Month: November 2011

It Isn’t That There’s No Jobs,

KevinLeave a comment

…it’s that there aren’t qualified people to fill the jobs that are out there.  Mike Rowe understands it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_pp8CHEQ0?feature=player_embedded]

Right now, American manufacturing is struggling to fill 200,000 vacant positions, I’m told.  And there are 450,000 openings today in trades, transportation, utilities.  The skill gap seems real, and it’s getting wider.  In Alabama a third of all skilled tradesmen are now over 55.  They’re retiring fast, and there’s really nobody there to replace them.  Alabama’s not alone.  A few months ago in Atlanta, I ran into Tom Vilsack, our Secretary of Agriculture.  Tom told me about a governor he knows who is unable to move forward on the construction of a new power plant.  The reason, I thought, was fascinating.  It wasn’t a lack of funds or lack of support, it was a lack of qualified welders.  

In general, people are surprised that high unemployment can exist at the same time as a skilled labor shortage.  But they shouldn’t be.  We’ve pretty much guaranteed it.  In high schools the vocational arts have all but vanished.  We’ve elevated the importance of higher education to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled as “alternative.”  Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and really valuable on-the-job training opportunities as vocational consolation prizes best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree.  And still, we talk about creating “millions of shovel-ready jobs” for a society that doesn’t really encourage people to pick up a shovel.

In a hundred different ways I think we’ve slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a good job into something that no longer looks like work.

If tough history does come, we’ll be learning those skills again because we must.

Now, go read the associated post at House of Eratosthenes.

About that 9% Unemployment Rate

Kevin1 Comment

My wife has been working part-time on-call at a local children’s shelter.  She had worked there full-time, but it’s pretty emotionally wringing, so she went part time instead.  However, they’ve been cutting hours a lot, so she’s only been working one or two days a week, tops.  So she’s decided to re-enter the workforce.

Now, granted, she left the full-time workforce about ten years ago to provide day-care for our grandkids, this after having worked at call centers for literally over a decade, first as an international long-distance operator, then as a dispatcher for a national automotive emergency service company when the company providing long-distance operator services lost their contract.  Since then she’s worked at a couple of public schools, at the children’s shelter, and one short stint as a deli worker at a local grocery store.

So now she finds that to apply for a job, you pretty much HAVE to have a computer with internet access – something she really doesn’t like.  She’s pretty much an internet widow as it is.  Having to, figuratively, ask my mistress for a job grates on her more than a little bit.  But what bothered her more than anything are the qualifications employers are asking for, and the stupid damned psychological tests they make you take now.  For example:  one local position open was for a part-time parking lot attendant.  They wanted someone with accounting experience.  Excuse me?  To sit in a booth and collect parking fees for minimum wage?  Part time?  That position, unsurprisingly, is still open.  I looked at some of the job openings out there.  I realize there are a lot of unemployed people out there, but since when do you need a college degree to work at a call center?  For $8 an hour?  (Maybe that Master’s in Comparative Theology will pay off for someone!  Kinda tough to pay off the $120k in student loans on that salary, though.)

More to the point, though, pretty much every online application included a psych test – a timed psych test.  I was prompted, however, to do this post because of today’s Dilbert cartoon:

Dilbert.com

No wonder it’s tough to get a job.

Interesting Data Point

KevinLeave a comment

I picked up the current issue of Tucson’s alt.weekly, and ran across an opinion piece concerning a local artist whose subject matter is the border and narcotics trafficking.  Near the bottom of the piece was this, however – and bear in mind, this is the local lefty rag:

Consider the scandal du jour, the “Fast and Furious” sting operation in which U.S. agencies secretly facilitated the purchase and transmittal of thousands of weapons from U.S. gun dealers to Mexican drug cartels. It may seem like an isolated instance of bad judgment, corruption or incompetence, but it’s really a perfectly logical dynamic of a vast industry that annually generates somewhere between $350 billion and $500 billion—a massive, global current of cash that actually kept some banks afloat during the 2008 financial crisis.

A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel has testified that his organization received from U.S. and Mexican authorities guarantees of immunity and all the weapons it would need to crush its competitors—an ongoing initiative that’s resulted in an incredible escalation of violence in Mexico over the past few years.

It’s quite possible that “Fast and Furious” was not a sting at all, but was intended to aid the Sinaloans in their efforts to recapture the quieter “good ol’ days” when they enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

(Emphasis in original.)  Hmmm.  When even your team isn’t covering for you anymore….

Welcome to My World, Rush

KevinLeave a comment

From Ann Althouse‘s comments via Instapundit:

I think the thing that made Rush so popular was his sense of cheerful optimism. Unlike the O’Rilleys and Savages of the world, Rush has always been optimistic about the future.

I think that the Obama presidency has been such a disaster of Biblical proportions that Rush is no longer optimistic about the future.
— Jim Howard

One of the things about Bill Whittle that amazes me is his nearly unflappable optimism. I wish I could share it, but I don’t.