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Have you seen this man? If so, please call your local employment agency at once.
Bloomberg News has its collective hair on fire over a crisis in American enterprise, and it’s not the staggering stock market or the idiotic trade war or the shuttered government. It’s a persistent and growing lack of labor for those American businesses that are still able to actually make and/or sell products. “The shortfall is being driven,” says Bloomberg, “by a shrinking supply of manual and low-pay service workers as the labor force becomes more educated and less able to take on such jobs.” You see what education does for you.
What kind of jobs are we talking about? Construction, manufacturing, truck driving, food services, nursing and anything else that is “physically demanding.” One staffing executive — obviously an oligarch who knows how to address the lower classes with delicacy — calls it “an acute shortage of talent in the blue collar space.”
A home builder I talked to recently was a lot blunter when he explained to me that his biggest problem is finding workers. He told me that eight out of ten job applicants fail the drug test, and half the people he does hire simply don’t show up for work, or show up and won’t work. Sounds like a cultural problem, doesn’t it?
Nationally, The Washington Post reported in October that there were more than seven million jobs available in the U.S., a million more than the number of people looking for jobs. (Of course, the job seekers are often not living anywhere near the job openings.) U.S. manufacturers predict they will need nearly 5 million new workers in the next ten years, and expect to find only half of them.
The good news for workers is that increasingly desperate employers are — incrementally, reluctantly — raising wages and offering perks to entice applicants. The bad news continues to be that physically demanding thing.
Meanwhile, in Tijuana, Mexico, seven thousand migrants fleeing climate change, crime and poverty in Central America, are clamoring for sanctuary so that they can take jobs in construction, manufacturing, food service, custodial work — you know, anything that is physically demanding. According to recent studies, three-quarters of all immigrants believe the way to succeed in America is hard work; they are far less likely than American citizens to commit crimes: their criminal conviction rate (in Texas, according to the CATO Institute) is 719 per hundred thousand; for native-born Americans the rate is over twice that — 1,797 per hundred thousand. There are no recent studies of any credibility that indicate that these people are criminals, gang members or terrorists. None. Zero.
So. On the one hand, seven thousand hard working, low-crime, family-values people looking for jobs. On the other hand, seven million unfilled jobs. Two insoluble problems, side by side, with a fence between. Hm.
Any country worth its flag would, in this circumstance, organize the biggest jobs fair ever, in Tijuana, with a thousand desperate corporations signing up several thousand new employees with the enthusiastic help of ICE and free government transportation to their new homes. If every one of them came in, they would not change the percentage of immigrants among the US population, which has hovered around 13% for years.
So that’s what a country that had any sense would do. What did we do? I’m going to go look it up.
Damn good argument. This old socialist (and life-long manual laborer) wants to refute all of it with every fiber of his being, but he can’t.
I could say, always, it comes down to this:
“…increasingly desperate employers are — incrementally, reluctantly — raising wages and offering perks to entice applicants.”
And I would be right, if it was 20 years ago. In today’s America, I must admit, much of it boils down to:
“The bad news continues to be that physically demanding thing.”
If (big if) those 7,000,000 jobs paid a living wage they would be filled overnight. Physically demanding or not. And those unable to pass a drug screen just might have a reason to forgo their self defeating behavior. Globalization destroyed our middle class. NAFTA is a prime example. It’s obvious it did not benefit the folks who wish to evade our borders. In 1991 Presidential candidate Ross Perot opposed NAFTA using the phrase “giant sucking sound” in reference to the loss of middle class jobs being shipped to Mexico. Mr. Perot lost the election while the tax paying middle class lost their “living wage” jobs.
I got a similar response from my barber last week here in Melbourne when I told him all his employees that have cut my hair in the past are foreigners (Italian, Japanese, Swedish, British, French, Indonesian and Korean): “Aussies don’t want to work, so I hire foreigners.”
Granted I am in Melbourne, where working with your hands (unless you’re holding a camera or gesticulating on a stage) isn’t very fashionable.
As a side note, seeing how Aussies generally don’t want to grow and harvest their own food (as neither do Americans, Canadians, Brits, etc.), but don’t have a nearby pool of cheap labour, Australia offers extended visas to backpackers who spend a few months working in certain parts of the country (which generally means farms).
Australians are going to be in for a rude surprise once that well of cheap backpacker labour dries up due to cost-prohibitive travel.
