
Unemployment Is So 2009: Labor Shortage Gives Workers an Edge - dpflan
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/business/economy/labor-shortage.html
======
3pt14159
I remember reading articles like this in early 2007. Just look at this table:

[http://www.multpl.com/unemployment/table](http://www.multpl.com/unemployment/table)

A recession is coming soon. Prolonged low unemployment rates are a pretty
reliable sign that the economy is overheating. So are pricy Forward P/E
ratios. So are property bubbles.

[https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/08/daily-...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/08/daily-
chart-20)

Also, I disagree that we have a labor shortage. I think we have a skill
shortage. If we had double the machine learning experts we might need half the
number of commercial drivers, and there are a lot more drivers out there than
AI developers.

~~~
maxxxxx
"I think we have a skill shortage. "

To be more precise we have a lack of will to train people. The big companies
sit on piles of cash, complain about worker shortage but they are not willing
to invest in their workers.

~~~
pm90
Its just not as simple as that. Most people wouldn't be willing to go through
all that retraining unless they had a compelling reason to do so.

I agree that the environment could be more conducive to encourage people to
get education; many companies do have that in place.

~~~
taurath
I wonder what would happen if Amazon/Google gave 6 month (lowly) paid courses
to help people with otherwise good experience or degrees pass their
interviews. There's a lot of focus on whether people "get it" or not, but I'll
bet a ton of people would "get it" had they the actual relevant training.

~~~
scarmig
Google (and Amazon AFAIK) do give people resources to study with before an
interview. Facebook sent me an electronic copy of CLRS beforehand.

I think the real question is: would making the interview process more
accessible through offering courses increase the average quality of hires? Or
allow more hires of the same quality? That's not clear. The actual white-
boarding is pretty far divorced from day to day work, even at BigTechCo. An
argument could be made that self-driven prepping for an arbitrary filter is
the actual thing being tested, since it correlates more with success. Courses,
although reducing the noise that comes from differing levels of prior exposure
to those types of questions, would simultaneously decrease the self-motivation
signal.

~~~
bradknowles
You've seen the interview process for Amazon right?

I mean, it's like they're trying to eliminate all human beings from
consideration, before they even get started.

------
TheAdamAndChe
> How to get [the workers] back [into the workforce]?

> Give high-quality education, childcare, tax credits, and don't raise the
> minimum wage.

Wow, these authors just don't get it. Quality of life for the lower and lower-
middle class has been declining for decades. Worker leverage is at an all-time
low. Most households require two wage-earners to live any sort of quality of
life. Jobs are becoming more and more centralized to a handful of urban
centers around the country, and jobs that don't require high levels of
education have mostly been outsourced. Socioeconomic mobility is declining
massively.

Then the authors imply that instead of raising wages or shifting the
worker/employer leverage balance, they just want to shuffle more of them
through school? Why not create an economic environment where businesses have
an incentive to give an increasing quality of life for its workers over time?
Instead of shuffling more workers through a broken education system, why not
train & promote internally? Why not promote & create jobs that don't require
decades of education and experience to live a comfortable life? Why not do
something about our anti-trust and global trade laws so that more areas than
big urban centers experience economic growth?

Uneducated people in our country shouldn't be pushed out of our economy.

Edit: To those downvoting me, could you please explain why? If I'm wrong in
any way, I'd love to learn from your view on it.

~~~
dvt
Meta: I'm also wondering why you're being downvoted. I'm noticing brigading-
style downvoting recently on HN (which is the main reason I avoid the cesspool
of Reddit). Sad to see HN head in the same direction.

~~~
gozur88
Yes. HN is becoming more like Reddit as time goes on. It was probably
inevitable as the site became less focused on startups.

EDIT: I should probably add that's just in relation to the voting. The
moderators keep the site from getting as nasty as Reddit, and as long as they
do I'll like HN better.

------
creaghpatr
>For instance, restricting immigration is not the smartest policy when workers
are scarce.

>Raising barriers to imports — inviting retaliation from trading partners — is
exactly the wrong approach, especially now that the workers in cheap labor
markets that put such pressure on American jobs promise to become big
consumers of things made in America.

Regular NYT readers will have guessed where the article was going right from
the title's code word "labor shortage".

