Tag Archives: jobs

Manufacturing Companies Struggle To Recruit Workers For High-Paying Management Jobs, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 28, 2017 | 1 comment

There are jobs out there for those who know things that are useful to employers. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Americans who are hoping to avoid the shackles of student debt and proceed straight from high school into the workforce have more options for well-paid gainful employment than they might think. Even as the ROI on college degrees continues to decline, employers in certain blue-collar industries are struggling to fill management jobs that pay as much, or more, than jobs that require a college degree.

One such employer, 84 Lumber Co, is spending millions on advertising to spread its message that a management-track job at one of its stores can be more valuable than a college degree. The company pays trainees $40,000 a year, but employees in charge of top-grossing stores can earn as much as $200,000 a year. And some of those stores, managers earn more than $1 million. All without paying $60,000 a year in tuition to double major in art history and women’s studies, according to Bloomberg.

And 84 Lumber is hardly alone in it recruiting push: Associated General Contractors of Colorado is spending $2 million on recruiting and apprenticeships. Carpentry Contractors Co. in Minnesota hired a comedian to star in recruiting videos that have racked up a quarter-million views on YouTube.

One trainee quoted by Bloomberg was supposed to be the first person in his family to graduate from college, but he dropped out of Kent State and took a job at 84 Lumber instead. When asked why he left, he said he believes the experience of his management-training job with 84 Lumber is more valuable than that conferred by a college degree.

“Sabastian Kleis, the son of a waitress from Rust Belt Ohio, was supposed to be the first person in his family to graduate from college. Instead, he dropped out of Kent State University after two years. By most accounts, Kleis, 24, should be flipping burgers. But on a recent afternoon a lumber company was grooming him for a management job

“You can go to college and learn the theology of the Roman Empire,” says Kleis, who just completed a three-day training program at 84 Lumber’s rural Pennsylvania headquarters. “You learn all this ridiculous nonsense, and when you get out, what are you applying that to? I know how to frame a house.”

To continue reading: Manufacturing Companies Struggle To Recruit Workers For High-Paying Management Jobs

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More Solar Jobs Is a Curse, Not a Blessing, by Paul Dreissen

Posted on June 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

By the logic of cheerleaders for solar jobs, it would be a great thing if 100,000 dug a hole, and a tragedy if 100 engineers design and produce a high-end microchip. When studying jobs, the benchmark is what gets produced by how many people, or productivity, not how many people are employed. From Paul Dreissen at mises.org:

Citing U.S. Department of Energy data, the New York Times recently reported that the solar industry employs far more Americans than wind or coal: 374,000 in solar versus 100,000 in wind and 160,000 in coal mining and coal-fired power generation. Only the natural gas sector employs more people: 398,000 workers in gas production, electricity generation, home heating and petrochemicals.

This is supposed to be a good thing, according to the Times. It shows how important solar power has become in taking people out of unemployment lines and giving them productive jobs, the paper suggests.

Indeed, the article notes, California had the highest rate of solar power jobs per capita in 2016, thanks to its “robust renewable energy standards and installation incentives” (ie, mandates and subsidies).

In reality, it’s not a good thing at all, and certainly not a positive trend. In fact, as Climate Depot and the Washington Examiner point out — citing an American Enterprise Institute study — the job numbers actually underscore how wasteful, inefficient and unproductive solar power actually is.

That is glaringly obvious when you look at the amounts of energy produced per sector. (This tally does not include electricity generated by nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal power plants.)

  • 398,000 natural gas workers = 33.8% of all electricity generated in the United States in 2016
  • 160,000 coal employees = 30.4 % of total electricity
  • 100,000 wind employees = 5.6% of total electricity
  • 374,000 solar workers = 0.9% of total electricity

It’s even more glaring when you look at the amount of electricity generated per worker. Coal generated an incredible 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per worker; natural gas 3,812 MWH per worker; wind a measly 836 MWH for every employee; and solar an abysmal 98 MWH per worker.

