Will Labor Shortages Give Workers More Power? (msn.com) 174
It's been argued that technology (especially automation) will continue weakening the position of workers. But today the senior economics correspondent for The New York Times argues a "profound shift" happening in America is instead something else.
"For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand..." Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say "no experience necessary" is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled.
People are demanding more money to take a new job. The "reservation wage," as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... [T]he demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation's history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3 to 0.4 percent annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the work force rose an average of 0.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2020.
The article describes managers now "being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity... At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home..."
But it also notes a ride-sharing driver who switched to an IBM apprenticeship for becoming a cloud storage engineer, and former Florida nightclub bouncer Alex Lorick, who became an IBM mainframe technician, "part of a deliberate effort by IBM to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job." [IBM] executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor's degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for.
"By creating your own dumb barriers, you're actually making your job in the search for talent harder," said Obed Louissaint, IBM's senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Mr. Lorick was hired, "it's about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent."
"I think something fundamental is changing, and it's been happening for a while, but now it's accelerating," Mr. Louissaint said.
"For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand..." Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say "no experience necessary" is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled.
People are demanding more money to take a new job. The "reservation wage," as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... [T]he demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation's history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3 to 0.4 percent annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the work force rose an average of 0.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2020.
The article describes managers now "being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity... At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home..."
But it also notes a ride-sharing driver who switched to an IBM apprenticeship for becoming a cloud storage engineer, and former Florida nightclub bouncer Alex Lorick, who became an IBM mainframe technician, "part of a deliberate effort by IBM to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job." [IBM] executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor's degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for.
"By creating your own dumb barriers, you're actually making your job in the search for talent harder," said Obed Louissaint, IBM's senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Mr. Lorick was hired, "it's about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent."
"I think something fundamental is changing, and it's been happening for a while, but now it's accelerating," Mr. Louissaint said.
Will history repeat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sems to have been true after the black death in Europe.
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It happens after any recession, household names are often born out of recessions - IBM, Disney, Uber, Instagram and it happens because people find themselves without a job and plenty of time on their hands to consider what they want to do with their lives, some choose to follow their dreams.
This time it's different, people were often furloughed, they had not just time on their hands but they continued to have money too. On top of that, it wasn't just a small percentage of the population who were made redund
Re: Will history repeat? (Score:2)
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Exactly nothing has changed demographically. COVID simply did not kill or disable enough people by any reasonable estimation to 'create a worker shortage.' (please don't read that as a negative)
There are two things in play. 1) A large number of workers are still enjoying some form of enhanced unemployment. 2) there is unmet demand for a range of products and services out there that could not be economically done during the pandemic. So there is a temporary need for extra workers while that overhang is met.
W
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I can even cite English Social History by Trevelyan in support of your FP. I don't suppose anyone wants page numbers? Nor would I recommend the book. Rather dry. A more exciting read was a book arguing that iron deficiencies associated with genetic anemia helped some people survive the plague. (But I'd have to search for the title and author (though I remember the library).)
But the effects were rather transitory (in Trevelyan's big history perspective) and the current pandemic is much less severe.
File it
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Black death:
Two thirds of the population died,
Nothing was automated,
Most people were subsistence farmers.
Corona:
1% (skewed towards retirees) of the population died,
Automation is increasing,
Nobody can "go back to the farm" if participating in the city life/capitalist labor force isn't agreeable
I doubt we are going to see a re-alignment of anything substantial. Yes, there are workers who are seeing raises of 15%, or getting one-time hiring bonuses of a few hundred dollars. It doesn't bring them up to what the
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Just as a side note,
After the plague, many farmers upgraded to higher quality farms for free (simply by moving into the abandoned farm) and their old farms went back to nature. This resulted in more income and higher productivity than they used to have on their lower quality farms.
Re: Will history repeat? (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of socialists, usually of the variety that don't actually work and spend all of their time making their viewpoints known on the internet, like to make it look much worse than it actually is. If things were truly this bad, we'd have a brain drain, but instead we have the total opposite. Rather, the most talented from Europe and anywhere else that supposedly has better working conditions would prefer to work here instead.
