04 November 2011

This part of the unemployment problem is not often talked about

Last week I wrote a post about how hard it was for southern farmers to find Americans willing and able to do field work.  Here are excerpts from a similar story, but this time it comes from the far north (Minnesota), and involves skilled work, not field work.
At a daylong jobs summit convened by Gov. Mark Dayton on Tuesday, frustrated business leaders gathered from all parts of the state to say they have hundreds of openings but can't find workers qualified to fill them. The skills gap persists even in the face of a state unemployment rate that stubbornly hangs around 7 percent...

As businesses adapt to a shifting economy, they leave behind a glut of unemployed workers from waning industries who are not qualified for the new jobs being created. Those workers increasingly can't afford or don't want to relocate and retraining can be expensive and out of reach.

Nathan Johnson, an administrator with Pioneer Care nursing home in Fergus Falls, said he could hire 15 licensed nurses today -- 40 percent of Pioneer's available nursing shifts, but he can't find qualified nurses...

Many of the unfilled jobs are in health care, but more are in vocational fields such as welding, metal work and precision machining, where jobs paying $20 an hour or more go unfilled.

Traci Tapani's metal fabrication company, Wyoming Machine in Stacy, recently published a job opening at what she thought was an attractive annual wage of $36,000.  Four weeks went by without a single applicant...

Some of the disconnect may stem from what business managers and even some educators say are overwhelming cultural and parental pressures to push children into a traditional liberal arts education where they can pursue white-collar professions...

"We need to start talking to our kids about these other jobs..."
Some of the best and brightest students I ever taught were not at a university, but rather at a technical college.  And I will guarantee that those guys and gals are thriving at high-pay jobs right now.

30 comments:

  1. Trade schools often cost far less to attend, as well. This is one of those Unintended Consequences of constantly harping "go to college." Frankly, 4 year universities need the competition of losing students to trade and vocational colleges. We all do.
    --a.

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  2. Anon: It's not just harping. The U.S. Government has made it a policy to subsidize 4-year schools. You subsidize liberal arts education and that's exactly what you get.

    Up until two months ago I worked adjacent to an ITT Campus. It seemed like the courses were full to me, but this is anecdotal.

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  3. Bret,
    That is partly due to the GI Bill as well. It is a hold over from an era that prized a degree as the path to cleaner, less labor intensive, indoor work that paid much better. Clearly, reforms are needed so access to other forms of higher career education are given equal opportunity. Universities need their ivory tower status threatened a bit so they will reduce tuition and costs, for a change, stop talking down to everyone who isn't a college graduate liberal and stop cranking out others who do the same. But just yesterday, a talking head on a morning show once again insisted "a college education is the best way to go" as if it is a foregone conclusion. "Best"? Not for everyone, and not lately.
    --a.

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  4. I know unemployed welders, pipe-fitters and other members of the construction trades who are in unions, you'd think the unions would help them relocate to areas where folks are hiring.

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  5. What ever happened to the practice of learning a trade through apprenticeship? When did a bachelor's degree become an 'entry level' requirement to get your foot in the door for an apprenticeship?

    Many of today's businesses whine about not being able to find employees, but often they aren't willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile to retrain, and if you do give up a couple years worth of income and pay your own tuition, employers still want to hire you at apprentice wages. Businesses will train employees if they really need them.

    The shortage of nurses is largely the fault of the nurses themselves. Medical industry workers have spent decades demanding higher and higher educational requirements to protect their higher and higher salaries while grandfathering in their senior ranks to the new standards.

    If we want to reduce the shortage of nurses, all we need to do is to relax the educational standards to those in place before the turn of the century. The schools will be able to turn out more classes per year, which will help to reduce the backlogs in school waiting lists and fill vacant positions with fresh new graduates.

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  6. Society as we know it cannot be maintained without qualified mechanics, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. Having done a bit of plumbing myself, I respect the expert plumber immensely. I would like to see us respect people who take these jobs for the important contributions they make.

    And wouldn't a parent rather see his/her child fulfilled in a trade than miserable and jobless with a degree?

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  7. Anonymous said...

    "What ever happened to the practice of learning a trade through apprenticeship? When did a bachelor's degree become an 'entry level' requirement to get your foot in the door for an apprenticeship?"


    You took the words right out of my mouth!

    I realize that there are trades that require certain skill sets and education, but far too many employers refuse to hire intelligent and capable people for lack of "formal education" or lack of experience in that particular field.

    There were several "common sense" jobs that I applied for when laid off a couple years ago, but was turned down for those reasons.

    Then you have kids fresh off a four year degree that have never held a job and they may get the job, but it's going to take just as much training for them as it would anyone else.

