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One in five American men don't work: Where's the outrage?
- fatalisk 15y agoWhat's really interesting here is that companies are reporting awesome earnings[1], yet they're still resting on their laurels when it comes to hiring. And, I think everyone is outraged when it comes to what's going on in Washington right now. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/18038403/ http://www.cnbc.com/id/18038403/
- cageface 15y agoOr, to put it another way, companies just don't need as many unskilled workers as they did a decade ago.
- Hyena 15y agoAll companies need unskilled people: you train them so your business can expand. That's where global supply chain managers and database programmers came from originally--and in many cases still do--they don't fall from the clouds. The issue is that a lot of these companies are only expanding overseas, so they're not really ready to hire and train people. Much of their profits come from cutting back on their junior staff, from laying off the next generation of skilled workers.
- ars 15y ago> you train them so your business can expand That only worked when people stayed with a single employer for years. These days they would take the training and get a better job somewhere else.
- tomjen3 15y agoWhat is it they say? "Better to educate your people and risk they leave than to not, and risk they stay?" But yeah, training would be more likely if you either took a lower salary (part of your income comes in the form of training) or agreed to stay with the firm for a number of years.
- Hyena 15y agoMost businesses take about 6 months to train people, it seems, from informal polling of acquaintances.
- ericd 15y agoI don't want to hire a DBA that's never touched a DB before at this point, though - since that field has been around for a while now, there's now a lot of signaling where before noone could distinguish themselves. Those who have the aptitude and/or are motivated/interested in the field have made themselves into DBAs or something similar that could easily transition on their own time. I don't want to hire a warm body that's looking to work just for a paycheck. If you've never bothered to learn to program, I don't want to hire you as a programmer, even if I think I could train you. There is a shortage of employable people in the US, and a glut of unemployable. To me, this means that our culture and our education system need a lot of help.
- Hyena 15y agoMy point is that when DBAs were new(ish), you had a lot of people you had to train to become them. We don't see this as a problem now because we're past that point in the database arena. The people I knew who ran databases when I was in high school had all learned it on a job somewhere. It's only with my generation (it seems) that DBA was something you got a lot of external training for. Some of the jobs quoted in the article are short workers because they're relatively new. "Managing integrated supply chains" is something most workers would have learned only recently, since before the spread of IT in the late 1990s/2000s it was pretty much the province of major corporations.
- cageface 15y agoAs an employer, I'd be willing to take a chance on a new employee without experience if he/she could demonstrate some aptitude and some effort to learn independently. I got my first software job with no formal training this way. I spent several months studying Java on my own and did well enough on an interview test to persuade the company to give me a shot at a low salary. However, I don't think I'd be interesting in bringing somebody up from absolutely nothing. It's just too big a risk and an investment. I think the fundamental problem is that the American public education system just isn't training people in the skills they need to succeed in a modern economy.
- nowarninglabel 15y agoYes! It's the U.S. educational system that refuses to move into the 21st century that is not providing the needed skills to new workers.
- Hyena 15y agoThis isn't going to help us. The "reform the education system" model is usually an incredibly stupid idea. The issue is that you're essentially farming: you take 22 years to grow a new crop of skilled workers. In the education reform arena, what we should concentrate more on is patching workers. Most people could probably gain hackable proficiency in languages like Java or Python in 6 months or less. We need to be concentrating on this sort of thing, not making high school and college better. An example: the retraining benefits attached to UI are often meager and highly targeted towards special interests (the construction and healthcare industries seem to loom rather large in my conversations with EDD). What we could be doing instead, at least in California, is directing the CCs and CSUs to create 6 month curricula in more portable skills. Again, we could be teaching scripting languages plus basic data analysis skills.
- cageface 15y agoWhat if it takes 20 years to grow a crop of skilled workers? Go ahead and walk down to the unemployment center, pick 20 people at random, and let me know how their Python coding is coming along six months from now. I was able to jump into programming because I was lucky enough to get a solid math & science education that nurtured whatever innate talent I had. The kind of analytical thinking it takes to do higher-level information work can't be taught from scratch in a few months. Both my parents teach at the University level and they tell me that the students they see coming into their classes now can't even write a simple, logically coherent essay.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYou can interpret that several ways. Perhaps those awesome earnings are short-term gains due to not paying wages for all those empty jobs, but long-term losses due to faltering growth as a result of all those empty jobs?
- pedalpete 15y agoI'm surprised the figure quoted in the opening paragraph would include incarcerated men along with those on disability and unemployed. According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta... 2.3 million people were incarcerated in the US, and 93% are male, so that's 2.1 million men. The article also says 4.3 Americans have been jobless for months if not years. If this number includes those who are in prison, that means that nearly half of what is counted as unemployment is actually within the prison system. Part of me says there are way too many people in prison, but the other side says, what if these people weren't in prison? Would the actual number of people competing for jobs be higher?