Except...inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
Inflation, and the reckless spending policies of SEVERAL administrations (R & D - yes both) as well as a complete disregard for debt will be taking leverage away from those same workers in two ways:
1) your raise won't be worth as much.
2) the money you've saved for retirement will also be devalued.
We get what we voted for.
In the current and previous administrations we showed as voters that not only do we want to be showered with money from the sky (where does it come from? WHO CARES?) we want even MORE when the crisis is over.
That's the problem with democracy: it's run by selfish, short sighted idiots (us).
Re:Except...inflation (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporate America has had money showered upon them from the sky for quite some time now. Actual people, not so much. How come inflation is never a problem until it's wage inflation? You CANNOT keep jacking up prices unless you raise wages by a proportionate amount. Unless you *want* to have another Revolution.
Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
Because as perverse as it is, giving the top 1% a bunch of money only translates to inflation for ultra-premium goods and houses. It doesn't cause general inflation because there's only so much food and basic commodities that 1% of the population can by. However, if you give everyone more money without a commensurate increase in productive capacity or labor productivity then the price of basic goods and services has to go up.
Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a bad thing if wages at least keep up with inflation, and comes with the side benefits of effectively reducing the burden of older debts, and the wealth of people who hoard cash (as the super-rich largely do these days).
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Mod parent up.
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Super rich so not hoard money. They actually mostly have it on things like stock market that continues to raise due to the FED pumping in a lot of money into it, so they mostly just get richer..
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A common bit of outdated knowledge:
https://www.financialsamurai.c... [financialsamurai.com]
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
https://www.marketwatch.com/st... [marketwatch.com]
https://www.business-standard.... [business-standard.com]
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This isn't a bad thing if wages at least keep up with inflation, and comes with the side benefits of effectively reducing the burden of older debts, and the wealth of people who hoard cash (as the super-rich largely do these days).
No, if the super-rich suspect that inflation is coming they will move any surplus to assets that hedge against inflation such as bitcoin, gold or other scarce resources. The ones being hurt by inflation are those who are not able to move their money to those assets or to other countries. Regular people, who will see their savings disappear like the morning mist, prices rise more than their wages and their jobs disappearing because the inflation will quickly become stagflation.
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Luckily only the "eccentric" would move their cash hoard to "scarce resources," especially some valueless certificates of resource waste such as Bitcoin, and they would deserve everything they get. Most would invest their cash hoard in something somewhat sensible, which is the least bad way for an individual who has 8+ digits of money for some reason to store it.
Re: Except...inflation (Score:2)
"the wealth of people who hoard cash"
So, you mean literally anyone trying to save for retirement, then?
You know, that used to be considered people's own responsibility, right?
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Retirement savings are usually invested in low-risk index funds, all-cash retirement savings is...basically not done.
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Retirement savings are usually invested in low-risk index funds, all-cash retirement savings is...basically not done.
But don't you usually have a large portion of bonds in such low-risk funds? And if they are in US dollars their value will also be reduced due to the inflation?
Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, no.
Giving the 1% helicopter money ensures they can leverage themselves into every aspect of the economy (see RTC scandal), solidifying their position as the ownership class, and keeping the rabble on the plantation. When a CEO gets millions, it's because talent costs money. When workers get raises that can't even keep up with inflation, it's how labor is destroying the economy, and time to start looking into relocating to Mexico.
IF you were going to give helicopter money, it actually makes more sense to give it to the people directly instead of this modified trickle-down economics of saving executive bonuses, so they can save people's jobs.
People will spend it on goods and services, where it eventually funnels back to the 1% anyway.
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Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Informative)
Good thing we've banked a metric shitton of productivity increases [epi.org] with virtually no corresponding wage increase. Now argue how regression towards the mean is a bad thing.
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Oddly then, wages have been stagnant for decades and productivity is way up, yet consumer inflation has continued unabated.