To continue reading: More Solar Jobs Is a Curse, Not a Blessing

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Mexicans and Chinese Aren’t “Stealing Our Jobs”, by Bill Bonner

Posted on May 30, 2017 | 2 comments

The US government, not the Mexicans and Chinese, are responsible for the drying up of vitality and risk taking, and consequently the job creation, of the economy. From Bill Bonner at bonnerandpartners.com:

GUALFIN, ARGENTINA – Now comes a report from the Financial Times that tells us the nation’s No. 1 industry – homebuilding – has been backing up for a quarter of a century.

According to the newspaper, U.S. homebuilders “started work on the same number of houses in the past year as they did a quarter of a century ago, even though there are 36% more people working as residential builders now than then.”

The report puzzled over the apparent collapse in productivity in the sector.

“Somewhat difficult to believe,” say researchers.

(It’s not so difficult for us to believe… but we’ll get to that in a minute.)

Tremendous Flop

As we’ve written about before, so far, the 21st century has been a tremendous flop.

At least for America.

Economic growth rates have been trending down for 40 years. The number of people with “breadwinner” jobs – as a percentage of the working-age population – is at a 40-year low. And homeownership is back to where it was half a century ago.

There are pockets of prosperity. But get too far from the good neighborhoods and you find dilapidated houses… minimum wages… and drugs.

What happened to all that dazzling new technology from Silicon Valley?

What happened to all that super-duper capital allocation being done by Wall Street – matching young entrepreneurs with trillions of dollars in financing?

And where did all those trillions of dollars in new money – put out by the Fed via its quantitative easing (QE) program – go?

Many are the bogeymen… the fall guys… and the stooges in this spectacle.

Ask around: Some blame the Democrats. Some blame the Republicans. Some blame robots. Most don’t know whom to blame.

To continue reading: Mexicans and Chinese Aren’t “Stealing Our Jobs”

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Manufacturing Might Come Back to the US, but Robots will Get the Jobs: Apple CEO, by Wolf Richter

Posted on May 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

America is producing as much manufactured goods as it ever has, with a lot fewer people. Even if the Trump administration is successful in bringing factories back to this country, it won’t be a jobs boom because such factories will be highly automated. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Robots are the Great Equalizer.

Apple will invest in and promote “advanced manufacturing” in the US, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday after the somewhat uninspiring earnings report. It was one of the ways Apple would create jobs in America, he said. To do that, Apple would put $1 billion in a fund that would invest in “advanced manufacturing” companies.

Apple has already “created two million jobs in America,” he said in the interview. This includes 80,000 jobs at Apple in the US; plus jobs at US suppliers, such as Corning, which makes the glass for the iPhone and iPad, and 3M, which makes adhesives that Apple uses in its devices; plus the “developer community” of almost 1.5 million people who write apps that, as he said, “change the world.”

So to “get more people to do advanced manufacturing in the US,” he said, Apple is setting up a fund, “initially” putting in $1 billion. “We’re announcing it today,” he said. “We’ve talked to a company that we’re going to invest in already.”

This $1 billion would have to be “our US money which we have to borrow to get, which is another whole topic….” Most of Apple’s cash is registered overseas, the result of profits that have not been taxed in the US. Apple’s overseas cash can be and is already invested in the US, such as in Treasury securities, but it cannot be used for capital expenditures or share buybacks in the US without being “repatriated” under the US tax code and thus triggering an income-tax event.

That’s why “comprehensive tax reform is so important to this economy,” he said. Practically everyone agrees on that. Practically no one agrees on how to do it.

By promoting advanced manufacturing in the US, “we can be the ripple in the pond,” he said. “Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them.”

To continue reading: Manufacturing Might Come Back to the US, but Robots will Get the Jobs: Apple CEO

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How Many Jobs Do Robots Destroy? Answers Emerge, by Wolf Richter

Posted on March 29, 2017 | 1 comment

Robotics may not be a replay of the Industrial Revolution, during which technology created more jobs than it destroyed. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

But this isn’t the Industrial Revolution.

How many jobs do robots – whether mechanical robots or software – destroy? Do these destroyed jobs get replaced by the Great American Economy with better jobs? That’s the big discussion these days.