~~~
jrs95
>Raising barriers to imports — inviting retaliation from trading partners — is
exactly the wrong approach, especially now that the workers in cheap labor
markets that put such pressure on American jobs promise to become big
consumers of things made in America.

Stop paying people in America to make things so that people will buy stuff
made by Americans...makes sense to me.

------
rdtsc
What is going on, I was told right here by the bright armchair economists of
HN that jobs are _never_ coming back, it's over and done.

> Professor Krueger suggests that the increase in opioid prescriptions could
> account for about 20 percent of the decline in men’s labor-force
> participation from 1999 to 2015, and 25 percent of the observed decline in
> women’s labor-force participation.

Joking aside. That is a scary statistic. Unless you've been through West
Virginia or Rust Belt states, then it is believable.

~~~
chrisbennet
_> Professor Krueger suggests that the increase in opioid prescriptions could
account for about 20 percent of the decline in men’s labor-force participation
from 1999 to 2015, and 25 percent of the observed decline in women’s labor-
force participation._

It seems likely that lack of work and resulting depression would drive drug
use as well. Depressed people often "self medicate".

------
jellicle
> Workers lose ground for 50 years straight

> Corporate profits now higher than ever before in human history

> Recent news says workers may lose slightly less ground this year than in
> previous years

> Panic! Quick, raise interest rates and chop off the economy at the knees!
> Quick, import more foreign workers to keep wages low!

------
frgtpsswrdlame
Here's a link around the paywall:
[https://outline.com/7XaW7b](https://outline.com/7XaW7b)

And can I say I hate this article? I hate this article. Take this:

 _In 2008, in the midst of the recession, the average hourly pay of production
and nonsupervisory workers tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — those
who toil at a cash register or on a shop floor — was 10 percent below its 1973
peak after accounting for inflation. Since then, wages have regained virtually
all of that ground._

So we've only _almost_ recovered from the recession on this metric and we've
almost broken even with how good workers were doing in 1973? That sounds like
a pretty shit recovery to me.

 _More than seven years after the recession ended and the job market began to
bounce back, only 60 percent of Americans over the age of 16 are working,
about 2.5 percentage points fewer than just before the economy took a dive._

Here's another metric where we haven't even made it back to '08 levels!

 _And the answer requires removing a roadblock standing in the way of this
potential golden age: Even if demand for workers is rising, it may not be for
the kind of workers on offer, those sitting on the sidelines of the labor
force. “The jobs in demand are more skilled than the workers we have,”
Professor Krueger told me._

Because the article won't describe a solution to this "roadblock" can we all
take a guess at what it's going to be. I'll give you two choices:

(A) Encouraging firms to hire under-developed american workers and train them
in-house to do these jobs.

(B) Loosen immigration restrictions so we can hire cheap overseas labor.

 _On the supply side, Professor Kearney and Professor Abraham suggest that
being cautious about raising the minimum wage, which could price some workers
out of jobs, and reforming disability insurance to encourage recipients to
seek jobs._

Oh for fucks sake. So simultaneously we are about to enter a labor shortage
but we can't raise the minimum wage? A labor shortage is the best time to
raise the minimum wage! And of course rather than encouraging any one of our
numerous solutions we definitely need to cut disability. This is the grossest
bit of neoliberal propaganda I've seen in a while.

~~~
ubu7737
I don't really agree. It's not like raising the minimum wage will train
workers for tasks they can't already perform. The shortage of laborers in
specialized task domains is endemic to our changing times, and I think framing
the challenge as an old-school labor rights issue is just... terrible and
stupid.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
That's just ahistorical, there have always been labor shortages through
history, especially since industrialization. That's what makes it an old-
school labor challenge. How do we get firms to pay for training? Well probably
the same way we got them to do 8 hour days, overtime, paid vacation, weekends,
etc.

