Unemployment and job vacancies
Catherine Rampell writes a good analysis with caveats on why we seem to have . Best to read the original as I could not figure out a way to nuance a summary. Lots of comments to fill out the why I believe :
In an article on Thursday’s front page, I wrote about how long job vacancies are taking to fill, especially when you consider the abundance of unemployed workers.Economists have been thinking about this issue for a couple of years now thanks to a shift in what is known as the Beveridge Curve
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,,,shows the relationship between the unemployment rate and the job vacancy rate.Since late 2009, the curve has shifted outward. That means that even if the job market is not exactly booming, there are more vacancies out there than the unemployment rate alone would have predicted a few years ago.
This is probably true for some highly coveted occupations that require specialized skills, like nursing or engineering, that have a mismatch in skill sets between workers left out of other industries. In addition, there are now a lot of long-term unemployed workers whose skills may have deteriorated…(but if there were a shortage of qualified workers across a lot of industries, you would be seeing employers bid up wages for the few candidates who were desirable). That does not appear to be happening.)
Another explanation those who are calling themselves unemployed today would have been counted as unemployed sooner in the past as longer unemployment benefits impact stats (such as with a faster declining labor participation rate). Employers have vacancies but are afraid to fill them?…
“Still, this can’t be the whole story. If there were a shortage of qualified workers across a lot of industries, you would be seeing employers bid up wages for the few candidates who were desirable. That does not appear to be happening.”
This is the problem I have with the skills gap argument. Yes, there are certainly instances of it, and some industries are seeing a structural shift in their labor demands, but when we look at an industry like manufacturing, the skills gap argument is nothing more than an instance of monopsony in the labor market.
For instance, the industry is claiming that it has a 600,000 person labor shortage. However, from 2008 to 2012, there were some 1.5 million workers laid off. The industry cannot, with a straight face anyways, say that ALL 1.5 million laid off workers do not match any of the necessary skills for the 600,000 positions. Sure, the industry has probably evolved, but so much in FOUR years that the skills the laid off workers have are no longer needed in the industry?
I doubt it. What is happening, as the article notes, is that the industry is likely using this argument to suppress wages–monopsony. Which means all of this discussion about MPl and min. wage increasing unemployment and whatnot is a red herring in various industries.
This issue of labor shortage has more to do with companies will to reduce output in order to keep hiring at suppressed wages, which means lower hiring rates, in order to . . . increase profit margins.
irrational view
think i agree with that.
the “probably” in “this is probably true for some… occupations…” sets my teeth on edge.
employers have perhaps become so stupid they can’t hire a normal human being who could learn their stupid job in a week… or six months of on-the-job… because they have been told by their MBA’s that they need to evaluate the resumes and “experience” and “education” to find an exact fit.
and then wonder why they don’t have the intelligent “problem solving” workforce that made the growth of their company (and the economy) possible in the first place.
Just always wonder how many of the “job creators” unfilled jobs are just trolling lines looking to pick up that higher qualified for lower than currently paying wage?
Part of the issue noted has been the lobbying to increase the visas. Gotta make it look like they just can’t find the help anywhere in the US.
Finally, how many jobs, being they are service jobs are requiring that a person be always avaliable for a flexable schedule. My daughter can’t get a job while doing her masters because her school schedule means she is not always avaliable.
Daniel:
I get calls and emails all the time for jobs several grades lower than what I am today. Sometimes they will pay and many times they will not pay. So why would I give up $10,000 or more as I would never make it back over a couple of years in today’s ecomnomy?
I’m in with Daniel. I wonder how they are measuring vacancies. There is definitely more job trolling out there than there used to be. Vacancies advertised to get a stock of resumes, things like that always existed, but now I think a higher percentage of externally advertised jobs don’t actually correspond to real jobs. We have simultaneously laid off a pretty large number of people and had a relatively large number of vacancies open internally (we stopped filling externally for a while in anticipation of the layoff, then we work candidates internally to try to avoid letting people go, which is quite expensive in most countries (not so much in the US)), and our external fills come predominantly from a temp agency.
Unemployment rates for most flavors of STEM professionals are at or just a bit down from all-time highs. Outside of petroleum and battery-related positions, I can’t think of anything with even the remotest hint of tightness in the job market.
Bearing in mind officially only those collecting some kind of “benefit” are unemployed. With 13% collecting and easily another 13 not the help wanteds around here have replaced with an expanded comics section.
The trolling I see here is a bit of a reverse of a problem.we are having here: I am of a generation of Loggers (woods-workers, “Lumberjacks”) who have been structurally unemployed over twenty years, yet when the multi-nationals buy up the big (government) timber contracts they advertise for experienced Loggers in New York or D.C. and then the feds they couldn’t find any so they bring in visaed workers to do what my family has done here for five generations. You might find a skilled hacker on the Oregon High Desert who speaks Farsi, but it ain’t likely.