The answers have been soothing. Economists cite the Industrial Revolution. At the time, most humans replaced by machines found better paid, more productive, less back-breaking jobs. Productivity soared, and society overall, after some big dislocations, came out ahead. The same principle applies today, the soothsayers coo.

But this isn’t the Industrial Revolution. These days, robots and algorithms are everywhere, replacing not just manufacturing jobs but all kinds jobs in air-conditioned offices that paid big salaries and fat bonuses.

Just today, BlackRock announced a plan to consolidate $30 billion of their actively managed mutual fund activities with funds that are managed by algorithms and quantitative models. As these software robots take over, “53 stock pickers are expected to step down from their funds. Dozens more are expected to leave the firm,” as the New York Times put it.

“We have to change the ecosystem – that means relying more on big data, artificial intelligence, factors and models within quant and traditional investment strategies,” BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink told The Times.

In a similar vein, “robo-advisors” are becoming a cheap and hot alternative for many customers at major brokerage houses, replacing human financial advisors. A lot of the grunt work that used to be done during all-nighters by highly paid law school grads in big law offices is now done by computers.

So job destruction due to automation is not a blue-collar thing anymore. It’s everywhere. But soothsayers have been steadfastly claiming that for each destroyed job, the Great American Economy will generate more and better jobs, because, well, that’s how it worked during, you guessed it, the Industrial Revolution.

To continue reading: How Many Jobs Do Robots Destroy? Answers Emerge

 

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How The Market Creates Jobs (And How Government Destroys Them), by Walter Block

Posted on March 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

In a free market there’s always scarcity and thus, work to be done, which means unemployment is a matter of choice. Governments have all sorts of ways of imposing non-voluntary unemployment. From Walter Block at mises.org:

The Creation of Jobs
If the media tell us that “the opening of XYZ mill has created 1,000 new jobs,” we give a cheer. When the ABC company closes and 500 jobs are lost, we’re sad. The politician who can provide a subsidy to save ABC is almost assured of wide spread public support for his work in preserving jobs.

But jobs in and of themselves do not guarantee well-being. Suppose that the employment is to dig huge holes and fill them up again? What if the workers manufacture goods and services that no one wants to purchase? In the Soviet Union, which boasts of giving every worker a job, many jobs are just this unproductive. Production is everything, and jobs are nothing but a means toward that end.

Imagine the Swiss Family Robinson marooned on a deserted South Sea island. Do they need jobs? No, they need food, clothing, shelter, and protection from wild animals. Every job created is a deduction from the limited, precious labor available. Work must be rationed, not created, so that the market can create the most product possible out of the limited supply of labor, capital goods, and natural resources.

The same is true for our society. The supply of labor is limited. We must not allow government to create jobs or we lose the goods and services which otherwise would have come into being. We must reserve precious labor for the important tasks still left undone.

To continue reading: How The Market Creates Jobs (And How Government Destroys Them)

 

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Does Technology Destroy Jobs? If Not What Does? by Mike Mish Shedlock

Posted on March 6, 2017 | 1 comment

If technology destroys jobs, how come, if we are at the most advanced state of technology ever, we are not all unemployed? Perhaps technology creates more jobs than it destroys. That’s not the drift of about 85 percent of the articles on the Internet (the Drudge Report seems to have at least one new scary headline about automation per day), but it’s the truth. From Mike Mish Shedlock at mishtalk.com:

In light of my posts on robots, driverless vehicles, and automation, readers keep asking: where will the jobs come from?

I do not know, nor does anyone else. But does that mean jobs won’t come?

Is technology destroying jobs for the first time?

Daniel Lacalle on the Hedgeye blog offers this bold claim: Face It, Technology Does Not Destroy Jobs.

If you read some newspapers and politicians’ comments, it seems that technology companies are a threat and robots will take your job . The idea is interesting and has populated hundreds of pages of science fiction books that feed on a dystopic view of the future where humans are only an annecdote.

It’s an interesting idea, there’s only one problem. It is a fallacy.

The idea that technology will destroy jobs starts with exaggerated estimates – as always – with the objective of presenting a world in which there must be an intervention – fiscal, of course – from governments, in order to save you from a future that has always been wrongly predicted … But this time it’s different.