Time for a new excuse.
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Inflation is largely centralized to industries which are subsidized or cost shifted; real estate, healthcare, education being the biggest offenders. Wages being stolen by billionaires is still a massive problem, but it's the expansion of false competition and artificial boom/bust of these markets that make them overly expensive.
It would be rather poetic justice if the shadowy figures responsible for much of this market manipulation would have to start paying for a pinched labor market, and frankly would be
Re: Except...inflation (Score:3)
2 of those 3 careers you listed are also ones that are hard to increase productivity in.
Schools still need X number of teachers per Y number of students, but if they're hiring people that work in fields that have benefitted from increased productivity (for example any field of science or engineering that's benefitted from massive computer calculations being pretty cheap now), they need to pay more.
A doctor or a lawyer can still only handle X number of clients, but they have advanced degrees and skills in de
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Real Estate hasn't been anything like sane in a long time. That's why you see malls whose occupancy is down raising rent, houses go unsold until they crumble and get condemned, etc. In many cases, building rents and property "value" get a big bump for being in a "desirable" area long after the area has deteriorated into a warzone. They may get their just deserts now that at least some companies are considering going to work from home longer term, in part due to outrageous costs for office space.
Doctors are
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For most people if they have more money in their pockets they will use it to generate more business. They will buy more overpriced coffee, replace their car sooner, add solar panels to their house, get a new phone instead of keeping the old one for 5 years.
The money they get tends to go directly back into the economy and creates more jobs and revenue. The 1% just stash it.
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How come inflation is never a problem until it's wage inflation?
Because wage inflation is at the end of the day the only real inflation. All other inflation is 'asset bubbles.' Showing money all banks and zombie companies propped up the stock market, and make a bunch of paper shares retain value. Holding up banks held up real-estate. Everyone feels wealthy when they look at this home values but on the other side they realize they still need a place to live and buying another one would wipe out all their gains. Those stocks (and yes unless you a really the bottom of the
Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
where does it come from? WHO CARES?
That is a surprisingly deep philosophical question.
We are witnessing an actual real-time experiment in a corrupted version of MMT. Both parties have discovered that spending bounces the economy and thereby increases the likelihood of getting reelected and maintaining power - enabling them to implement their favored non-fiscal political agenda.
However, they aren't really following MMT by helicoptering money on their favored constituency. MMT maintains that the chief economic evil is: a person who wants to work but can't find a job. So, MMT advocates making jobs by spending on public works and infrastructure in times of low economic activity, not showering the unemployed, inefficient businesses and politically connected corps with money.
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Every sane economist predicts the end games for MMT is hyperinflation.
Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
Every sane economist predicts the end games for MMT is hyperinflation.
Except for those that look at reality and see that inflation isn't happening and the predictions have been consistently wrong for 35 years.
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We just started this MMT stuff in the pandemic and then Biden expanded it. Last inflation report was 4.6% for May.
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We've had expansionary monetary stimulus since Ronald Reagan was president.
MMT is just slapping a new name on it.
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Except for those that look at reality and see that inflation isn't happening and the predictions have been consistently wrong for 35 years.
Inflation is spiking... housing prices where I live are nearly double of what they were 3 years ago. Rents are way up. Transporation costs way up. On and on.
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Inflation is spiking...
BLS says inflation in April of 2021 was 0.8% [bls.gov].
That is BELOW the Fed's target rate.
The one-year spread on TIPS is under 2%.
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That is 0.8% in a single month, which comes to 9.6% annually.
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Except for those that look at reality and see that inflation isn't happening and the predictions have been consistently wrong for 35 years.
Void in cases of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. It could be the case that the US (or 1st world) economies somehow are immune to this. It also might be the case that inflation hasn't been measured well due to political influences. One of the inputs to inflation should be housing. Housing costs have more than doubled since I graduated college several decades ago. Health care costs are way up too. Education costs are way up. But somehow we still get 2-3% per year for the last 10 years. Funny thing that infla
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Housing costs have more than doubled since I graduated college several decades ago. But somehow we still get 2-3% per year for the last 10 years
Doubling over several decades is not a high inflation rate. If by "several decades" you meant 2, that's about 3% inflation. If you meant 3 decades, that's closer to 2% inflation. That's pretty low.
