypical.
I’m sure there are lots of people who are after disability because work isn’t fun; my point is only that some people may appear functional in many (particularly low stress) circumstances, but actually have disability level difficulties in other circumstances.
The Unemployment rates make this very clear.
Yes, very low.
But yeah, due to a labor shortage, some decent jobs might have issues getting the perfect candidate. Sometimes this is the fault of HR with silly rules that date from the period when there was a massive labor surplus. (“If the candidate has an unacceptable email , shit can them”)
Right, employers are still thinking that what worked in the past will work today.
That $ is long gone.
Yep. That $$ is long gone.
By working. The stats show that. Or retiring.
Get off that idea. Yeah it doesnt include those who are disabled, retired or twoo young to work, but there just aint people who cant afford to not work who arent working.
Do you think that somehow there are young people with degrees just deciding to not work, since they dont need to eat or pay rent?
And many years ago they could get applicants for those jobs. Not now.
Does that mean you work in the appeals sort of process? Like if someone is turned down, they can appeal to you? If so, you must be seeing a lot of borderline cases.
How do you know about their social life? Is that something that is typically reported in medical files?
My kid is currently Level 2. I don’t know if my kid is going to be more like your kid or more like the kid who won’t ever be independent. It doesn’t help that I don’t know diddly about “typical” child development. But I find that people vastly overestimate my kid’s abilities based on his intelligence, the fact that he speaks (at all), and the fact that he makes periodic eye contact. I would hope that any professional writing to support a disability claim would be able to better evaluate one’s prospects than the average layperson.
This is true of ADHD as well. It looks like selective attention (as in, oh, you could focus on this boring thing if you tried harder) but it’s actually the person’s brain deciding for them what’s urgent and what’s irrelevant. I have ADHD that my husband describes as mild in presentation, but moderate in how much it actually impacts my life.
Which idea, pray tell?
It doesn’t include the ~5.5M who BLS noted as wanting a job but who don’t meet the criteria for being in the labor force. It doesn’t include however many working-age people have someone else paying their bills, or who are living off loans, etc. The point is that “the unemployment rate”, i.e., U-3, doesn’t tell us how people are paying their bills. Not that . . . whatever it is you think I think.
This has nothing to do with anything I’ve written.
Add “having your scheduled changed without talking to you about it first” to the list.
That could be “fuck it, I can retire.” It could also be reflective of getting let go at 50+ and then trying to find another job is an uphill battle. I am certain (because I’ve been on those hiring committees in the past) that there are positions where they bemoan the lack of any “qualified” candidates because they aren’t getting people with experience, and discount anyone who shows up looking like they are over 50 as being “a bad culture fit.”
“Pay: 50 cents above whatever the current minimum wage is for this area.”
I know two young people with degrees who are both working, but very much underemployed and not happy about it. Both want to work from home, and don’t want to take an office job. So both are doing ‘gig’ work. One is classifying data for AI use, and the other is doing translations (has a degree in linguistics). Both are earning less than half of what they’d get with a ‘traditional’ job given their education. Also, ‘gig’ work leaves little opporunity for promotion and improvement and training. And there are no benefits.
Neither of them can come close to making enough money to truly start out on their own. They would not show up in the unemployment statistics, yet they are definitely not happy with the way things are.
Also not included in the unemployment figures are the recently retired and the people who have dropped out of the statistics because they stopped actively looking for a job and are not receiving benefits.
The boomers retiring has another effect: The people retiring are highly experienced, and the people replacing them are not. So while the absolute numbers of workers might not change, their suitability for various jobs has.
Also, the unemployment numbers are driven down by massive government hiring and expenditure. In the private sector, things aren’t going as well. This is especially true in Canada, which is becoming a bifurcated country. The people connected to power and the ‘elite’ class (academics, CEOS, white collar gov’t workers) are doing great, while the working class is suffering. Just like during the pandemic. This might be why the working class is shifting to the right while the Left becomes the party of the elites and the protected classes they favor.
One last factor: The younger generations are nowhere near as materialist as the Boomers, so they may settle for jobs with lower pay but better conditions, or settle for part-time or gig work. If so, it may be hard to fulfill positions for difficult or uncomfortable jobs, even for high pay. That’s another form of mismatch between what the market needs and what people will do, which could help explain full employment while the economy suffers.
Yeah, I’ve worked in several legal firms as contract IT - and I’ve done legal secretary adjacent work - and you couldn’t pay me enough to be a legal secretary. Lawyers in law firms are ASSHOLES (at least enough of them that it would be a last resort job for me), the pressure gets intense, and they expect a legal secretary making 1/5th of what they make to work as hard and put in the hours.