The empirical evidence of more than 140 years is that technology creates more jobs than it destroys and that there is nothing to fear of artificial intelligence. Randstad studies show that technology will create more than 1.25 million jobs in Spain alone over the next five years.

Evidence shows us that if technology really destroyed jobs, there would be no work today for anyone. The technological revolution we have seen in the past 30 years has been unparalleled and exponential, and there are more jobs, better salaries.

The best example is the German region of Baviera, one of the parts of the world with a higher degree of technification and robotization, and with a 2.6% unemployment. An all-time low. The same can be said about South Korea, and the world in general.

To continue reading: Does Technology Destroy Jobs? If Not What Does?

 

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LinkedIn Job Postings Plunge, “by far the Worst Month since January 2009” by Wolf Richter

Posted on June 9, 2016 | Leave a comment

The job market is sputtering at the low end, the high end, and all ends in between. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Is the job market for professionals unraveling?

The jobs data in the US has recently taken a nasty spill. Last week it was an ugly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It could bounce off next month, and the current data could be revised higher, but we’re not seeing the signs of this sort of hiring momentum.

Instead, we’re confronted with a sharp and ongoing deterioration of a leading indicator of the labor market: temporary jobs. They rise and fall months ahead of the overall number of jobs. The sector peaked in December 2015 at 2.94 million. It shed 21,000 jobs in May, and 63,800 since December. This is also what happened in 2007 and 2000, at the eve of recessions [read… What Makes this Jobs Report so Truly Ugly?].

This week, it was the Fed’s very own Labor Market Conditions Index which dropped to the worst level since the Financial Crisis, a level to which it typically drops shortly before the onset of a recession – and shortly before employment gives way altogether. It still could bounce off as it had done in early 2003, but it better do so in a hurry:

So now comes LinkedIn, or rather MKM Partners, an equity and economics research firm, with a report in Barron’s about LinkedIn – “While we like LinkedIn’s long-term prospects and believe that sentiment on the company’s opportunity is overly negative, we remain at Neutral on the stock,” it says. Rather than disputing the deterioration in the labor market or throwing some uplifting tidbits into the mix, the report highlights yet another 2009-type super-ugly data point.

LinkedIn has some, let’s say, issues. Its stock has gotten hammered, including a dizzying plunge in February. It’s now down over 50% from its high in February 2015. The company lost money in 2014, 2015, and in the first quarter 2016 despite soaring revenues. And that revenue growth may now be at risk.

But we aren’t concerned about the stock or the company. We’re concerned about that 2009-type super-ugly employment data point.

MKM Partners discussed that data point because it’s worried that investors might misconstrue it as weakness at LinkedIn, rather than what’s happening in the labor market and the overall economy:

We believe that LinkedIn is a unique network, the de facto in Recruiting with promising opportunities in Sales and Learning. We are concerned that the jobs tailwind over the past six-years is becoming a headwind and that any further softness in Hiring revenue would incorrectly be perceived as a TAM (total addressable market) issue vs. a macro issue.

The online jobs data is getting “incrementally worse,” the report explained (emphasis added):

After 73 consecutive months of year-over-year growth, online jobs postings have been in decline since February. May was by far the worst month since January 2009, down 285k from April and down 552k from a year ago.

Online job postings are not a direct revenue driver for LinkedIn. We do however believe it is a reflection of overall hiring activity and should be considered a check on demand vibrancy.

And the report frets that “further deterioration” could trigger a “revenue shortfall” in the second half.

LinkedIn caters to professionals, people with well-paid jobs, or people looking for well-paid jobs. They’re software developers, program managers, petroleum engineers, executives of all kinds, marketing professionals, sales gurus…. They span the entire gamut. And companies use LinkedIn to recruit those folks.

To continue reading: LinkedIn Job Postings Plunge, “by far the Worst Month since January 2009”

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The Keynesians Stole The Jobs, by Ron Paul

Posted on June 6, 2016 | Leave a comment

In the long run, Keynesian economics destroys jobs. From Ron Paul, and ronpaulinstitute.org:

Late last week the markets were shocked by a surprisingly bad May jobs report – the worst monthly report in nearly six years. The experts expected the US economy to add 160,000 jobs in May, but it turns out only 38,000 jobs were added. And to make matters worse, 13,000 of those 38,000 were government jobs! Adding more government employees is a drain on the economy, not a measure of economic growth. Incredibly, there are more than 102 million people who are either unemployed or are no longer looking for work.

