
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills - vimes656
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the-bills.html
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chrisbennet
"The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I
spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a
hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to
break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone
Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of
skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in
wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and
demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has
fallen and so have their wages."

This is true in other fields as well. Take the "shortage" of Phd's. I believe
the average fresh Phd is probably doing post doc work at a college for little
pay.

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hnwh
"I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a
hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs."

No shit...

not news.

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eli_gottlieb
It _is_ news, because the "skills gap meme" has gotten deeply embedded in our
entire culture and public consciousness. In everything from skilled
manufacturing and trades to research science, heavy engineering and computer
programming, there's a meme that we face a "skills gap": a working class that
can't make good wages because it lacks skills, and employers who can't upgrade
their productivity because they can't find skilled workers.

Problem is, whenever you investigate it in _almost any field_ , you find the
explanation given here: that employers want lots of skills for very little
money. Software is almost the _only_ exception, and software salaries only
started trending up in any real, serious, "shortage" sort of way a year or two
ago as the latest wave of Silicon Valley start-up hiring hit.

Hell, in software it took start-ups to raise salaries because the BigCos even
had _blatantly collusive_ anti-poaching agreements to _hold salaries down_.

There's a salary gap, not a skills gap. There's a unicorn shortage, not a
workhorse shortage (to blatantly rip off a noble Redditor of /r/programming).

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izend
" Running these machines requires a basic understanding of metallurgy,
physics, chemistry, pneumatics, electrical wiring and computer code"

For $10/hour? Sign me up...

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thatcheclay
Interesting points; I would be curious to take the economic argument a step
further and understand the effects of traditionally unionized labor on the
manufacturing industry. The economics of supply and demand driven wage
efficiency falter in the face of unionized labor, and you have to wonder if
the skills gap the author is talking about is really just people adjusting to
a non unionized market for their skills.

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eli_gottlieb
I disagree. A well-run union, professional association, or "flexicurity"
program can _help_ keep the labor force up-to-date on the latest skills,
raising productivity and wages.