- glimcat 15y agoSimple arithmetic says yes, there would be more competition for jobs. But you're talking about a dramatic change in US public policy. A first-order approximation is not sufficient, and higher-order approximations depend heavily on what guesses you want to make about the social outcomes.
- ars 15y ago> Simple arithmetic says yes, there would be more competition for jobs. But there would also be more demand since those same people would also be buying things.
- JamesBlair 15y agoWhat's the alternative to being in prison and what are their prospects? I suspect that employers of the sorts of jobs that the incarcerated could find are probably not that eager to hire people with a history of drug use[-1] regardless of its legality, but I do not have any data. [-1]I also suspect that this is the main source of the incarcerations. But I'm not a US resident, I don't have any data here, either.
- sixtofour 15y agoViolent crime is the main source of incarcerations. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/corrtyp.cfm http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/corrtyp.cfm
- glimcat 15y agoOkay, it sucks. What do you want me to do about it? There are not many obvious sustainable solutions that don't involve the government suddenly deciding to reallocate pork funding to major public works or otherwise taking unlikely actions which would dramatically alter the current climate. Meanwhile, it's a good time to start a business. It probably won't create many jobs and it might not take off, but at a minimum it will be good experience and it will look better than a few blank years on the resume.
- intended 15y agoHmm, just had a thought - wouldnt it make sense, based on what you are saying, for people to just lie and say that they started a business which failed during the time they were unemployed?
- glimcat 15y agoMost likely, that will just end up wasting everyone's time when it turns out that you do not, in fact, have any experience whatsoever with business development or product design.
- Hyena 15y agoI think the article does a pretty good job. I've figured several times that there is no "talent shortage" but a "training shortage": companies want people with skills they learn on the job but are unwilling to actually train anyone. So you've got a bunch of companies sitting around waiting for a miracle to happen. Maybe HR imagines that a Google product exec will fall from the sky and accept $40k a year.
- mlg 15y agoEven traditionally 'entry level' jobs that historically don't need a four-year degree are like this these days - secretary/receptionist jobs are almost always looking for people with two or three years of prior experience. I wonder how much of this is due to the job market. Is it a supply and demand issue, where there are simply so many applicants that HR can sit back and wait for the perfect candidate? Or is the reluctance to hire less-experienced workers a long-term behavior shift that will stick around even if the worker supply dries up?
- seanmcq 15y ago"or getting by on the paychecks of wives" This is pretty rampant sexism for 2011. Don't want it to go unnoticed.
- sliverstorm 15y agoIn what way? Not that I disagree, but please expand on your statement?
- seanmcq 15y agoSure. It's been more than a generation since women started making more money than men in some households due to increases in equality between the sexes. The phrasing and positioning used implies that a stay-at-home dad is something that we should be reacting to as an economic problem. In other words, it required the assumption that men are the proper breadwinners in heterosexual households.
- prayag 15y agoI don't know why you are being downvoted. This is absolutely correct.
- sliverstorm 15y agoPerhaps the article writer was making the assumption you imply, but there's potentially more to it than that. Members of households all need to contribute, and while I am neither female nor married, I have heard from many married females that unemployed men do not generally tend to assume the duties of housekeeping. That is to say, the wife winds up both breadwinning and housekeeping, and the man does not contribute. This is broken. It's sexist of me to generalize (and certainly I hope if I wind up married and unemployed, I won't let my partner take all the burden), and it may well not be what the author was thinking of, but if we take feminine anecdotes at face value there are more reasons to encourage men to be breadwinners than simply because it's their role.
- ericd 15y ago
- daimyoyo 15y agoI have experienced this first hand. I have applied for a LOT of jobs in the last 2 years and one of two things happens: They don't talk to me, or they do, and I sail past the preliminary interviews only to get rejected after the background check. I am not a felon, a terrorist, or a scourge of society. I have bad credit.(Funny/sad aside, I once went to Best Buy to see if I could get a card to finance something with the idea of improving my credit score. I was rejected summarily. I was trying to buy a toaster. I literally can't finance a toaster.) This scarlet letter had precluded me from any job paying a living wage. And that's why I'm retraining myself. No one cares what the FICO score of a talented software engineer is. At least, that's what I desperately hope the case is. For recruiters out there: Do you care about the credit of a potential coder?
- Nate75Sanders 15y agoForgive my ignorance: What jobs are asking you your credit score?
- david927 15y agoI saw it a couple years ago in the States, for technical and managerial jobs, and I was shocked and horrified.