Gold reacted to the report quickly and decisively, gaining 2.5 percent to $1,243 per ounce on Friday. Gold mining stocks also saw significant gains on the day.

As recently as late May, there was confident talk about a rate increase when the Federal Reserve meets in June. Transcripts of the Federal Reserve’s April meeting showed that the central bank was seriously considering a June rate hike. With last week’s jobs report and other bad news, that is increasingly unlikely. In fact, citing the weak May employment numbers, Goldman-Sachs is now predicting that there is a zero percent chance of a rate hike in June. Of course they also see this as a temporary blip in an otherwise robust economy, predicting a 40 percent chance of a rate hike in July.

I don’t mean to rain on Goldman’s parade, but there are no miracles between now and July that will propel the economy to where according to their terms a rate hike would be appropriate.

Many will point to the May employment numbers and the weak economy in general and pin all the blame on President Obama. However, Obama is only part of the problem. The real culprit is an economic philosophy shared by both Republicans and Democrats for many decades. It is a belief in the fantasy of effective central economic planning by the Federal Reserve. It is a belief that a central bank can determine better than the free market what interest rates should be. This belief results in mal-investment, spiraling debt, distorted markets, inflation, bubbles, and finally economic depression.

I was not surprised by the lousy May employment numbers. Actually, I am surprised that so many others were surprised. While the “experts” have talked about our “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008, I happen to believe we have been in a recession or even a depression for the past eight years. The government manipulates the statistics to hide how bad the economy really is, until finally a bit of the truth leaks out and everyone seems surprised.

The people sense something is wrong but many don’t fully understand what it is. They have been told that more government spending will stimulate the economy and bring back jobs, and that more tinkering with interest rates will finally produce ideal economic conditions. But the real problem is that there is a cancer out there and it needs to be aggressively treated, not handed an aspirin. What we are seeing is an epic failure of the Keynesians who have tricked so many people into believing that economic interventionism can create a perfect economy. They have mismanaged the economy and I am afraid the worst is yet to come.

To continue reading: The Keynesians Stole The Jobs

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And this is When the Jobs “Recovery” Goes Kaboom, by Wolf Richter

Posted on March 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

A party pooper showed up.

The future for employment looks bright. The gig economy is firing on all cylinders. The FOMC, in its statement concerning its interest rate decision today, was practically gleeful about employment and where it’s headed:

A range of recent indicators, including strong job gains, points to additional strengthening of the labor market.

The Committee currently expects that, with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace and labor market indicators will continue to strengthen.

Elsewhere, employment has been cited as one of the strong points of the economy. Companies have been hiring and creating jobs by the millions since the Great Recession, bringing total “non-farm employment,” as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from a low of 129.7 million in February 2010 to 143.6 million in February 2016. That’s nearly 14 million more employed folks!

A lot of them might be part-timers, and there are some with more than one part-time job, and some have been counted twice, and many people are mired in the vast category of the “working poor.” But some sectors in some parts of the country have been booming and adding jobs that pay well, for example the “tech” sector, which includes all kinds of app-companies that are actually just trying to sell something to consumers, such as a craft-brew delivery service or Uber.

Some of these “tech” companies, from startups to broken icons like Yahoo, are running into trouble and are axing jobs, and so some unease has invaded the tech sector, but other “tech” companies are still hiring. And per our most recent employment reports, the party goes on.

But in July 2014, a party pooper showed up. That’s when total business sales in the US peaked, according to Census Bureau data. Since then, total business sales, which include US sales of all companies, not just the largest in the S&P 500, have fallen 5%, to $1.296 trillion in January, about where they’d been two years ago!

This has been confirmed by Corporate America. Revenues of S&P 500 companies, based on their earnings reports as parsed by FactSet, fell 3.6% in 2015.

To continue reading: And this is When the Jobs “Recovery” Goes Kaboom

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