Plenty of Factory Jobs, but Now Too Few Applicants

This is weird to me. With all the studies Major listed out, I'm surprised. In my experience as a recruiter in technology, I have consistently seen companies unable to fill their tech positions, and in the last year the competition for talent has gotten nuts. H1s are underpaid (they still make good money), although the sponsoring company does take care of a lot of legal process for the worker, but the non h1s I've seen complain are still making a great salary. I like the idea of skimming the best and brightest and letting them come here.

I also think the owners quoted originally probably do need to increase their wages. The reason someone would stay on aid is that it's hard to make it on $10 an hour. Opportunity cost is the reason you'd turn down such a job, not laziness.

 

Crude math says that his break even ratio is 23 Chinese, possibly underage borderline suicidal workers, to one highly trained domestic engineer.

I'm thinking that is why domestic manufacturing is moving out of the blue collar realm: cheaper labor costs offshore plus customer tolerance for generally shoddier mass produced products and a focused shift to higher value added domestic automation.

10/hr is debatable for both perspectives under this. Ideally an apprenticeship and career growth system would benefit skills and experience generation but workers love their freedom to be mobile and employers loathe pension systems that typically come with a structurally long term work force.

 

Under paying for what? To be trained with benefits and a union job?

Maybe once they find that you can do the job, they can increase your pay.

Or, if all else fails, maybe it's an opportunity to get trained on someone else dime and then going somewhere that pays better.

Hmm... I think I'd rather work at walmart stocking shelves.

 

Every job can be a dead in job and every job can be an opportunity.

Flipping burgers could be a dead end job.

But it could be an opportunity to get to
drive through duties.
cashier
shift lead
manager
and so on

 

So true. I know someone who's a manager of a major hi-tech company. He's only able to fill 12 of the 20 positions he has available. One of the problems with Hi-tech companies is that senior positions are so skill specific. It's not enough that you have a tech degree, but you need experience with specific application or language usually not taught in college. i.e. Ruby on Rails is super hot right but I'm willing to bet 0.1 percent of anyone on this board has EXPERT experience on it as nerdy as this board is (Companies don't hire entry level RoR's developers).

There has to be a shift in the way we stress education for us to meet these needs. Where as the foreign (eastern) countries stress hard sciences, we're doing the opposite, at least on the social level.

 

Underpaying for whatever he's asking people to do. Walmart has no problem finding cashiers for $10/hr, so people are pretty clearly willing to work for that wage. If this guy is not getting any interest in the jobs he's offering, he should look at what he's offering and what he's asking people to do instead of blaming everyone else. Obviously, there's something wrong on his end.

 

B

Its not really an open question- if it were a structural problem you'd see employers raising wages so that working at McD's wasn't more lucrative option.

 

Sounds right to be. Be pissed off. Why would anybody want to work for a measly 10.00 per hour. After gas and taxes you might clear 275.00 a week.

This factory owner wants a 20.00 per hour worker for 10.00 per hour. And he wonders why nobody wants his job.

 

Was that your career path? Is that a realistic and sustainable end goal for the millions of unemployed and underemployed out there?

I was talking about looking for higher opportunity costs with whatever skills I can market or learn, but thanks for playing.

 

Unskilled entry level positions for $20.00 an hour? There are those who are graduating with masters having trouble making that kind of money.

 

Maybe with a masters in history or something like that. If you have a masters in something practical and you can't get 20/hr, you are doing something really wrong.

 

Exactly

 

The people in this thread trying to make a point like this are showing their white collar work & lifestyle.

The $10 to $12 is an apprenticeship. They will train you. The owner is taking all the risk here on unproven and unskilled people with his money and resources. They're paying you to go to school on their time and dime. An apprenticeship might last what, a year? If you are a skilled factory worker, the objective here, you're likely making $20 to $24 an hour. Long term guys even more. No formal education or prior training needed to apply and they'll give you a career.

The problem here the article seems to be saying, is that people are unwilling to lower their expectations, roll up their sleeves and learn an applicable blue collar trade for the greater long term outcome. Guess the solution is we need more immigrants given this is so beneath the indigenous population.

 

You completely made all of this stuff up. You know nothing about the specifics of the jobs being offered in the article. You know nothing about what expectations are, what the hours are, what the work requirements are, what the skills needed are, what benefits are offered, or anything else.

 

Of course I did. Everybody pilling on the owner for what he's offering know nothing of the opportunity either. That's not to say that these circumstances can't be found in the 'market.'

 

But the owner is claiming people are lazy and thus not applying. We know there are a ton of people working minimum wage crappy and often difficult jobs - those people aren't lazy or relying on assistance. So why aren't they applying, if it was as simple as "no experience necessary". Do people simply not want 50% raises in his mind?

Simply put, his claims don't make sense on the surface. Labor is likely anything else - if you want to hire people, pay what the market demands. If you're not finding labor, then you're not offering enough. Instead of blaming lazy workers, maybe it's about cheap employers.

 

I can understand his sentiment and can look at it from both sides. I have worked construction as recently as 2010 and I currently have a client who owns an O&G MFG/machine shop-so my comment as a counter POV is from recent experience. These jobs typically appeal to hispanic labor here in Texas. From my experience, they're the hardest working group of people I've ever worked with-atleast manual labor related. It is culturally engrained in them (at least the ones I worked with) that you can make a decent middle class living working construction/mfg/machine jobs if you start early, learn a trade and work your ass off.

That's not really a message you'll find in the middle & upper class suburbs. The message there is go to school, get an advanced degree & be a white collar professional. Use your brain, not your hands. Admittedly, my stint in construction was very humbling but it was necessary because of my dire circumstances. If I had unemployment available to me, Im sure I wouldn't have done it.

Is it possible that certain Americans are too prideful to work certain jobs? Maybe that's a part of the equation too.

 

But his job offer isn't only available to unemployed people - if it was a good job, employed people looking for better jobs would be applying too. If his job was good, other people in manufacturing jobs that weren't happy would at least be applying to consider it. If NO ONE is even applying, the problem lies entirely on his end - whether it's the job itself, how he's marketing it, or whatever else.

 

If the article mentions the hourly wage, as if it is a great deal of money, then I am sure that it would have mentioned benefits to further support the narrative that lazy Americans would rather eek by on federal aid than work.

Further it is presumptive of you to assume you know the blue collar market better than everyone else posting based on your limited time working construction. First your experience is not unique, many people work manual labor at some point in their life. My entire family has, and I did for years before I became an attorney. Not all factory jobs provide the benefits you assumed, indeed most do not.