Plenty of Factory Jobs, but Now Too Few Applicants

Labor follows basic laws of supply & demand. Maybe he should consider paying more.

 

Well Walmart is the exception right?

 

How so? Walmart employees super low-skill people and pays the equivalent wages. This guy is paying $10/hr but maybe he wants people who are more skilled and normally make $20 or more per hour. In that case, he's underpaying and thus not finding qualified applicants and thus should pay more.

 

I wouldn't want to work in a dead end 12 dollar Texas job.

Though I would work for less for a few years if i earned skills and experience to make triple that much

 

The government only pays people for so long - I believe it's something like 50-60 weeks. The labor supply has been high for 4 years, so there should be a ton of people available that are no longer getting unemployment benefits, so I don't think that's necessarily the cause of his inability to hire. I'm purely assuming - but I would guess he's not willing to pay wages that fit the skills he wants.

 

Broaden your pool, parolees, older folks, what have you; or just do what the military's done for years to attract young people to low-paying, dangerous, stressful work: pick up a mortgage (?) or tuition check every once in a while.

 

I believe he was referring to welfare, food stamps, etc.

 

Why don't the unemployed just reduce their wage demands and get employed?

The question is whether there is a structural problem. It is an open question at this point.

 

They certainly can. But here, the employer is the one complaining. If the article was about an unemployed person complaining, then I would suggest that person consider reducing their wage demands.

Those all have time limits too, as of the 1996 welfare reform requirements. If you don't have dependents and are not working, my understanding is that you can only get SNAP assistance for 3 months during any 3 year period. I think TANF is limited to 2 years.

 

The point is asking the unemployed to lower their wage demands or asking employers to raise salaries doesn't get to the crux of the economic problem.

Unemployment can be due to lack of demand or to structural issues, and it's not always due to people being unreasonable on wages.

 

That's certainly true - but I think it does go to the crux of this particular business owner's problem. He wants employees. He can't find employees willing to work for what he's offering. He should consider paying more rather than complaining about his inability to find employees being the result of everyone else simply being lazy.

I'm not really making an argument on the larger scale or in terms of structural employment in the US, where I think there is a significant and much deeper problem.

 

I agree it's not a matter of "people being lazy," but at the same time it isn't just one business owner.

Even Steve Jobs complained to Obama that he couldn't find qualified engineers in the U.S. I'm not sure what's going on. Is it our education system? Is it people being upside down on their homes and being unable to move to better jobs?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203687504577003763659779448.html

"Jobs told Mr. Obama that Apple employs 700,000 factory workers in China because it can't find the 30,000 engineers in the U.S. that it needs on site at its plants"

 

$10 an hour to work in a factory outside Chicago? No thanks... $10 an hour in Chicago is like $6 an hour in Texas. I wouldn't take the job either. Far easier to work at 711 or Kohls for the same pay and an easier work environment.

 

I still can't get over the pay itself in a city that large, regardless of the job. I can't imagine even a studio apartment in Chicago runs for less than $1,000 a month. People who whine about welfare, subsidized housing, funding for education, job training or halfway decent suburban public transportation probably don't understand how needing to be in a large city to even find low wage jobs creates an impossible personal budgeting model.

 

This is exactly correct. I read an article last month(can't remember who or where) that did a pretty in depth exam of this scenario and came to the same conclusion. Manufacturing jobs now seen to want to have their cake and eat it too

 

There's a lot of controversy over the tech visa battle. A lot of high-tech companies make this claim. But others claim that they just prefer immigrant labor because they can pay less and they lock in the employees: they can't just leave for another job when they are here. So the companies pretend there is a shortage to convince the government to open up more high-tech visa positions. No idea which side is right, though.

Here's some stuff from Wiki about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa


No labor shortages

Paul Donnelly, in a 2002 article in Computerworld, cited Milton Friedman as stating that the H-1B program acts as a subsidy for corporations.[43] Others holding this view include Dr. Norman Matloff, who testified to the US House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration on the H-1B subject. Matloff's paper for the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform claims that there has been no shortage of qualified American citizens to fill American computer-related jobs, and that the data offered as evidence of American corporations needing H-1B visas to address labor shortages was erroneous.[44] The United States General Accounting Office found in a report in 2000 that controls on the H-1B program lacked effectiveness.[45] The GAO report's recommendations were subsequently implemented.

High-tech companies often cite a tech-worker shortage when asking Congress to raise the annual cap on H-1B visas, and have succeeded in getting various exemptions passed. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), described the situation as a crisis, and the situation was reported on by the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and Washington Post. Employers applied pressure on congress.[46] Microsoft chairman Bill Gates testified in 2007 on behalf of the expanded visa program on Capitol Hill, "warning of dangers to the U. S. economy if employers can't import skilled workers to fill job gaps".[46] Congress considered a bill to address the claims of shortfall,[47] but in the end did not revise the program.[48]

According to a study conducted by John Miano and the Center for Immigration Studies there is no empirical data to support that claim.[49] Citing studies done at Duke, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Georgetown University and others, critics have also argued that in some years, the number of foreign programmers and engineers imported outnumbered the number of jobs created by the industry.[50] Organizations have also posted hundreds of first hand accounts of H-1B Visa Harm reports directly from individuals negatively impacted by the program, many of whom are willing to speak with the media.[51]

Studies carried out from the 1990s through 2011 by researchers from Columbia U, Computing Research Association (CRA), Duke U, Georgetown U, Harvard U, National Research Council of the NAS, RAND Corporation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers U, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Stanford U, SUNY Buffalo, UC Davis, UPenn Wharton School, Urban Institute, and US Dept. of Education Office of Education Research & Improvement have reported that the USA has been producing sufficient numbers of able and willing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workers, while several studies from Hal Salzman and others have concluded that the USA has been employing only about 30% to 35% of its stock of new able and willing STEM workers. A 2012 IEEE announcement of a conference on STEM education funding and job markets stated "only about half of those with under-graduate STEM degrees actually work in the STEM-related fields after college, and after 10 years, only some 8% still do".[52]

Wage depression

Wage depression is a chronic complaint critics have about the H-1B program: some studies have found that H-1B workers are paid significantly less than U.S. workers.[53][54] It is claimed[55][56][57][58][59][59] that the H-1B program is primarily used as a source of cheap labor. A paper by Harvard Professor George J. Borjas for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that "a 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the wage of competing workers by about 3 to 4 percent."[60]

The LCA included in the H-1B petition is supposed to ensure that H-1B workers are paid the prevailing wage in the labor market, or the employer's actual average wage (whichever is higher), but evidence exists that some employers do not abide by these provisions and avoid paying the actual prevailing wage despite stiff penalties for abusers.[61]

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Well according to conservatives the problem is that there is a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, forcing poor old Kohl's to pay $10/hr and therefore this guy head small factory owner can't get folks to do heavy work for $10/hr.

I don't have much sympathy for the greed head one percenter the factory owner. I believe it is just another CNBC story sucking up to the one percent and is very atypical for folks who want to pay wages competitive with similar employees.