Whenever I look this up, I find that housing costs and education costs have *not* gone up precipitously. I really don't understand why there is this perception otherwise. Say we look up us public university tuition cost over time [google.com]
I see it went up 3.9-fold from 1975 to 2015. That's about 3.5% inflation. If I
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You can never have government spending control unless both sides agree to do it. One party is not gong to bear the pain of cutting budgets only to have the other party undo those cuts in the next election. If both sides won't agree to spending constraint the game theory solution is for both sides to recklessly spend until they can't. Sooner or later massive inflation or currency devaluation will force the spending to stop. Stopping is going to be a brutal unmanaged process where a lot of people get hurt and
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Inflation is the cowards way out of the government spending problem. Want to make $30T in debt disappear? Trigger 20% inflation. It will effectively be gone in a few years. Great for the government, totally screws the people. 20% inflation utterly destroys retirement savings. I've seen pundits on TV saying we'll hit 10% by the end of the year.
Re: Except...inflation (Score:2)
Of all the people to feel sorry for, ones who have their savings in non-productive assets are pretty far down the list.
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During the Carter years the stock market couldn't keep up. We just aren't there yet.
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20% inflation utterly destroys retirement savings.
Only if their savings are in cash stuffed under a mattress.
For most families, their biggest asset is their home. Real estate does well in times of inflation.
I've seen pundits on TV saying we'll hit 10% by the end of the year.
Those same pundits have been wrong the last hundred times they made the same prediction. Why will this time be different?
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20% inflation utterly destroys retirement savings.
Only if their savings are in cash stuffed under a mattress.
For most families, their biggest asset is their home. Real estate does well in times of inflation.
Which, to take advantage of, they'd either have to sell or borrow against (at that inflated interest rate). Home ownership isn't a panacea for all one's financial woes, though it can help. I paid off my mortgage in 2011 when I almost got laid off. I calculated that my funds would last longer paying it off -- and I saved about $30k in interest. I didn't get laid off until 2017 and was able to save/invest those mortgage payments for 6 years. The current $465k market value of my house isn't really doing me a
Re: Except...inflation (Score:2)
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Re:Except...inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
> That's the problem with democracy: it's run by selfish, short sighted idiots
Oddly, that's also the problem with authoritarian rule
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You just explained why I'm interested in cryptocurrency. I'd prefer an algorithm control inflation (rather than meat bags of questionable ethic/intent) and a market controlled value (USD is market controlled on the international side, but intranational almost everyone is unaware of currency markets and has implicit trust in the USD).
I want EXPLICIT trust in my currency. I want to have to choose to trust it. Trust in USD is IMCPLICIT, your parents trust/believe in it, so will you (same goes for religion,
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In the current and previous administrations we showed as voters that not only do we want to be showered with money from the sky (where does it come from? WHO CARES?)
I remember reading a letter in US News & World Report shortly after George HW Bush was elected.
It went something like this:
The American people are not stupid. We elected a congress that said, "You can have all the social programs you want!" And we elected a President that said, "...and you're not going to have to pay for them!" This sounds like a pretty good deal."
One thing I can say for the Democrats is that they at least are talking about how to pay for stuff. I remember back in 2016, Hilary Clinton was talking about spending $500+ million on infrastructure (she had an exact number but I don't remember it) and accompanied it with a list of how much was going to be spent on what. Donald Trump followed by saying, "500+ million? Pfft! If I
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For those of you who don't have a stock portfolio, ahem, I'm going to politely point out that you're an idiot, and you've screwed yourself. Inflation will hit you like a frikkin freight train. You're not participating in the single most effective way that workers can
Give Workers More Power? Only if they use it (Score:5, Insightful)
And this time try to keep the mafia bosses out of the unions' front office
Re: Give Workers More Power? Only if they use it (Score:2)
Re: Give Workers More Power? Only if they use it (Score:2)
Exactly. Limit soil for mafia to unavoidable government - contractors interaction, prone to corruption ("waste management consultant"). Unions are an absurd corrupt monopoly that has no place in XXI century
Only Temporary... (Score:5, Insightful)
We are in non-equilibrium state while inflation takes off and wages are trying to compensate combined with less people actively seeking work due to extended unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums, etc.
