320 Years of History
Gold Member
Day in and day out, we hear, and people seem to believe, that there is a dearth of jobs to be had. That just isn't so. Time and again I come by information indicating that the issue is not that jobs aren't there to be had and that instead the issue is that workers haven't the skills employers demand. The thing is that the same message -- there are plenty of jobs to be had -- come from both conservative and liberal leaning outlets.
Forbes Magazine:
In 2014, the American Transportation Institute found that there were some 30K+ jobs waiting to be filled and the shortage of workers is expected to rise to 240K by 2022.
While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful; one can often find a job in 48 hours. As Bob Funk, the president of Express Services, which matches almost one-half million temporary workers with employers each year, “If you have a useful skill, we can find you a job. But too many are graduating from high school and college without any skills at all.”
The lesson, to play off of the famous Waylon Jennings song: Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be philosophy majors.
Three years ago the chronic disease of the economy was a shortage of jobs. This shortage persists in many sectors. But two other shortages are now being felt—the shortage of trained employees and of low-skilled employees willing to work. Patrick Doyle, the president of Domino’s Pizza, says that the franchises around the country are having a hard time filling delivery and clerical positions. “It’s a very tight labor market out there now.”
This shortage has an upside for workers because it allows them to bid up wages. When Wal-Mart announced last month that wages for many starter workers would rise to $9 an hour, well above the federal legal minimum, they weren’t being humanitarians. They were responding to a tightening labor market.
The idea that blue collar jobs aren’t a pathway to the middle class and higher is antiquated and wrong. Factory work today is often highly sophisticated and knowledge-based with workers using intricate scientific equipment. After several years honing their skills, welders, mechanics, carpenters, and technicians can, earn upwards of $50,000 a year–which in most years still places a household with two such income earners in the top 25 percent for income. It’s true these aren’t glitzy or cushy jobs, but they do pay a good salary.
So why aren’t workers filling these available jobs–or getting the skills necessary to fill them. I would posit four impediments to putting more Americans back to work:
First, government discourages work. Welfare consists of dozens of different and overlapping federal and state income support programs. A recent Census Bureau study found more than 100 million Americans collecting a government check or benefit each month. The spike in families on food stamps, SSI, disability, public housing, and early Social Security remains very high even 5 years into this recovery. This should come as no surprise given the combination of the scaled back welfare work requirements and the steep phase-out of benefits as a recipient begins earning income.
The preceding article notes that skilled welders and mechanics can readily earn $50K/year. It also posits that welfare is the reason why folks aren't going to get those jobs. Well, the question I have then is, if, as the article suggests, some 100M people are content with their welfare-enabled earnings, why the hell are some ~60M (based on recent polling of who'd win the election were it held today) or so people "buying into" Trump's rhetoric about jobs, "good jobs," not being available because of manufacturing facilities having been offshored? There're about 150M people in the American workforce; it doesn't add up.
If folks are unemployed by choice, that's their choice. Be unemployed, but gripe about being unemployed.
Here's an article from a liberal-ish source. The underlying message is pretty much the same.
More than just what one can read, when I go look on company websites, I see job listings galore:
I mean let's be real. One doesn't need a "good manufacturing job," one needs a "good job." In the listings above, I saw plenty of them.
Forbes Magazine:
In 2014, the American Transportation Institute found that there were some 30K+ jobs waiting to be filled and the shortage of workers is expected to rise to 240K by 2022.
While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful; one can often find a job in 48 hours. As Bob Funk, the president of Express Services, which matches almost one-half million temporary workers with employers each year, “If you have a useful skill, we can find you a job. But too many are graduating from high school and college without any skills at all.”
The lesson, to play off of the famous Waylon Jennings song: Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be philosophy majors.
Three years ago the chronic disease of the economy was a shortage of jobs. This shortage persists in many sectors. But two other shortages are now being felt—the shortage of trained employees and of low-skilled employees willing to work. Patrick Doyle, the president of Domino’s Pizza, says that the franchises around the country are having a hard time filling delivery and clerical positions. “It’s a very tight labor market out there now.”
This shortage has an upside for workers because it allows them to bid up wages. When Wal-Mart announced last month that wages for many starter workers would rise to $9 an hour, well above the federal legal minimum, they weren’t being humanitarians. They were responding to a tightening labor market.
The idea that blue collar jobs aren’t a pathway to the middle class and higher is antiquated and wrong. Factory work today is often highly sophisticated and knowledge-based with workers using intricate scientific equipment. After several years honing their skills, welders, mechanics, carpenters, and technicians can, earn upwards of $50,000 a year–which in most years still places a household with two such income earners in the top 25 percent for income. It’s true these aren’t glitzy or cushy jobs, but they do pay a good salary.
So why aren’t workers filling these available jobs–or getting the skills necessary to fill them. I would posit four impediments to putting more Americans back to work:
First, government discourages work. Welfare consists of dozens of different and overlapping federal and state income support programs. A recent Census Bureau study found more than 100 million Americans collecting a government check or benefit each month. The spike in families on food stamps, SSI, disability, public housing, and early Social Security remains very high even 5 years into this recovery. This should come as no surprise given the combination of the scaled back welfare work requirements and the steep phase-out of benefits as a recipient begins earning income.
