Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
United States Businesses The Almighty Buck

There Are More Jobs Than People Out of Work, Something the American Economy Has Never Experienced Before (cnbc.com) 689

The jobs market has reached what should be some kind of inflection point: there are now more openings than there are workers. From a report: April marked the second month in a row this historic event has occurred, and the gap is growing. According to the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released this week, there were just shy of 6.7 million open positions in April, the most recent month for which data are available. That represented an increase of 65,000 from March and is a record. The number of vacancies is pulling well ahead of the number the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as unemployed. This year is the first time the level of the unemployed exceeded the jobs available since the BLS started tracking JOLTS numbers in 2000. As of April, the total workers looking and eligible for jobs fell to 6.35 million, a decrease from 6.58 million the previous month. The number fell further in May to 6.06 million, though there is no comparable JOLTS data for that month. Under normal circumstances, the mismatch would be creating a demand for higher wages. However, average hourly earnings rose just 2.7 percent annualized in May, up one-tenth of a point from April. Further reading: Why Nebraska has an amazing jobs market but nobody is moving there.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

There Are More Jobs Than People Out of Work, Something the American Economy Has Never Experienced Before

Comments Filter:
  • Ok (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:12PM (#56745846)
    So why are headhunters still calling me up and trying to lowball me on software developer contracts? With H1B Visas getting shut down, they should be especially short on software engineers, shouldn't they?
    • Re:Ok (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:19PM (#56745896)

      And why are there (more than ever) unhoused people living in the streets which society has decided to take a giant dump on? Seattle which has a hot tech job market is befuddled with a growing number of unhoused jobless people living in tents on the sidewalks. Amazing.

      • Re: Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:28PM (#56745972)

        Most homeless people have mental health issues.

        We don't do much for them.

        They probably wouldn't handle doing software development well.

        • by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

          I had two schizophrenic friends, one, that uses drugs (mostly marijuana) is chronically homeless. The one that stayed clean was a co-worker at Microsoft (sadly died suddenly from a heart problem).

          Anecdotal.

      • Re:Ok (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Humbubba ( 2443838 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:02PM (#56746490)
        An A.C wrote

        And why are there (more than ever) unhoused people living in the streets which society has decided to take a giant dump on? Seattle which has a hot tech job market is befuddled with a growing number of unhoused jobless people living in tents on the sidewalks. Amazing.

        The unemployed usually go where the jobs are, ridiculously increasing the unemployment and homeless numbers for that particular area. Some come hoping to find a toehold to a career, others come for any sort of employment, even in the secondary job market. But even the qualified might not get hired for whatever reason (gender, race, HR rules and regulations, history, etc.) Not to mention, some homeless have jobs, but just can't afford Seattle's high rent.

        It wouldn't surprise me if some of the homeless are anarchic Utopians wanting to create a practical social/economic/ecological alternative to 'authoritarian' representative democracy. Like Europe's Autonomism movement or France's Collectif la vieille Valette.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomism [wikipedia.org]

        https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://laboratoireurbanismeinsurrectionnel.blogspot.com/2015/10/france-magnifique-vieille-valette.html&prev=search [google.com]

        https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.passerelleco.info/article.php%3Fid_article%3D527&prev=search [google.com]

      • by Gryle ( 933382 )
        It's one of two things:
        1) Skills mismatch: employers can't find personnel with the skill-set they need. I don't work in the tech sector so I won't comment on the HB1 visa debacle, but I know this is a big issue in construction and civil infrastructure sectors.
        2)Regional mismatch: the jobs are in places where people aren't.

        As for Seattle, I'd guess that most of the street people don't have the necessary skills to work in the tech sector. That said, feel free to donate your time and energy to teach a few of
    • by Altus ( 1034 )

      When exactly did they get shut down? I heard a lot of talk about it but haven't seen anything about real changes. Got a link?

    • Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zlives ( 2009072 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:21PM (#56745912)

      there are jobs, but not well paying jobs. i think it has to do with all the profits the corporations are not making...

      o wait
      http://fortune.com/2017/12/07/... [fortune.com]

      • Well --- if there really were so many jobs, why are 47% of millennials working as free lancers, with 35% of the overall working population (which has been shrunk considerably with jobs offshoring and foreign visa replacement workers insourced)? And why have an estimated 94% of new job creation been those unsustainable gig economy-type jobs?
    • Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sgt_doom ( 655561 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:26PM (#56745948)
      Yup, and why are employers doubling down on yearning for younger and younger workers? If there were really a demand, as neither of us believe, wages would have shot up long ago, and my old employers would be bothering me and others without let up.
    • Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:40PM (#56746036)

      So why are headhunters still calling me up and trying to lowball me on software developer contracts? With H1B Visas getting shut down, they should be especially short on software engineers, shouldn't they?

      Just because a job is open, doesn't mean it's either

      A) A good job

      B) A job that's offering pay commensurate with experience,,

      Nobody but the truly desperate would even bother applying for jobs like these.

      That and of course the mandatory drug tests.... /s

      • Re:Ok (Score:4, Informative)

        by Koby77 ( 992785 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:27PM (#56746624)
        It's a simple matter to create more jobs than job applicants. As an example, I could want to start up a new health clinic. I need to employ ten doctors, and I'm willing to pay $7.50 an hour. Hmmm, I'm not finding any takers. But now I want to increase the size of my clinic, and now I need 15 doctors at $7.50 per hour. Of course, I could repeat this and pretend to create an infinite amount of job openings. But it's the problem that you identified as B: pay must match the value of the work.
      • Re:Ok (Score:4, Informative)

        by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <angelo.schneider ... e minus math_god> on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:28PM (#56746630) Journal

        Many companies, in Europe, use job offerings as a kind of "advertizement". In other words: there is no such job, no idea if that also happens in the US:

        • Re:Ok (Score:4, Interesting)

          by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @08:54PM (#56746988)

          Many companies, in Europe, use job offerings as a kind of "advertizement". In other words: there is no such job, no idea if that also happens in the US

          Speaking as someone who recently had to look for work, I can assure you that this is very much the case in the U.S. as well. Very, very few advertised positions represent actual jobs. The vast majority of them fall into one of these categories:

          1) Job recruiter bait (no actual job, just a fake ad for a job recruiter basically)
          2) A job that they already have someone in mind for, but have to advertise for legal reasons
          3) A job with the unstated hidden requirement "must be a woman or minority"
          4) A continuous fake job ad that's just intended to solicit resumes to add to the pile
          5) A job that is posted with ridiculous qualification requirements or a terrible salary, just so the company can claim they can't find anyone to fill it when they apply for an H1B hiring permit.

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      Same reason they keep calling me. You are good at what you do and they only want to hire the best.

      Or maybe they are just fishing around for a sucker.

      • During my career, I got a lot of calls offering a position and then asking if I knew anyone who was available.

        My answer was that all the good people I knew already had jobs.

        The callers were, indeed, low-ballers.

    • Re:Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:47PM (#56746090) Journal

      With H1B Visas getting shut down, they should be especially short on software engineers, shouldn't they?

      Correct, they lowball you just so they can prove that they can't find anyone to fill the position before (ab)using the H1B program for cheap labor. They don't expect you to actually take the job, nor are they willing to pay more to fill the position.

    • Why shouldn't they give it a pitch? Perhaps you still think it's an employer's market, and they can get you to jump for less than you're really worth. They're doing the car dealer thing on your trade-in, trying to low-ball you. Smart move on their part - they represent the employer, not you so of course they want to low-ball you.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:24PM (#56745934)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • If 10m millennial women suddenly dropped out of the workforce over a decade to be stay at home wives**, they'd probably call them unemployed.

