The Wall Street Journal seems truly mystified that with headline unemployment at 9.5% and U6 at 16.5%, some employers are nevetheless having trouble filling jobs. But this shouldn’t seem all that strange when you consider that workers are not an undifferentiated mass, but have particular skills and experience, and live in particular places, and they may not always match up tidily with where employers are and what they are looking for.
The subtext of the piece, however, is that a major culprit is that workers are being too fussy and are not willing to accept what is on offer:
Employers and economists point to several explanations. Extending jobless benefits to 99 weeks gives the unemployed less incentive to search out new work. Millions of homeowners are unable to move for a job because the real-estate collapse leaves them owing more on their homes than they are worth.
The job market itself also has changed. During the crisis, companies slashed millions of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. That has created a glut of people who can’t qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work like the food servers that Pilot Flying J seeks for its truck stops…..
If the job market were working normally—that is, if openings were getting filled as they usually do—the U.S. should have about five million more gainfully employed people than it does, estimates David Altig, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That would correspond to an unemployment rate of 6.8%, instead of 9.5%.
Yves here. Go back and look at the list of why some jobs go begging. The Journal lists three reasons, but there are really only two: employees are not willing to take whatever is on offer (either due to still having unemployment benefits or believing they can find higher-paid work) or due to inability to move where jobs are. Note these problems all have to do with workers, there is no consideration as to whether employers are contributing to this dynamic. For instance, note how the story suggests that workers will need to trade down. Yet many employers turn down job-seekers because they are overqualified.
Yet one can think of reasons why, and the article itself provides some supporting evidence. A core issue is that the employer-employee relationship has broken down. Quaint as it may sound, there once was a tacit commitment: a worker who competent and dedicated could expect to spend a considerable amount of his career at with one firm (in the 1980s, job tenures of less than five years needed to be justified). But as cost cutting and short term earnings fixation became more pervasive, average time of employment shortened greatly. And with that came a major shift in behavior: it made less and less sense for employers to hire talented people with good general competence and character and train them. They’d be unlikely to recoup the cost of the investment. Instead, companies started more and more to seek staff, in that horrid corporate cliche, who could hit the ground running. For instance, headhunters would increasingly be tasked to find someone who was doing exactly the same job at a competitor firm. This tendency goes all the way down the food chain; for instance, I’m told it’s impossible to become a bartender in NYC unless you have at least two years of bartending experience.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/08/why-is-the-journal-mystified-that-some-employers-are-having-trouble-finding-workers.html
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