I found Rani Molla and Emily Stewart’s post at Vox.com on the mismatch between jobs being advertised and people being hired interesting and thought-provoking. Buried under a considerable amount of word salad (are Vox writers paid by the word?) there are some reasonable hypotheses about our present situation. Here’s the summary:
For some of the jobs available, people don’t have the right skills, or at least the skills employers say they’re looking for. Other jobs are undesirable — they offer bad pay or an unpredictable schedule, or just don’t feel worth it to unemployed workers, many of whom are rethinking their priorities. In some cases, there are a host of perfectly acceptable candidates and jobs out there, but for a multitude of reasons, they’re just not being matched.
There are also workers who are hesitant to go back — they’re nervous about Covid-19 or they have care responsibilities or something else is holding them back.
The result is a disconnected environment that doesn’t add up, though it feels like it should. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 8.4 million potential workers who are unemployed, but it also says there are a record 10.9 million jobs open. The rate at which unemployed people are getting jobs is lower than it was pre-pandemic, and it’s taking longer to hire people. Meanwhile, job seekers say employers are unresponsive.
There are multiple mismatches going on:
- A mismatch between the skills being sought by employers and the skills that prospective employees have.
- A mismatch between the jobs on offer and the preferences of prospective employees.
- A mismatch between the HR algorithms used to filter the large number of resumes employers receive and the reality of hiring.
I have been complaining about that last factor for decades. The filtering programs being used don’t necessarily result in finding the right workers. Rather they preference things that are easy to search for, they subsidize the training industry, they create an opportunity for an entire industry dedicated to tailoring resumes to pass the filters, and they give a competitive advantage to outsourced workers whose resumes it is impossible to check.
Update
One last point. Very low level jobs that require few skills are easier to match as should be obvious. My understanding is that about half of the jobs presently on offer fit that description.
As I have been saying for some time it may be that those jobs cannot and should not be filled. President Biden talks about “building back better”. That may mean a discontinuation of the decades-long emphasis on maximizing the number of minimum wage jobs. Don’t think that’s been emphasized? Both of the metrics used to gauge the status of the employment situation, the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate, do that. Maybe we need an additional metric, something along the lines of a measurement of underemployment which will be devilishly hard to define.
“it may be that those jobs cannot and should not be filled.”
If these are real jobs, and I bet they are, they have to be filled. E.g., in recycling all of the sorting is done by minimum wage people belly up to a conveyor belt. Sorting has to be done by hand; there are no mechanical ways to do it. So, if there are no men (and it is 100% men) on the conveyor belt, there is no recycling program.
Plumbing, cleaning septic tanks, killing and dressing cattle and poultry, lineman, construction… a few of these jobs pay well, but working conditions are terrible, and people with alternatives won’t do them. And right now, a perfectly good alternative is welfare/unemployment.
You might want to see how many people in all those sectors are immigrants, ofter illegal.
Lots of dirty, dangerous, unpleasant work has to be done if the economy is to function. The fact that it is done by working class men is really important, because the unconscious class bigotries of people like Molla and Stewart cover over and hide the realities of working class life.
PS. My father was a union pipe fitter in Boston in the 50’s and 60’s, and he made pretty good money. But he came home every day a mess, scabs and burns from the arc welders, burns from hot piping, mud from lying in it to make a weld, frozen and wet in winter when working outdoors…
He offered to get me into the union, a real gift in those days of hereditary trade jobs, but I turned him down to get an engineering degree.
Not necessarily. This is a point I have made before and it comes from direct, personal experience. You can build major structures with thousands of laborers. That’s how the pyramids were built. But you can also build major structures with many fewer workers aided by draft animals or you can build them with even fewer workers and machines.
When the cost of the workers is low enough, employers will choose teams of laborers doing things that should be done by machines. That’s where we’ve been in the U. S. for the last 30-40 years due to the enormous number of immigrant workers brought in. Rather than automating things continue to be done with manual labor.
Fast food, much of the hospitality sector, and the ag business as it is presently conducted exist in niches created by a continuing, reliable supply of immigrant labor. The question is should those niches exist as they presently do? I don’t think so. The reason is that the marginal product of labor is too low and the marginal cost of the additional people is too high. To make matters worse the marginal product is not increasing rapidly enough but the marginal costs are increasing very quickly and bid fair to increase even faster in the coming years. That’s unworkable.
The Swiss recently faced a similar situation in their hospitality sector. The issue was whether to create a $50,000 minimum annual wage. They decided to leave the matter between employers and the workers’ labor unions but the relationship between labor and management is pretty different in the U. S. than in Switzerland. The similarity is that the issue pertained almost exclusively to immigrant workesr.
Nearly every sector of the U. S. economy is getting into the act. The market for associates in major law firms has flagged as tasks that used to be performed by associates are now offshored. That, too, is a niche, created by outdated artifacts of U. S. law.
Seems to me a forest is being missed for the trees. Mismatches existed before now; they always have. So what is different?
We scared the bejesus out of people about covid (at work). And we started paying people not to work.