If folks are unemployed by choice, that's their choice. Be unemployed, but gripe about being unemployed.
Here's an article from a liberal-ish source. The underlying message is pretty much the same.
The Atlantic -- "Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph:
President Obama's State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: "Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there."
It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years?
National Journal addressed just this topic in its special report on the rise and fall and rise of manufacturing. The spectacular graphic compares employment by sector in 1947 and 2007 and its most important lesson is a whopper. Manufacturing and agriculture employed one in three workers just after World War II. Today, those sectors employ only one in eight.
Where did all the making-stuff and growing-stuff jobs go? They went into services.
The champion in the last six decades was finance, insurance and real estate, which doubled its share of employment from 10.5% to 21.4%. But the broader service industry -- including professional and business services (a broad catch-all with marketing, managing, consulting, computer services) and health and education services -- also grew from about 13% to about 30%. Everything else has stayed pretty much the same. Government, wholesale/retail, information, and construction account for a little more than a third of the economy today, and they accounted for a little more than a third of the economy 60 years ago.
The big story about American jobs in the post-war period is this: The manufacturing/agriculture economy shrunk from 33% to 12%, and the services economy grew from 24% to 50%. I don't want to leave you with a facile explanation, but for the purposes of space, I think it's acceptable to say that as manufacturing and agriculture got more efficient, they required fewer American workers, while the services industry (which had slower efficiency gains since it has more person-to-person work) required more employees to keep up with the rising demand for consulting, nurses, teachers, computer technicians, and so on. This isn't a sad story, or a happy story. It's just what's happening, and it's not accurate to think we can change it very much by, say, creating a panel to badger China's trade practices, as the president has proposed.
Closing thought: Why isn't anybody talking about the tragic decline of agriculture? The industry's share of workers has fallen by 80 percent in the last 60 years. Nobody seems to think that's much of a tragedy, but we do consider it tragic that manufacturing has lost 60 percent of its share over the same period. Are we being hyperbolic about the decline of manufacturing, in particular, or are we being way too stoic about the greater loss in agriculture employment? Open question.
I should have made this point more clearly: Manufacturing jobs have declined as a share of the economy. But manufacturing hasn't declined as an industry. It's grown. By a lot. Here's total industrial production (manufacturing, utilities, and mining output) indexed to 1945. Output has sextupled.
President Obama's State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: "Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there."
It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years?
National Journal addressed just this topic in its special report on the rise and fall and rise of manufacturing. The spectacular graphic compares employment by sector in 1947 and 2007 and its most important lesson is a whopper. Manufacturing and agriculture employed one in three workers just after World War II. Today, those sectors employ only one in eight.
Where did all the making-stuff and growing-stuff jobs go? They went into services.
The champion in the last six decades was finance, insurance and real estate, which doubled its share of employment from 10.5% to 21.4%. But the broader service industry -- including professional and business services (a broad catch-all with marketing, managing, consulting, computer services) and health and education services -- also grew from about 13% to about 30%. Everything else has stayed pretty much the same. Government, wholesale/retail, information, and construction account for a little more than a third of the economy today, and they accounted for a little more than a third of the economy 60 years ago.
The big story about American jobs in the post-war period is this: The manufacturing/agriculture economy shrunk from 33% to 12%, and the services economy grew from 24% to 50%. I don't want to leave you with a facile explanation, but for the purposes of space, I think it's acceptable to say that as manufacturing and agriculture got more efficient, they required fewer American workers, while the services industry (which had slower efficiency gains since it has more person-to-person work) required more employees to keep up with the rising demand for consulting, nurses, teachers, computer technicians, and so on. This isn't a sad story, or a happy story. It's just what's happening, and it's not accurate to think we can change it very much by, say, creating a panel to badger China's trade practices, as the president has proposed.
Closing thought: Why isn't anybody talking about the tragic decline of agriculture? The industry's share of workers has fallen by 80 percent in the last 60 years. Nobody seems to think that's much of a tragedy, but we do consider it tragic that manufacturing has lost 60 percent of its share over the same period. Are we being hyperbolic about the decline of manufacturing, in particular, or are we being way too stoic about the greater loss in agriculture employment? Open question.
I should have made this point more clearly: Manufacturing jobs have declined as a share of the economy. But manufacturing hasn't declined as an industry. It's grown. By a lot. Here's total industrial production (manufacturing, utilities, and mining output) indexed to 1945. Output has sextupled.
More than just what one can read, when I go look on company websites, I see job listings galore:
- IBM: 8000+ job openings in the U.S. alone
- Boeing: 370 jobs in the U.S.
- Monsanto: 489 jobs
- General Motors: ~750 jobs
- Dupont: 217 jobs in the U.S.
- Intel: 1724 jobs
- Deloitte: 1200+ jobs
- Openings in St. Louis, MO: 27K+
- Openings in Pittsburgh, PA: 23K+
I mean let's be real. One doesn't need a "good manufacturing job," one needs a "good job." In the listings above, I saw plenty of them.