- oneofthefive 15y agoIf you want to be a programmer at a financial firm they usually care about your credit score.
- achompas 15y agoThis makes sense, as financial firms want to avoid cash-strapped employees who might sell HFT algorithms to competing firms for money.
- oneofthefive 15y agoYour credit score has nothing to do with being strapped for cash. You can have plenty of cash and a bad or nonexistent credit score.
- martythemaniak 15y agoThere's lots of outrage - it's called the Tea Party.
- sage_joch 15y agoIt's unfortunate there is so much misinformed, incoherent outrage, when there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be upset.
- Helianthus 15y agoand it's summarily laughed at. edit: not that it doesn't deserve to be.
- pyre 15y agoFrom the little I know about the Tea Party it seems to be a dumping ground for anyone who ever thought that the government didn't listen to them. From people that think we should ban gay people from 'merica, to people that think that socializing health care is an Obama 'Nazi policy.'
- ck2 15y agoSo if a tool made in China cost $20 and the same kind made in USA cost $100, which one do you think people are going to buy at the hardware store (even if the one made in China lasts 1/4th as long). What if there was a tax that made the one made in China cost $70 - you think the one made in USA would have a fighting chance? I think so. It would create a whole bunch of jobs because there would be less impulse to move jobs overseas. What if that $50 was used for single payer health care so that "job providers" didn't have pay for health insurance or play that game and compete with the international market.
- tomjen3 15y agoThen everything else would become way more expensive and the quality of life would decrease a lot. Protectionism never many a country rich. Only production of goods and services that people actually want will do that. This may require people to upgrade their skills, but so be it.
- ars 15y agoYou need to think on a larger scale. If everyone had to spend 3 times as much on the things they buy, then they would have even less available money than they do now. So they would probably stop buying, which would really hurt the economy. Or they would cut out health insurance and other things.
- jlangenauer 15y agoOr they would buy fewer things that they actually needed, and that would probably last longer. Not an idle consideration on a planet with finite resources and an ecosystem being pushed beyond its limits.
- ars 15y ago> Or they would buy fewer things that they actually needed, and that would probably last longer. Unfortunately that's a recipe for economic disaster. > Not an idle consideration on a planet with finite resources and an ecosystem being pushed beyond its limits. Not really. The resources are effectively infinite because they are never destroyed, they only get changed into various different forms. We can keep making things, then remaking them into different things basically forever. And the ecosystem is not anywhere near its limits (not that making less things would help it even if it was). There are definitely areas where things are bad, but the good areas far outweigh the bad.
- CrystalKoo 15y agoOn top of that 20%, there are people that are working part time to make ends meet. So in reality, the number of people that need full time jobs is much higher.
- webwright 15y agoI'd wager close to another 1 in 5 works for the government directly or indirectly. And I assume we're not including retirees in any of this. The ratio of retirees to workers continues to get worse. In the 1940s, there were 42 workers per retiree. Today there are 3.3 workers per retiree. So you have a shrinking group of people who are actually producing (total workforce minus unemployed, minus goverment workers, minus workers who exist due to government purchasing) and a growing number of people who get a chunk of that production. This does not end well.
- doctoboggan 15y agoI am curious as to why you state that government employees are not producing?
- diolpah 15y agoBecause hamstringing and stifling business activity that does not comply with the interests or arbitrary whims of politically connected powers is not an economically productive activity?
- danenania 15y agoSome of them produce useful goods and services, but at a drastically lower efficiency than the private sector due to lack of competition and economic incentives (spending other people´s money). Still it´s good that someone is planning out the roads and running fire departments, even if they´re bad at it. On the other hand, the government also produces a lot of counterproductive ´services´ like war, financial meltdowns, and software patents. It´s in no way obvious that government employees as a whole do less harm than good.
- paulcedars 15y agoI think that your position is ideological and not correct. The government provides institutions that lower risk to the rest of the economy and enable more stability and growth. Is regulatory capture a problem at some agencies? Sure. Are some departments outdated or ineffective? Sure. But it is irresponsible to look at a few cases and claim that the entire government is a problem. You want to see less government? Visit Yemen or gangster Russia
- davidw 15y agoUh, the outrage is over on reddit. Let's leave it to them, please. There are plenty of things to be outraged about to the point we could innondate the site with them. Down the path of "outrage!" lies discussions about abortion, gay rights, appropriate levels of taxation, health care systems and any number of other topics that people feel VERY STRONGLY about.
- known 15y agoThe Growing Divide Between Silicon Valley And Unemployed America http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/16/tale-of-two-countries-silicon-valley-unemployed/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/16/tale-of-two-countries-silic...