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I feel it's a cycle of mistrust. Companies don't want to spend as much time training junior workers or apprentices because they often leave shortly after achie

I feel it's a cycle of mistrust. Companies don't want to spend as much time training junior workers or apprentices because they often leave shortly after achieving proficiency. But this lack of perceived loyalty comes from a rational viewpoint. After the shift in business culture in the 80s, where workers were laid off in bulk even if the company was in good financial health, workers woke up to the new reality. (To be fair, the era of the "company man" only encompasses half a century, so it's not necessarily a right or natural phenomenon) I remember in the 80s and early 90s it was common for a salaried worker to stay at the same company for decades. Since the 2000s, it appears to be less prevalent. The solution would appear to be to make conditions good and wages competitive for the newly-trained junior workers to improve retention. However, some industries risk their competitiveness with labor costs above a certain level. I wonder how much of the shortage is due to the intransigence of capital versus true limits for competitive pay. I suspect the former for almost all specialized positions experiencing shortfalls, such as pilots, machinists, CNC operators, and millwrights. For unskilled labor I suspect that the wages cannot climb much higher without harming profits or risking competition from overseas.

WalterBright 10y ago
I read in the newspaper that Boeing has a skills gap with their machinists. The skilled older ones are retiring, and the younger ones aren't experienced enough. There are few in the middle. What happened? When they had layoffs, the machinist union rules specified the ones with the least number of years of service got laid off first. This left Boeing with a very unbalanced workforce.
- madengr 10y ago
  Yep, same with my aerospace employer. Massive layoffs in the early 90's, and the young ones were let go due to union seniority. Now there is a sharp bimodal age distribution from the mass hiring to replace the retirees.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. One reason why I am skeptical when people say unions built the middle class. Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Only when the management's time horizon is short. It probably would have been prudent to do a long term ROI on those layoffs. Slashing the executive bonus pool may have reduced those layoffs significantly and saved the company far more down the line.
  - bsder 10y ago
    If a company has a bimodal age distribution, the question to be asking is "Why didn't they think about hiring someone occasionally over the last 15-20 years?" Of course, the answer is that no corporate manager wanted to miss his number by hiring another person. So, the managers kicked the problem down the road and hoped that someone else would take the hit. > Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. Everybody gets old, you know. Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare. > Employer competition probably does more for that than unions. Agreed. But the same anti-union people are also against anti-monopoly regulations.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      > Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare. This is essentially what GP is saying. Unions kept the expensive older worker at the expense of firing the younger workers. If the workers they keep are more expensive, then they have to fire proportionally more younger workers to make it up.
  - Terr_ 10y ago
    Well, suppose for a moment the position or job really was "dying", though. (Which is hard to predict accurately, but everybody gets pessimistic in times of huge layoffs.) Arguably the older workers are the more-vulnerable section, since they have fewer opportunities (and lifetime) to re-train.
Retric 10y ago
It's easy to keep people after training, just pay them more and avoid toxic environments. Companies don't do this because they make bank underpaying people and burning them out.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Companies don't make bank burning people out. Burning people out is a sign of organizational... corruption. There are more incompetent managers than competent ones, so you get things like this due to that. In some, end-of-life organizations, burning people out can be a ... semi-rational decision, but .. it's an end-of-life company...
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Some industries appear to operate on the "burn out model", take game dev or managed IT services firms for example.
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      Even in creative fields. All those young actors spending years on underpaid bit parts on off-Broadway and low budget Hollywood productions. Most of them make less than an average blue collar job. See also college athletes. A lineman at a top-tier football school in the U.S. ends up with all sorts of chronic injuries, possibly including brain damage. Very few of them make it to the pros. None are supposed to be paid at all except in kind for degrees, room, and board.
      - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
        Blue collar jobs pay reasonably well after a few years. You might have to work pretty hard and hustle to move up the food chain. Trades gigs can be "nice house and a boat" levels of lucrative. This is exactly why I think those football programs should be professionalized. The program should be licensed by the school - logos and all - but completely financially independent. Obviously, the money says otherwise ( football donors are a very significant stream of income ). And you'd quickly develop a "New York Yankees' problem - wealthy programs would have more money. I have a Son In Law Candidate who is physically arranged like a left offensive tackle. Even in high school, the six hour practices put him off it. Part of me says that "the love of the game" should be encouraged, but as you note... the costs are substantial. And I think the real money in sports is trading on the player's name, anyway.
vtange 10y ago
There is also some outright "pickyness" coming from the younger generations against work that's seen as manual and unsophisticated, at least I perceived this in the architecture school I went to for a number of years. I remember very clearly many professors lamenting the fact that with each passing year the student body grew more reliant on technology and computer-assisted crafting and grew less interested in manual handicraft. It's going to sound cliche but younger folks are more attracted to work that looks attractive. Everyone wants to be able to tell others at a party that he works a respectable job for a well-known company. The media doesn't idolize craftsmen and truck drivers as much as tech whizzes, so something drops under the radar.
- analog31 10y ago
  Oddly enough, in my industry, we've been making technology easy to use, that once required understanding the nuts and bolts. As a result, we can't hire people who understand the nuts and bolts any more.
  - NegativeLatency 10y ago
    What industry is that?
    - analog31 10y ago
      We make electronic measurement instruments. "Back in the day," sophisticated instruments evolved from laboratory curiosities to industrial products, but still required experts to set up, operate, and in some cases program.
      - linkregister 10y ago
        Something like high-end Fluke or Agilent kit? Those are some really nice rigs.
petre 10y ago
Cycle of mistrust or not, this would likely work better than gradually increasing the retirement age as it happens in Europe. The free market always provides better solutions than state or superstate bureaucrats. In the EU they just throw regulation at any problem.
- dasil003 10y ago
  Disagree here, consider health care. Free market solutions here have led to healthcare being tied to your job, and only big employers able to gain any negotiation leverage, so individuals and small companies get screwed, big company employees are scared to leave, sometimes for this issue alone, and in effect, the desired "insurance" effect is undermined as people get sliced into smaller and smaller buckets. Despite what conservative propaganda would have you believe, nationalized health care does not preclude private health care on top, and in fact it makes the market for that care much more competitive and reasonable for individuals who seek it.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Id like to see the figures on the cost of ss and medicade given the aging population