------
NumberSix
Ah! A Labor Shortage!

But even as they forecast a brighter future for the working class, these
economists also worry that the new age of tight labor markets and rising wages
will create a different sort of challenge. As Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton
University economist who was the chief economic adviser to President Barack
Obama, put it, “We are heading for a _labor_ _shortage_.”

Emphasis on _labor_ _shortage_ added.

Now where have I heard that before? Oh, yes:

2003 (depths of a recession)

[http://aoaconsulting.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Will_T...](http://aoaconsulting.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Will_There_Really_Be_A_Labor_Shortage.190155250.pdf)

[http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-labor-
shorta...](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-labor-shortage-
debunking-a-popular-myth/)

2004

[https://www.fastcompany.com/50595/labor-shortage-
myth](https://www.fastcompany.com/50595/labor-shortage-myth)

2005

[https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-
magazine/Pages/0305cov...](https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-
magazine/Pages/0305covstory.aspx)

2010 (depths of Great Recession)

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/skilled-labor-shortage-
frustrat...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/skilled-labor-shortage-frustrates-
employers/)

[https://www.tlnt.com/a-coming-labor-shortage-the-evidence-
ju...](https://www.tlnt.com/a-coming-labor-shortage-the-evidence-just-doesnt-
support-it/)

2012

[https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/the-looming-us-labor-
sh...](https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/the-looming-us-labor-
shortage-2012-03-14)

2013

[http://businessroundtable.org/media/blog/the-u.s.-skills-
gap...](http://businessroundtable.org/media/blog/the-u.s.-skills-gap-real-and-
growing)

[https://www.us-immigration.com/us-immigration-news/us-
immigr...](https://www.us-immigration.com/us-immigration-news/us-
immigration/labor-shortage-increases-demand-for-immigration-reform/)

[http://www.nasdaq.com/article/weekly-review-the-upcoming-
lab...](http://www.nasdaq.com/article/weekly-review-the-upcoming-labor-
shortage-cm248466)

[http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/13/news/economy/trucker-
shortag...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/13/news/economy/trucker-
shortage/index.html)

2015

[https://tickertape.tdameritrade.com/investing/2015/06/skille...](https://tickertape.tdameritrade.com/investing/2015/06/skilled-
unskilled-labor-shortage-100228)

[https://www.tradesmeninternational.com/news-events/the-
const...](https://www.tradesmeninternational.com/news-events/the-construction-
labor-shortage-where-did-all-the-skilled-labor-go/)

Where did all those construction workers laid off at the end of the housing
bubble go?

It seems that for employers and their hirelings, there is _always_ a labor
shortage or a looming labor shortage.

~~~
RobertoG
"It seems that for employers and their hirelings, there is always a labor
shortage or a looming labor shortage"

Of course, competition makes the prices go down, ergo, there is never enough
competition. The only good price is 0 (or less).

That is also true if you are consuming labour.

------
ng12
> For instance, restricting immigration is not the smartest policy when
> workers are scarce.

Says who? God forbid a country put it's citizens above the holy dollar.

~~~
gozur88
I'm with you. Labor shortages are what incentivize business to train people
and pay more. You can't simultaneously complain about worker pay on the bottom
end and advocate policies that reduce the value of their labor.

------
adventured
"Over the next 20 to 25 years, a labor shortage is going to put a binding
constraint on growth."

Over the next 20-25 years the labor shortage is going to spur vast new
investment into productivity gains after ~15 years of relatively weak
productivity growth.

Labor shortage is only a problem if you fail to boost productivity.

Ideally labor and population growth slows or flatlines while productivity
soars thanks to robotics, AI, general automation improvements, etc. - with the
end result being, finally, another big leap forward in the standard of living
(particularly for the bottom 3/4). The absolute last thing the US needs is
more people as we enter a potential boom age for automation.

~~~
s73ver_
" with the end result being, finally, another big leap forward in the standard
of living (particularly for the bottom 3/4)"

Only if those people still have jobs.