      The rules on who is unemployed are pretty simple (if possibly erroneous.) You have to want a job not have a job be healthy enough for a job and have had a job in the past two years. The last one is probably to detect people unwilling to admit they are unemployable because of skills/disabilities. However, post-2008, it caught lots of other people.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      You're looking for the Labor Force Participation Rate [stlouisfed.org]. 62% of the people who could work are currently working.

      The u3 unemployment number is just rigged nonsense, so the headline of this story is also nonsense.

  • by sgt_doom ( 655561 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:29PM (#56745978)
    for corporations doing poorly to advertise for nonexisting jobs. I recall back in the 1990s, when a local company called Traveling Software, kept advertising for positions after they had laid off over 60% of their workforce --- and surprise of surprises --- they never bothered to fill any of those advertised-for positions.
    • by crow ( 16139 )

      They also advertise for jobs where they already have a H1-B worker doing the job to prove that they can't find a qualified American to do it.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:46PM (#56746086)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Of course they aren't counting U6. Nor are they counting the under-employed - after all, one should be happy just to have a job.

      And you're right about age discrimination for aged-60+ people. All of those are now "discouraged workers" who aren't counted in the unemployment stats.

  • Are these jobs those that require knowing how to use a shovel or jobs knowing how to use advanced programming languages, jobs requiring advanced knowledge and experience in synthetic chemistry, chemical engineering, health care positions such as nursing, structural engineering, architecture, financial management, finish carpentry....? The nature of the openings will make a big difference in the statistic discussed.
  • Fake (Score:5, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:57PM (#56746166)
    First, there are plenty of people for these jobs but the government doesn't consider them "looking" because they haven't actually looked for a job in the last week or so. It's why the unemployment numbers aren't really that accurate. [foxnews.com]

    Second, and this has been going on for decades, employers will put up fake jobs [jobacle.com] in that the position doesn't exist, but the employer wants to get a feel for who is out there and what they want in pay.

    Third, as the most recent jobs numbers showed, the largest portion of job creation is service jobs. i.e. low wage positions. One could argue that an increase in service jobs is a reflection of a growing economy, it could also mean that automation is taking away some of the more manual jobs which pushes down employment for those who would have done those jobs, thus revealing the only job growth is at your local Kwik E Mart rather than a production line. Since one can't live off those wages, they don't bother applying for such jobs.

    While the numbers indicate more jobs than people looking, as the con artist would say, they're fake.
  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:11PM (#56746244)

    Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly. Also, including every "job" regardless of full/part time status and suitability is misleading. No one who spent a reasonable effort getting a college degree wants to be working a minimum wage retail job. If all the jobs advertised were professional jobs, or even high-paying factory work this would be an actual story.

    One other problem especially in the tech and IT fields is the huge mismatch between employers/employees and the absolutely crappy hiring/headhunting process. Employees lowball their offers, headhunters have zero clue about the jobs they're advertising, and there's a massive fetish for anyone under 30. God help you if you're in your mid-50s and end up on the wrong end of an offshoring/outsourcing. The 28 year old MBA in HR is going to assume you're a dinosaur and immediately pass you over.

    It's sure better than 10+% unemployment, but let me know when employers are offering solid, well paying, stable full time work. You can't expect anyone with a family to want to string together 3 part time gigs plus some Uber driving on the side. It's great for the unattached, but a bad way to encourage stable home lives for people.

  • There is some irony that Trump got elected promising to cut work immigration and revive coal, and the time economy would need more work immigration, and coal energy gets more expensive than renewable.
  • by zkiwi34 ( 974563 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @10:17PM (#56747286)

    Nothing said about the nature of the jobs or the wages for them. Nothing about the cost of health and accommodation. Nothing about the numbers of people that are no longer counted as looking for work.

    So, things are clearly looking up. There are even concerns over wage inflation. Translation, research worth less than a used happy meal.

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done. -- James J. Ling

Working...