In future the present worker shortage and rising wages will only increase the implementation of automation.
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"In future the present worker shortage and rising wages will only increase the implementation of automation."
I'm long retired but were I in the job market I'd take mechatronics as that cannot be offshored if the facility is in the US, and the mix of hands-on work and requirements to know theory of operation weeds out the morons. For example instrument techs are an in-demand trade like commercial electricians because fewer stupid people can do the work.
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And don't forget, a lot of Boomers who could retire at any time deciding the 2020 furloughs were a good time to pull the trigger (or it was decided for them by their employer).
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You have no clue as to why CEO pay has risen like it has. Go think about what the impact of the Fed buying all of the bonds in the market has on stock prices and then consider that CEOs are mainly paid in stock. If those 1970 workers had put their pay into the S&P500 instead of spending it, they'd be up 17,811.95% right now.
Re:Only Temporary... (Score:5, Insightful)
Skyrocketing CEO pay has nothing to do with bonds or stock prices, they aren't paid in stocks purchased in the '70s. CEO pay is out of control because an elite clique of C-suite royalty is basically hijacking the economy for their own benefit - they're all on the boards of each other's companies, all jacking each other's salaries to astronomical values, and this has been going on for decades.
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Hear, Hear!
There has been a push for DECADES now by shareholders (you know, the actual owners of the company) to bring American CEO pay more in line with their European counterparts and have greater say in company decisions, and it has been thwarted time and again by company boards (imagine unions having a seat on company boards like at Daimler-Benz). Somehow American leadership is worth hundreds of times more than anyone else.
Even better is being told this narrative about how greedy shareholders (again, th
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No, they would be dead because food, clothing, and shelter are necessary and cost money.
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Thank god abortion is cheep and easy to access so those people are not reproducing as much.
It's nice that can just pick and choose the truth, right?
https://www.texastribune.org/2... [texastribune.org]
Sadly, it's those uneducated poors that aren't getting them there abortions.
https://www.kxan.com/news/educ... [kxan.com]
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People seem content with low pay or they would leave and find better paying work. IF they cant do the better paying work, that's their fault, as there are plenty of resources for job training and education free to the poor.
In practice, that's not always as simple and/or straightforward as you think.
Thank god abortion is cheep and easy to access so those people are not reproducing as much.
This is becoming less so in red states...
Betteridge says "no" (Score:3, Insightful)
My company isn't replacing workers, instead giving guidance to "leverage offshore resources".
I'm concerned that's going to become more common. Why deal with a (relatively) expensive First World remote worker, when you can hire someone for less?
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My company isn't replacing workers, instead giving guidance to "leverage offshore resources".
I guess US workers will just have to move to India (etc...) and either get call-center jobs there or apply for H1-B visas and come back... :-)
If your job could be outsourced, it would be gone (Score:5, Insightful)
My company isn't replacing workers, instead giving guidance to "leverage offshore resources".
I'm concerned that's going to become more common. Why deal with a (relatively) expensive First World remote worker, when you can hire someone for less?
So why do you have a job today?
Was it because your employer had no clue they could hire people in India and other parts of Asia?
Was it because your employer is a nice humanitarian organization willing to defy shareholders and pay more for local talent?
Have they never opened a newspaper since 2001?
