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"I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs." No shit... not new

• eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  It is news, because the "skills gap meme" has gotten deeply embedded in our entire culture and public consciousness. In everything from skilled manufacturing and trades to research science, heavy engineering and computer programming, there's a meme that we face a "skills gap": a working class that can't make good wages because it lacks skills, and employers who can't upgrade their productivity because they can't find skilled workers. Problem is, whenever you investigate it in almost any field, you find the explanation given here: that employers want lots of skills for very little money. Software is almost the only exception, and software salaries only started trending up in any real, serious, "shortage" sort of way a year or two ago as the latest wave of Silicon Valley start-up hiring hit. Hell, in software it took start-ups to raise salaries because the BigCos even had blatantly collusive anti-poaching agreements to hold salaries down. There's a salary gap, not a skills gap. There's a unicorn shortage, not a workhorse shortage (to blatantly rip off a noble Redditor of /r/programming).