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"Despite steady gains in hiring, a falling unemployment rate and other signs of an improving economy, take-home pay for many American workers has effectively fallen since the economic recovery began in 2009, according to a new study.."
9/4/15
Most workers actually making LESS than 5 years ago
Despite the new jobs being created, workers' real wages, including the cost of living, are going backward.
CNBC reported on Thursday that average pay in real terms slumped 4 per cent from 2009-14, according to the National Employment Labor Project.
What's more, the kind of jobs that have been most plentiful during the post-Great Recession boom have seen some of the biggest declines in pay, said CNBC.
Restaurant workers, whose ranks have swelled by 376,000 over the past year, saw real pay declines of 8.9 per cent for cooks, 7.7 per cent for food prepares and 4.8 per cent for waiters and waitresses.
"Our findings on occupational wage declines are consistent with a longer-run trend in wage stagnation and growing income inequality for America's workers," NELP was quoted as saying."
Lots of formerly experienced workers have ended up having to compete with the lower wage cooks, creating an abundance of candidates for positions which require little training or education. That's a big reason you're seeing the wage depression.
The jobs that are being added are the jobs that are in demand.
By denying tax-payer funded housing, you force them to alter their Life-Style to something less glamorous like living with the parents or sharing housing with someone else similarly situated.
That's right and they need to learn from their mistakes, but that's not going to happen so long as you keep robbing me of money to throw at them.
I'll leave the social agenda part alone and address the "type of jobs" part of this.
Even at the peak of the Great Recession, the top-20% with the high skill jobs were near full employment. You can't create jobs to hire more of those people because they don't exist. I can't hire Forest Gump to write iOS or Android smartphone applications. The best I can do is steal somebody from another employer who has somebody who knows how to write smartphone applications or hire from a limited supply of new grad Computer Science majors. ...or get somebody from overseas on an H1B visa who has the skills to do the work.
If you start with the basic premise that "good" jobs require at least a 110 IQ to be able to handle the work, you've automatically excluded 75% of the population.
This is the whole problem I have with all the unequal pay, income stratification, and McJobs rhetoric. Just because you happen to be a US citizen with a pulse doesn't automatically entitle you to a high paying job. You have to luck out in the genetic lottery and be born intelligent. You then need to luck out and grow up in an environment where you get a good education and are given a good work ethic. You then need to actually apply yourself and be competent at your work. The average 100 IQ high school C student isn't going to get one of those jobs. They can still do OK and be in the middle class but they're not going to get a Goldman Sachs finance job or admitted to Medical School or put on the executive fast track in corporate America. We've created an "everybody wins a trophy" culture that simply doesn't project onto reality.
I'll leave the social agenda part alone and address the "type of jobs" part of this.
Even at the peak of the Great Recession, the top-20% with the high skill jobs were near full employment. You can't create jobs to hire more of those people because they don't exist. I can't hire Forest Gump to write iOS or Android smartphone applications. The best I can do is steal somebody from another employer who has somebody who knows how to write smartphone applications or hire from a limited supply of new grad Computer Science majors. ...or get somebody from overseas on an H1B visa who has the skills to do the work.
Those CS majors can be trained, but employers won't want them due to a lack of prestige of the school, salary expectation mismatch, looking for unicorns, whatever.
Those CS majors can be trained, but employers won't want them due to a lack of prestige of the school, salary expectation mismatch, looking for unicorns, whatever.
I'm in the industry. A hiring manager doesn't give a rat's ass where somebody went to school. They only care if somebody is competent and isn't so dysfunctional that they'd blow up the team. If they went to a 3rd tier school, you might interview a bit more closely to make sure they're really smart enough to do the work. I've hired plenty of UMass Lowell and UMass Boston grads who were competent and went there because it was what they could afford. Most employers have little interest in hiring someone who is expensive and senior but with zero subject matter background for specific jobs. It often takes years to develop the subject matter expertise and by the time you've trained someone up to speed, they've jumped to another employer for more money. You'll do it for a new grad, a recent hire, or an H1B indentured servant because they're cheap and they don't mind doing the scut work the senior people loathe in order to get trained up. You're not going to hire somebody with 10+ and a 6 figure salary outside of their area of expertise unless they're such a rock star where you know they'll pick it up in weeks. There aren't many 140+ IQ software engineers like that since it doesn't pay enough. Those guys work for Goldman Sachs or are earning 7 figures doing specialty surgery.