When you repeat shit like that, what it says is "fuck you, don't try to negotiate for what you're worth." It's like me going into McDonald's an saying "I shouldn't pay more than $2 for a big mac meal...make me a big mac for that price, the price my first big mac cost, or I will go elsewhere!" I COULD yell that at the cashier, but I would look like a mega fucking idiot and it would get nowhere. To me, that's what I hear when employers complain about the labor market.
It's supply and demand. All those worthless entitled business class fuckers are all into capitalism and supply and demand when it benefits them...then when the supply runs low, they scream "labor shortage" on Fox News and Tucker Carlson gives some rant about how entitled everyone is for wanting to get paid a living wage when they have high-demand skills. CEOs all get on the TV say "we can't find enough workers" then studies have shown that if you just pay more...what do you know...you have enough workers?!?!. You get more applicants, retain more talent, and get higher quality people when you pay more...whooda thunk it? It's been proven my multiple recent studies, post-pandemic even, that the labor shortage is not real...it's just obscenely rich pieces of shit not wanting to pay market rates for labor....just like that stupid example about someone not wanting to pay retail for a Big Mac.
Yup, it's kind of annoying hearing workers negotiate for more pay, but it is needed. Either an employer pays a living wage or else the taxpayer ends up paying in the end between medicaid, welfare, crime, etc.
However, the more important point is that you're not special. Your employer doesn't like you any more than any factory liked their workers when they packed up operations and moved to China, Mexico, Vietnam, India, or wherever they sent the jobs. EVERY major company has been trying to offshore labor since the early 2000s. Some jobs were lost, most came back because it turns out it's NO CHEAPER TO DO MOST JOBS IN INDIA.
Sure, Tata, will tell you they will give you an army of IIT-educated PhDs for $50/hour...but once you sign the contract, they're quitting every 2 weeks. I've worked for many employers who tried to outsource their workforce. A few made me train the army of Indian Consultants who were supposed to replace me. They never let me go. Why? Those fuckers do terrible work at extreme cost. It was always twice as expensive to hire Indian than hire local. Why?...many reasons:
If they can do the job, they can do it for someone who will pay more. You're competing for talent with all major corporations, most of which open an office in India and treat the workers with respect and dignity. Want to be treated like shit by Tata for cheap to work for some US bank you've never heard of?...or want to get hired by Google for greater pay and greater benefits?
Every notice how many Indians are in any good neighborhood? Yeah...if they have talent, they're usually hired in another country and paid a lot more. Indian engineers are nerds too...they'll happily pack up and relocate to live in luxury and buy all the toys they wanted to. You'd move to London of someone paid you 5x as much as you'd get in the USA.
Fraud...it's rampant in Indian Consulting companies. They don't really check to see if that guy has 10 years of experience and a degree from IIT like his resume says. They have the same shortage
Always have a BATNA (Score:2)
This is one of the things I wish they'd told me back in the day. If you know you have a place to walk to, you can can walk any time.
Everything boils down to knowledge. Not so much technical knowledge as savvy about how the world works, what the games are and how to game the games.
Everything I was ever taught about loyalty and honor was a lie. Trust no one, be loyal to no one, look to no one but yourself to have your back.
Reciprocity is real, though. Always be good
Re: Always have a BATNA (Score:2)
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Outsourcing is often terrible. I worked for two different banks who did it.
In one, they had sone sort of agreement whereby the new Indian employee actually moved to Australia and lived in a shared accommodation, in a sort of Indian bubble. They may well have been cheap, but 90 percent of them were truly terrible programmers. The odd one was great.
And in the other, bigger, Australian bank, we had offshore outsourcing. Oh boy. We had meeting where the Indian folk sounded like they were sitting on a busy stree
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I'm concerned that's going to become more common. Why deal with a (relatively) expensive First World remote worker, when you can hire someone for less?
Spot on... all the tools and management process that allow people to work from home will only grease the skids to hire less whiny workers from poorer countries.
More power maybe, more inflation definitely (Score:2)
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Inflation really happens at some rate, just as relative purchasing power really does change over time.
Your political philosophy that it is all the same, and these things always remain in the same balance is stupid, and easily refutable.