Great article. The problem affects the military as well. Willing candidates are often denied entry due to criminal histories, lack of education, and health problems – mostly obesity and drug/alcohol problems. Recruiters are having serious difficulties meeting quotas.
As far as the general job market is concerned, I would include compulsive smart phone use as a real detriment. My daughter – a true millennial – says, “smart phones are the cigarettes of my generation.” She’s right; I believe that these devices can be physically as well as psychologically debilitating.
“Sounds like a cultural problem, doesn’t it?” Indeed! But this is not a topic one can publicly examine in depth without risking being accused of, shall we say, ‘insensitivity to issues of Diversity’…So I’m gonna’ leave it alone for the present.
Look, I get it. Every time people like Tom write a humanitarian piece on immigration, and people like me agree, the Koch brothers pop a champagne cork in celebration.
Gandhi was dead nuts wrong. Evil can’t help but win, because the better angels of our nature are just a part of Evil’s workforce.
My company has two plants in Mexico and they can’t find enough workers either. (You know, workers who can read, who show up for work, and don’t hop over to a competitor’s plant with no notice.) Logically Mexico should also be doing what you suggest.
The mob at the border looks and smells like a staged event, to me. How about we just enforce the immigration laws that we have. You know, use due process to determine who might make a good worker and citizen, and who would not. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, it is an invasion.
Oh horsepuckey! As already pointed out on this blog, would-be immigrants massing at our border are some combination of political, economic, and climate refugees. Staged event? Evidence, please! Also, unless you want to liberalize the meanings of words to nothingness, invasion is entirely the wrong word. Others deploying that meme are just trying to score rhetorical points. Seems to have worked with you.
I’d love if existing immigration law could be applied to the problem. Considering the natalist mood (being charitable there, it’s really garden-variety racism) of the U.S. these days, that body of law is wholly inadequate, which is why we’re now embroiled in a humanitarian crisis less severe than what’s also going on in Europe.
I’m not sure what you mean: are our immigration laws too liberal or too restrictive? Or are they just right, but we’re not enforcing them?
The very foundation of any Sovereign nation is a secure border. Ask Israeli. Or the Romans. And to paint any one who disagrees, with the broad brush of “garden-variety racism” is the one who is deploying a meme to try to score rhetorical points.
Arnold, you’re misreading me and must not be paying attention to the news. Plenty of folks all the way up to the chief exec have been stoking fears of (inevitable) demographic change, which has reactivated brazen racism mostly driven underground since the Civil Rights Era. Absolutely border control and immigration law are integral to sovereignty; I never suggested otherwise. However, considering that the world is becoming far less hospitable than the recent past for a variety of reasons, moves like the Muslim travel ban, shutting down the government, and threatening to close the border entirely (effectively holding Congress hostage to approve funding the border wall) demonstrate that the U.S. government is part of that rising hostility and no friend to immigrants. Current activities (e.g., long-term detainment, separating kids from parents, and mass deportations) show that immigration policy and law are simply not equipped to handle mass migration. I expect things to get far worse. And no, I don’t possess the wisdom to offer a neat solution.
-The original article should read: open positions for physically demanding jobs cannot be filled *at the current rate of pay*
– Do you needs a day off? good luck with that…
– You have 2 kids and need health insurance? just have you paycheck wired directly to the insurance company.
– On work ethics: if you spent 25 years treating your rank and file like worthless, disposable kleenex employees, they tend to believe it and treat their job accordingly.
Usually like your writing Tom but this one is bollocks. The picture you are painting is the race to the bottom – to serfdom. Pay people a decent wage and you will have no problems filling the jobs. Unfortunately the system can’t afford it anymore as there is less energy to around, so the relentless march to the bottom continues.
I am totally with nikoB with two exceptions:
1. In the first sentence substitute “love” for “like”.
2. The trickle of desperate people at the border will, inevitably, soon turn to a tsunami and in order to have some sovereignty and security, that tsunami must be stopped somehow.
Get ready for a loss of sovereignty and security.
When I started a career in construction I had health insurance and vacation pay. Twenty five years later my paycheck is less, I don’t have health insurance, and a vacation is what happens when I toss my back out so bad I can’t get out of bed. I loved building stuff. I was a construction nerd. Maybe the problem is not a lack of applicants.