There is an excellent article in the Jan/Feb issue of Dollars & Sense magazine entitled “UNEMPLOYMENT: A Jobs Deficit or a Skill Deficit?” This is a brief article and I suggest you follow the link and read it. They make the point that whenever we have a high unemployment, leaders of government and business try to define the problem as “structural” unemployment, that is, a mismatch between the available jobs and the skills of available workers. This strategy neatly blames the victim. It excuses the business institutions which caused the recession, and it excuses a government which might have prevented the recession, and failing that, might be doing more to cure it. But gosh, no! There are plenty of jobs—it’s just that those stupid, lazy workers haven’t given themselves the right training. And once this disinformation about a “skill deficit” catches on, the media jumps on it (including NPR, which one might expect to know better.)
But it’s all nonsense. This article exposes the kind of statistical gimmicks which the administration and business spokesmen now use to create the illusion that there are millions of job openings going unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. Yet if you are unemployed or know someone who is, you know that it is not unusual for 500 fully qualified people to show up when a single job is advertised, and half of them have recent experience actually doing the job in question. We have a shortage of jobs—not a shortage of highly qualified people. The reason is that no one is hiring. And they are not hiring because there is very weak demand—and there is weak demand because 17 million Americans are out of work. And it’s not that employers cannot afford to add staff—they are sitting on 3 trillion in cash.
This is a game I’ve seen played before. In the early 1980s, while the rest of the country was in a moderate recession, the rural Midwest was having a complete disaster due to the collapse of farmland values. Banks went broke, factories closed their doors, and masses of workers fled the region for both coasts, hoping to find some chance of a job. John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works, our main employer, went from making 225 huge tractors a day to making only 25--and they laid off employees back to 21 years seniority. And of course, they canceled all building projects. I was then an electrician doing industrial construction work. In one year, we went from having 300 journeymen working full time in the area to having less than a dozen. As a union electrician, my jobs are obtained though the union hiring hall. My business agent called business agents all over the country, and there was almost no work available anywhere except for a small amount in the south. I put 16,000 miles on my car looking for work in 1982. I was in every southern state except Arkansas at least twice, and I found not a single day of employment. Every place I went, I found 500 names on the waiting list ahead of me. Yet every day, I endured watching government pundits on the evening news claim that the country was awash with unfilled job openings.
After my 26 weeks of regular unemployment benefits were exhausted, in order to qualify for a federal extension, I had to register with the state employment service and pretend that they were going to find me a job. At one point I was subjected to some kind of an aptitude test. The young man who administered it informed me, with the thinly disguised jubilation of a cat that has just discovered a partially eviscerated frog, that I should consider being re-trained—I should become an electrician. After a few seconds of astonished silence, while repressing the urge to choke the bloody idiot to death on the spot, I patiently informed him that I was already an electrician—a fully licensed journeyman electrician—and I had been so for many years. And before that I had been a journeyman electronic technician, and before that I had studied physics in college for two years, and at one time I had owned my own machine shop and welding service.
Now it was the idiot’s turn for astonished silence. He finally said, “But then how could you be unemployed? According to my information, those are exactly the skills we should be training people for.” I said, “I haven’t worked in a year, and neither have a hundred other members of Electricians’ Local 288. Would you like their names?” He replied, “But those are exactly the job classifications that the country supposedly needs.” I replied, “Your data, averaged over the next 25 years, is probably correct. The country does need us—they just don’t need us today. We are all unemployed today—because there are no bloody jobs today! It’s that simple.”
At that time my wife was also unemployed. She was a teacher with a master’s degree in English, with a permanent professional certificate, and she had also taught Spanish. She had quit teaching a few years earlier to have a child and when she was ready to return, the demographics had changed due to working families with school aged children fleeing the area in search of work. In any rationally ordered society, no family could remain jobless with the pool of critical skills which my wife and I possessed. But this is not a rational society and never has been. Would a rational society have 30% of its GDP in the financial sector?
But whenever there is high unemployment, many people have a stake in pretending that there is no shortage of jobs. While my journeyman friends sat idle, on and off for a decade, the local community college went on merrily training electricians, and the teachers’ college went on cranking out more English teachers. Why? Because the false promise of imaginary jobs keeps people off the street and keeps them from becoming part of the unemployment statistic. And of course, it provides employment for those who run the training programs.
And there are other games being played. According to Wall Street Journal, many employers regularly post “job openings,” though they have no immediate plans to hire anyone. They do this because they know that the economy will someday change from slack demand and a surplus of workers, to strong demand and shortage of workers. And it could change very quickly--so they amass a file of resumes and continually update it. Yet they never admit this. Workers who are nearly broke spend their last few dollars jumping through hoops to interview for non-existent positions. And of course, the pages (or web pages) of help wanted ads which these corporations generate help support the illusion that jobs are going unfilled.
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