04.01.14
Got No Skills Rag
Americans are not bereft of skills. I’m not. Read the blog for a few months and you’ll have a hard time selling the idea that someone like me is unqualified for paying work.
But “American have no skills” is part of the cant corporate America uses to dismiss the unemployed. And it bleeds into everything.
If you can’t find work all the people you know who still have jobs eventually begin to recoil. They’ve all been exposed to the same myth-making and this country’s economic mark of Cain is plainly visible on you.
Everything dries up. You have no connections, no opportunities, nobody will even speak to you. The idea that in the US economy millions will network into some position or new employment is absurd.
Paul Krugman got to it yesterday:
A few months ago, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Marlene Seltzer, the chief executive of Jobs for the Future, published an article in Politico titled “Closing the Skills Gap.??? They began portentously: “Today, nearly 11 million Americans are unemployed. Yet, at the same time, 4 million jobs sit unfilled??? — supposedly demonstrating “the gulf between the skills job seekers currently have and the skills employers need???…
Meanwhile, multiple careful studies have found no support for claims that inadequate worker skills explain high unemployment.
But the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap??? is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.
“Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate,” concludes Krugman. “Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much.”
Extra galling it is for the presence of Jamie Dimon presenting himself as an expert on the alleged skills gap of his millions of lesser Americans. He’s the well-known CEO of Chase, hit by the Justice Department in 2013-2014 with a 20 billion dollar fine for institutional financial crime. Which the bank laughed off.
Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, has frequently referenced Dimon as a Wall Street criminal.
Chase’s responses to [the Justice Department’s] record penalties have been hilarious. Their first move was to make sure people outside the penthouse boardroom took on all the pain, laying off 7,500 employees …
Next, Chase’s board members sat down, put their misshapen heads together, considered the impact of this disastrous year of settlements, and decided to respond by more than doubling the take-home pay of the executive in charge, giving Dimon about $20 million in salary and equity.
A-hoo-hoo-ha-hoo-hoo, we got no skills today…
In mid-March, a blog reader sent me a link to a roundtable computer industry/corporate honcho discussion which included Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at UC Davis, who has made it a cause to debunk the idea that there’s any skills gap or shortage of highly trained American computer scientists and programmers.
Matloff posted his thoughts to the web.
Except for me, all the participants were people with strong vested interests in expanding the H-1B program. These were all people with considerable power and influence–tech industry executives, venture capitalists, heads of business groups and so on. I joked that I had entered the “lion’s den,” which provoked laughter.
We first went around the table with introductions. A number of those present made a big point of saying that they can’t find the workers they need, they need to hire H-1Bs, etc …
However, the moderator (“Moderator Z”), a [venture capitalist] who is also board member of the organization holding the conference, actually was sympathetic to me, saying to the group, “I personally know a lot of older engineers who have trouble finding work.” He added that just by the laws of supply and demand alone, the presence of H-1Bs lowers wages. Apparently he’s the one who chose to invite me to the “lion’s den.”
His statement about older engineers came after I mentioned a friend who had applied to Firm Y just last week and had been rejected just one day later without even a phone interview. I didn’t say the person’s name, of course, but did cite the person’s stellar background. The guy lives in the Bay Area, so there would be no relocation issue etc. I said to the group, “You say you can’t find qualified American workers, but frankly what I say is that you aren’t trying very hard.” I also pointed out that if one clicks on “Our Team” on Firm Y’s Web page, one sees they are almost all in their 20s or early 30s. That kind of took the wind out of the group’s sails for a while, especially since VP X did say that this person seemed to be of the type Firm Y is seeking …
What was especially interesting is what the group did NOT say:
i. Moderator X asked VP W, “What would happen if all your foreign workers were to disappear tomorrow? Just from the laws of supply and demand, you’d have to start offering a lot more money in recruiting workers, right?” W answered yes, she would. But what she did NOT say was, “We would have to scale back our operations, because there aren’t Americans with the skills we need”–the industry party line, one that she herself had stated earlier in the meeting. So, apparently Americans with the skills she wants are available after all.
ii. No one spoke the other standard industry party line, “We need to work at the K-12 level to get more kids interested in STEM, so we don’t have to rely on H-1Bs in the future.” It’s phony, of course, as W and X implicitly conceded, but they didn’t even bother with it. It was just, “Gimme the H-1Bs.”
The fact is corporate America is actively and passively hostile to hiring Americans who are skilled. And it’s for a variety of reasons, many of which are now being more deeply examined.
The No-Job Job Fair. Yes, if you haven’t, read it. Recommend it. So why haven’t you?
Hundreds show up, including your host, for two part time jobs — meat counter clerk and dishwasher — at a Pasadena Whole Foods.
From “Seen by appointment only:”
My friend Mark, [drummer in the WhiteManistan Blues Band], admitted the country was pathetic. It hardly produces jobs for its people. The majority of those it does don’t pay much of anything.
When you have no more practical chance of landing even part-time work as a dishwasher or someone wrapping and weighing meat in a supermarket than winning the jackpot with a lottery ticket bought at the liquor store, there’s nothing to do but laugh.
The unemployment problem is caused by a skills mismatch! Americans are too stupid to get the jobs the new global economy furnishes! If you want a job bad enough, you’ll have one! Only the lazy and sinful do not!
From the NYTimes: “[Since] 2000, many college graduates have taken jobs that do not require college degrees and, in the process, have displaced less-educated lower-skilled workers. “In this maturity stage,??? [a] report says, ‘having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less-educated workers for the barista or clerical job…’
“[The future] norm may very well be an economy where even college-educated workers cannot thrive.”
Remember, the misery jar is still open for business. As this is the web equivalent of street-corner busking.
And at least the police can’t send you packing.
Ted Jr. said,
April 3, 2014 at 8:16 pm
When any non representative group is given power way beyond their nominal influence due to their numbers, society as a whole will have to pay the tab.
As the corp overlords continue to hollow out the economy, and lay off each others customers, and burden the social system to support people who actually have jobs, the end result is pretty evident – a ruined economy while those who drive it to destruction either leave to some safer abode, or hire private security and live in some gated paradise where it’s ‘safe’ for thieves and charlatans and fraudsters to spend their time in quiet intellectual pursuits.