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  8. A lot to be said about this, some of which has been covered. Part of this is about pushing kids to go to college vs finding a vocation and part of it is about white vs blue collar work. One thing that never seems to come up is that skilled trades workers can be small business owners. An electrician or plumber has a good chance to make a good living with a lot more control over their lives than the office worker down the street, both in terms of how he runs his business and his life. How many office workers control their hours or can exercise choice over the work they do?

    Look up Mike Rowe (the "Dirty Jobs" guy) on YouTube when he testified before congress about the lack of skilled workers. We have become a nation of consumers and shoppers instead of makers and do-ers. It's not sustainable, as we're finding out.

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  9. "Traci Tapani's metal fabrication company, Wyoming Machine in Stacy, recently published a job opening at what she thought was an attractive annual wage of $36,000."

    Just wondering, is that a living wage for that area? Can a family survive on that?

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  10. Akin to what has already been said about nurses, we need to relax (or eliminate) licensing standards on all the trades. Although they often get pushed as consumer protection, the only real protection they offer is to eliminate competition.

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  11. $36000 ain't a lot around here. Our nanny gets paid more than that.

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  12. This congressional testimony from Mike Rowe is particularly relevant:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_pp8CHEQ0

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  13. this is exactly what I said to my community college students just yesterday.

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  14. @Jerry Smith -

    Mark (above comment) didn't say where he lived, but I suspect it wasn't near Stacy (which is north of St. Paul, near Taylor's Falls).

    $3K/month, less taxes, would give you a nice quality of life there. To doublecheck, I looked up the city's demographics in CityData:

    http://www.city-data.com/city/Stacy-Minnesota.html

    Housing data for 2009 (it won't be any higher now): median housing unit $150K, mobile homes $26K, median gross rent $618/month.

    I guess it all depends on what one requires in life. It would mean living in a semi-rural part of the state. And doing without a nanny.

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  15. Here's a major problem for businesses - our school system produces high school graduates who can barely read and write. There are very few I come across who can write a coherent email. Push them for a few paragraphs or a report and I end up redoing it. It's only marginally better after a 4-year college degree.

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  16. This argument would go nicely with the productivity vs. compensation chart posted a few days ago. I'm a machinist right now. I began this job to get through college, but have since stopped pursuing my business degree. When the job market improves, I'll be going back to finish the degree.

    After five years at this job, I'm already at the top of the pay scale, and though my skills do seem to be in high demand, that doesn't translate to high compensation.

    In professions like these, the laborer frequently has more valuable skills than their manager, but are seldom paid as much. In manufacturing, the cost of paying an employee more has to be weighed against the cost of moving production overseas.

    I'd love to believe that I can make a career out of this job, but unless I want to start a business of my own, I'm not likely to earn as much as my college peers.

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  17. Hey all,

    I'm from southern Alberta, Canada and after reading:

    "Traci Tapani's metal fabrication company, Wyoming Machine in Stacy, recently published a job opening at what she thought was an attractive annual wage of $36,000."

    it kind of makes me wonder at what people consider "an attractive wage". As a skilled skilled labourer/framer with no formal carpentry education I make that. I don't know of any Journeyman machinist that would settle for a wage that a first year apprentice makes.

    Here's a link for the wage info for machinist in Alberta.

    http://alis.alberta.ca/wageinfo/Content/RequestAction.asp?aspAction=GetWageDetail&format=html&RegionID=20&NOC=7231

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  18. Even though my kids are extremely bright, and could do well in college, we encouraged them to go to trade schools just because we already had a good idea years ago of where the jobs available would be. I went to college in the early 70's, teaching college, and now I wish I had gone to secretarial school or computers or something. I never taught, wouldn't even consider it, and my education handicapped me for decent paying jobs. Wish I had listened to the career counselor back then instead of what my family expected me to do!!

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  19. @Anonymous 7:37 -

    If you're going to compare salaries, you have to also compare costs of living. Can you get an average apartment in Alberta for $618/mo or an average house for $150K?

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  20. Mike Rowe testified before congress this year about the lack of vocational education in our high schools. He's even started a foundation.

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  21. I'm a nurse in New England and I find Nathan Johnson's quote about available nursing jobs in MN curious. There are jobs available here but they are almost exclusively "per diem" positions. Slightly higher pay but no benefits. This seems to be the trend here in all health care departments. I am currently in a job I don't really enjoy because it is full time with full benefits. I could have my pick of any number of new positions in area hospitals as long as I want to go without insurance. A risk I was willing to take in my early 20's but not in my 40's.