WalterBright 10y ago

I read in the newspaper that Boeing has a skills gap with their machinists. The skilled older ones are retiring, and the younger ones aren't experienced enough. There are few in the middle. What happened? When they had layoffs, the machinist union rules specified the ones with the least number of years of service got laid off first. This left Boeing with a very unbalanced workforce.

madengr 10y ago
Yep, same with my aerospace employer. Massive layoffs in the early 90's, and the young ones were let go due to union seniority. Now there is a sharp bimodal age distribution from the mass hiring to replace the retirees.
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. One reason why I am skeptical when people say unions built the middle class. Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Only when the management's time horizon is short. It probably would have been prudent to do a long term ROI on those layoffs. Slashing the executive bonus pool may have reduced those layoffs significantly and saved the company far more down the line.
- bsder 10y ago
  If a company has a bimodal age distribution, the question to be asking is "Why didn't they think about hiring someone occasionally over the last 15-20 years?" Of course, the answer is that no corporate manager wanted to miss his number by hiring another person. So, the managers kicked the problem down the road and hoped that someone else would take the hit. > Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. Everybody gets old, you know. Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare. > Employer competition probably does more for that than unions. Agreed. But the same anti-union people are also against anti-monopoly regulations.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    > Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare. This is essentially what GP is saying. Unions kept the expensive older worker at the expense of firing the younger workers. If the workers they keep are more expensive, then they have to fire proportionally more younger workers to make it up.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  Well, suppose for a moment the position or job really was "dying", though. (Which is hard to predict accurately, but everybody gets pessimistic in times of huge layoffs.) Arguably the older workers are the more-vulnerable section, since they have fewer opportunities (and lifetime) to re-train.

Retric 10y ago

It's easy to keep people after training, just pay them more and avoid toxic environments. Companies don't do this because they make bank underpaying people and burning them out.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Companies don't make bank burning people out. Burning people out is a sign of organizational... corruption. There are more incompetent managers than competent ones, so you get things like this due to that. In some, end-of-life organizations, burning people out can be a ... semi-rational decision, but .. it's an end-of-life company...
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Some industries appear to operate on the "burn out model", take game dev or managed IT services firms for example.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    Even in creative fields. All those young actors spending years on underpaid bit parts on off-Broadway and low budget Hollywood productions. Most of them make less than an average blue collar job. See also college athletes. A lineman at a top-tier football school in the U.S. ends up with all sorts of chronic injuries, possibly including brain damage. Very few of them make it to the pros. None are supposed to be paid at all except in kind for degrees, room, and board.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Blue collar jobs pay reasonably well after a few years. You might have to work pretty hard and hustle to move up the food chain. Trades gigs can be "nice house and a boat" levels of lucrative. This is exactly why I think those football programs should be professionalized. The program should be licensed by the school - logos and all - but completely financially independent. Obviously, the money says otherwise ( football donors are a very significant stream of income ). And you'd quickly develop a "New York Yankees' problem - wealthy programs would have more money. I have a Son In Law Candidate who is physically arranged like a left offensive tackle. Even in high school, the six hour practices put him off it. Part of me says that "the love of the game" should be encouraged, but as you note... the costs are substantial. And I think the real money in sports is trading on the player's name, anyway.

vtange 10y ago

There is also some outright "pickyness" coming from the younger generations against work that's seen as manual and unsophisticated, at least I perceived this in the architecture school I went to for a number of years. I remember very clearly many professors lamenting the fact that with each passing year the student body grew more reliant on technology and computer-assisted crafting and grew less interested in manual handicraft. It's going to sound cliche but younger folks are more attracted to work that looks attractive. Everyone wants to be able to tell others at a party that he works a respectable job for a well-known company. The media doesn't idolize craftsmen and truck drivers as much as tech whizzes, so something drops under the radar.

analog31 10y ago
Oddly enough, in my industry, we've been making technology easy to use, that once required understanding the nuts and bolts. As a result, we can't hire people who understand the nuts and bolts any more.
- NegativeLatency 10y ago
  What industry is that?
  - analog31 10y ago
    We make electronic measurement instruments. "Back in the day," sophisticated instruments evolved from laboratory curiosities to industrial products, but still required experts to set up, operate, and in some cases program.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Something like high-end Fluke or Agilent kit? Those are some really nice rigs.

petre 10y ago

Cycle of mistrust or not, this would likely work better than gradually increasing the retirement age as it happens in Europe. The free market always provides better solutions than state or superstate bureaucrats. In the EU they just throw regulation at any problem.

dasil003 10y ago
Disagree here, consider health care. Free market solutions here have led to healthcare being tied to your job, and only big employers able to gain any negotiation leverage, so individuals and small companies get screwed, big company employees are scared to leave, sometimes for this issue alone, and in effect, the desired "insurance" effect is undermined as people get sliced into smaller and smaller buckets. Despite what conservative propaganda would have you believe, nationalized health care does not preclude private health care on top, and in fact it makes the market for that care much more competitive and reasonable for individuals who seek it.
walshemj 10y ago
Id like to see the figures on the cost of ss and medicade given the aging population