Currently, pay has gone up, and inflation remains low.
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Currently, pay has gone up, and inflation remains low.
What country are you in and what currency are you using?
Here in the US, inflation is already taking off. (It's partially hidden because some of it is presented by DEflation of the sizes of some consumer item sales units while the price of a sales unit remains the same.)
Go buy gas. Go buy food. Go buy lumber. Compare the price (per gallon or ounce board-foot or whatever) to the same item two years ago.
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You're waving your hands like an idiot.
Inflation remains low. "It's taking off!" Ok, so it is still low, but you're predicting it went up, but didn't get measured yet? You're just being an idiot. Turn off your AM radio.
"Go collect the anecdotal evidence that reinforces my bias"
Oh, put a cork in it.
Tectonic shifts on the horizon (Score:2)
The one thing you can say about shitty minimum (Score:2)
wage jobs is that usually you don't need to look very hard, or very long to find a less shitty one.
Only for the next couple of years. (Score:2)
There is no labor shortage! (Score:2)
Repeating this bullshit is exactly what cheapskate corporations want you to do. There is no shortage of labor, there is a shortage of people willing to work for slave wages. Businesses can easily get more people to fill positions if they raise wages to acceptable levels.
Employers think... (Score:2)
...they're looking for candidates with higher education (based on rather outdated assumptions about transfer of learning) when what they really want is people with training & experience.
To illustrate the difference between education & training, if your 13 year-old daughter comes home & tells you that she had sex education classes today at school, you'd probably think OK, that's good. However, if she told you that she'd had sex training...
Nothing gives power but enables it to be taken (Score:2)
Nothing gives power unless the holder can knowedgeably use it. Shortages can assist holders negotiate better terms if both they and their employers are reasonable. Many of both are not.
Automation (Score:5, Informative)
I work doing automation in a manufacturing environment. I can assure you that (a) we have a hard time finding enough employees to fill entry level manufacturing positions, and (b) the company has been increasing pay across the board and adding better benefits to make sure it keeps up with competitors.
Now, since about 50% of my time is with the industrial automation department (doing more data collection type work) I can assure you that industrial automation projects never lead to lay-offs. The main driver of a new automation project is so that we can take on more work with the limited employees that we can hire, which we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. If we didn't find a way to do the project with fewer employees, the company wouldn't be able to afford to pay them higher wages and benefits to attract them. Also, about 95% of automation cells still require a human being as an operator. It's just that we'd otherwise need 2 or 3 employees and wouldn't be successful bidding on the contract.
The other 50% of my time is spent working on the company's ERP and data systems. This is where automation can often completely replace a person's job. Business administration, at all sizes of companies, still relies heavily on manual administrative tasks. A friend of mine works at a brokerage and he told me there's a huge room full of people who take documents received on fax machines and enter those into their computer system manually, and he told me this only 5 years ago, which is about 2 years after we finally disconnected our last fax machine.
In particular, I've done a lot of work automating our B2B commerce, most of which uses EDI, and I won't get into the ridiculousness of a system developed on 80's technology that still exists despite the fact that it could have been replaced by email two decades ago. But at any rate, having worked really hard to put a lot of automation into our side of EDI, it became stunningly obvious that many of our customers have little to no automation on their side of the system. I know this because many of the errors we get in the system are typos from people taking data from their MRP system and manually entering them into a their web-based EDI system.
So when people worry about robots taking their jobs, I smile knowingly. A full industrial automation cell generally costs somewhere in the $150,000 range (and can go up into the millions) but there are far more people sitting in offices doing jobs that could easily be 90% automated by a bright high school programming student given a couple weeks with some spreadsheet software, but that last 10% requires a programmer that knows the intricacies of some behemoth of an ERP system and bills $200 an hour for their consulting time. So it's not robots you should be afraid of, it's programmers and server racks.
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There's a LOT [criticalma...turing.com] that goes into a modern day factory.
No it won't (Score:3)
It will give investors incentive to robotize the hell out of every production line.