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  22. Nice to see the Mike Rowe piece mentioned a couple of times: I think what he had/has to say is relevant.

    Couple other observations:
    • yes, there may be jobs and maybe we could fill them with relaxed standards or making them all per diem/no benefits positions. But what does that say about the work or how we value the people doing it?

    • are we interested in filling jobs or creating a sustainable society? not to suggest a centralized planning approach but surely there are reliable ways of predicting/forecasting the need for certain skills/areas of expertise than can be used to help keep the labor pool full and the economy moving. Part of this means factoring jobs as sets of skills and training for those.

    Construction jobs, nursing, HVAC, all have different components for math facility, writing and communications, manual dexterity, patience, physical strength: why not try to help students and young adults (maybe full-grown people, too) with self-assessment and skill inventories? I think we did this when I was in school (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery comes to mind, though I remember nothing beyond the acronym). Maybe we need to think education as something that doesn't end at 18 or 21.

    I suspect most of us didn't know exactly what we wanted to do at that age, though it seems everyone expects us to. Is it time to expand and refocus what education is?

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  23. Here is a writeup on the ASVAB: I had to look it up, just to remind myself what it was about. I suspect it's more useful than as an entrance exam for the military, but &^*&^*ed if I can recall anything about my scores.

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  24. "But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no
    experiment I can do with test tubes and equipment and whatnot that will tell me the truth about a
    figment of my imagination." And then he goes on to perform an experiment to prove his hypothesis.

    (http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

    Dear Mr. Mathematician: you are a scientist. Get over it. There's nothing wrong with being a scientist and only clueless idiots think scientists lack imagination. So go play with your numbers and love what you're doing but please don't pretend you're not a scientist when you're clearly doing science.

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  25. Hidden inflation? Perhaps these blue collars truly are worth far more than we realize.
    BTW, we can't hire anyone without the 2year pedigree for liability reasons. Joe Bob's son may be a skilled welder but without that diploma 'proving' he knows something (?) ->if a crane folds and kills somebody after he's put a torch on it guess whose company is going to court?

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  26. The Star Tribune ran this debunking it: http://www.startribune.com/business/133266688.html

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  27. @anon 10:47 - it's a counterargument, but hardly a "debunking."

    This argument "So why not move to Pipestone instead?...Southwestern Minnesota has the lowest average manufacturing pay in the state: $781 a week. That's 39 percent below the state average, and not even two-thirds the average wage paid in the Twin Cities area...." ignores the relative costs of living in rural vs. urban areas.

    And this one -
    "•49,000 Minnesotans with a high school diploma were out of work, but there were only 16,708 job openings statewide that required a high school diploma or GED.

    •91,000 Minnesotans with postsecondary education were looking for work, but there were only 23,000 job openings requiring some level of postsecondary education.

    Minnesota's problem is not a skills gap. It's a jobs gap."

    - indicates that he is ignoring or misunderstands the difference between education and skills.

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  28. @Bret, I'm sorry but I don't want an unlicensed nurse taking care of me when I get sick. After dealing with an unlicensed construction contractor (7 years ago when demand for construction was booming), I have to say I would rather have more professions regulated. I don't think the guy we hired could have kept his license if he was required to have one. But he had impressive references, and talked a good game up front. However as the job progressed I found more and more things that were not up to code. After we parted ways I had to fix all of these.

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  29. I think we're looking at this the wrong way. Instead of lamenting the fact that many high-skilled positions can't be filled, we need to comprehend the idea that there will always be people in our society who don't have skills - who aren't capable of being nurses or skilled machinists.

    We need to figure out how to employ these people at a living wage because they aren't going away. I don't think that just paying them welfare is a good example, we need to find a place for them to work.

    They used to be employed in things like factories or even digging ditches. We have eliminated those jobs from this country. Although we provide more education to people, we will never eliminate people who don't have very good skills. So we need to employ them instead of just yelling at them to go to college or something.

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  30. NoPolitician seems to be more willing to consign people to the rubbish heap than I am. Maybe there is a small small rump of people whose skills will never match what's needed, but I don't think we're talking about that. We have a people who can learn skills and jobs that need doing but we have both devalued the work as outdated and unnecessary and the people doing it as some kind of underclass.

    I just read a note about the tallest building in the world in Dubai and how it has plumbing but the city doesn't. So the wastewater gets pumped into trucks to be hauled to a treatment plant, sitting sometimes up to 24 hours. In Dubai. I leave the smell to your imagination.

    Do you think maybe a lowly urban planner or plumber might have been useful at some point in the project, rather than a superstar architect? This is in some ways very like what we have done here in the US, with our MBA culture and emphasis on sales and marketing vs creating and building.

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