And to rebut your comment, the problem I have is that a lot of new grad CS majors from 3rd tier schools don't want to pay their dues doing scut work. They walk in wanting to be vice president of engineering. It's the whole "everybody wins a trophy" thing that they carry into the corporate world and then wonder why they're marched out the door after 90 days where they did little but surf the internet.
GeoffD nailed it. "Prestige" in schools is a myth in my area too.
It's next to impossible to find someone with critical thinking skills and an entrepreneurial spirit already, why make it harder by filtering out candidates from less-known schools? Not to mention, a lot of technical skills can be picked up on the job if they understand the core concepts like OO programming.
GeoffD nailed it. "Prestige" in schools is a myth in my area too.
It's next to impossible to find someone with critical thinking skills and an entrepreneurial spirit already, why make it harder by filtering out candidates from less-known schools? Not to mention, a lot of technical skills can be picked up on the job if they understand the core concepts like OO programming.
That is iff the employer wants you to learn skills as you go. Due to the employer's market, the employers don't want to train people and can cherry pick those who already have those skills and there goes the need for learning Catna 6. Instead they ask for Catna 6 experience in a Six-Sigma setting making it so they are looking for existing employees to take the job.
That is iff the employer wants you to learn skills as you go. Due to the employer's market, the employers don't want to train people and can cherry pick those who already have those skills and there goes the need for learning Catna 6. Instead they ask for Catna 6 experience in a Six-Sigma setting making it so they are looking for existing employees to take the job.
I'd love it if competent database/.NET developers grew on trees like Catna 6 people evidently do!
But instead we get people obviously googling answers in phone screens and padding their resume (e.g. "I see you listed the MVC framework on your resume, can you tell me what experience you've had with it?" "Well, I spent 3 minutes googling it 4 years ago, so I thought it'd slap it on the ol' resume!")
That's why we switched to looking for people with potential moreso than the precise skill set. It's way easier to teach syntax vs initiative.
Go look at your data. Sheesh. See those service jobs? What do you think, that those mcdonalds workers are making 6 figures? "service providing" is the largest gain in that group by a massive amount.
So yeah, you're wrong. The data indicates it clearly. And your response?
"The data does not show that all new jobs are low paying and in the service sector, so my calling it BS isn't worse and your claim the data supports it is equally idiotic."
Uh huh.
When Obama and others go on about how all these jobs are being created, the TYPE of jobs matter a lot. And this is the problem. "service providing" jobs have sucky pay. You provided data backing this up, when called on it, you simply deny the facts you provided.
Of course service sector jobs don't pay much. Do you think they have any real skills involved? Those skills difficult to train? Are they irreplaceable?
Like it or not, that's most of the jobs that will be created in this country in the next 20 years. And most of those will probably go to immigrants and refugees, who will continue to pour into the United States and become the biggest percentage of immigrant population in our history.
In 2030, wealth disparity in the United States will be an established norm of life, probably quite bigger than it is today. There will be fewer and fewer people listening to crazy a.m. radio, and more and more people eating kebabs and garlic nann. So if you are an American worker and you're smart, you should know that you did you work extra hard, challenge yourself, and compete with labor from around the world on a level playing field.
Like the Stock Market the Job stats are embellished by spin doctors . The earnings reports by Fortune 500 complanies are cooked books as usual and most jobs are part-time with no benefits and short lived jobs that equate to working in a South African diamond mine.
The article is filled with sentences like that, but what's weird about this one is that inflation is thought to be generally understated, not overstated.
It's generally thought to be understated by conspiracy theorists. It's thought to be overstated by economists.
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