"For the first time in a generation..." (Score:3)
Seems like a distant memory now, but only 18 months ago the US had such historically low unemployment that businesses were frantically competing for workers. The current dirth of workers is an artificial product of the Biden Administrations massive unemployment hand outs that basically pay people NOT to work. When that ends in September you can bet there will be a massive surplus of workers and most of the jobs will no longer be in the US.
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Documentation please.
From: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/s... [cbp.gov] it seems to me that you are posting misinformation.
Degree 6 months training (Score:2)
Yes (Score:2)
Market (Score:3)
>"Will Labor Shortages Give Workers More Power?"
Yes. That is how a [supposedly] free market works. If demand for labor goes up (due to increased demand and/or reduced supply thereof), the price (and power) of labor goes up. Of course, so does the demand for more automation. It is essentially automatic.
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>"There is no such thing as a free market. There is only competing monopoly interests."
Yes and no. First sentence I would agree with, in principle. I was using the term in a simple economic sense. Second sentence I don't agree with at all. You could say there is only competing interests... which doesn't pass any moral dogma on it and applies to both sides- consumers and sellers.
As typically understood, a true "free market" is one in which there is no government interference and operating in an enviro
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...
As typically understood, a true "free market" is one in which there is no government interference and operating in an environment in which sellers and buyers have total freedom- Freedom to set prices, to buy/produce/sell what they want, when they want, how they want. ....
And that's where you go wrong.
A "Free market" consists only of equally powerful buyers and sellers, with an infinite capacity to grow and diversify
What you HAVE is monopolists dictating terms of agreement so as to dis-empower all customers down to the same "bend-over-the-barrel" subjugation
Capitalism is not equality and thus not free market predicate at all.
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>"What you HAVE is monopolists dictating terms of agreement so as to dis-empower all customers down to the same "bend-over-the-barrel" subjugation Capitalism is not equality and thus not free market predicate at all."
Um, sounds like you have been drinking too much of the Marxist koolaide or something. The free market and capitalism aren't about "equality" or "equity" or some unattainable utopia. It is about the freedom of businesses and purchasers to pursue their own and mutually intertwined interests-
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Way to miss the point.
Businesses and consumers only have freedom to pursue their interests through the market insofar as the market is not skewed. But powerful or even controlling interests, with the aim of maximising profit, will exploit whatever power advantage to manipulate, coerce, and/or restructure the market for their own benefit. This erodes the freedom of others within the market. Thus any power imbalance translates into a market imbalance. Thus the ideal of a free-market requires equally balanced
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>"But powerful or even controlling interests, with the aim of maximising profit, will exploit whatever power advantage to manipulate, coerce, and/or restructure the market for their own benefit."
Yes, but that is why we have laws against coercion, blackmail, violence, private property, theft, robbery, murder, libel, arson, etc. Legitimate roles of government. I think everyone agrees with that. The rules of the game are on the table- as long as it is not illegal.
The only equality should be equality of e
What will happen (Score:2)
Employers will shout the "the world owes me", employees will be punished for enforcing the law of supply and demand, government will issue more minimum-wage work visas, and employers will use robotization or outsourcing.
Overqualification-itis (Score:3)
[IBM] executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor's degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for.
My company is having trouble hiring people to move boxes of plastic parts around, because they DEMAND a high school diploma... for a job that is just moving boxes of plastic parts around.
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Sad thing is, even at these wages, McD's workers still can't even get orders correct.
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Once wages are raised, it's really, really hard to lower them again. People are motivated more by having something taken away, than by a reward. This is why few people care much about car insurance devices that reward you for good driving, but they will pay attention when they get a fine for running a stop sign.
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Once wages are raised, it's really, really hard to lower them again. People are motivated more by having something taken away, than by a reward. This is why few people care much about car insurance devices that reward you for good driving, but they will pay attention when they get a fine for running a stop sign.
But since inflation is rising wages won't have to go nominally down again. Your 18$ salary will just be worth 15$ next year.