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I have read that the unemployment rate for 50+ year old people of any color is about the same as for 18 year old black guys in the cities. Apparently employers figure the old guys will cost too much for health insurance and the young guys will not show up or learn something and leave. They forget the old guys already know how to do the job and that once trained the young guys are worth higher pay. If they were not a competitor would not hire them.
The linked article above says the job market is on fire. Though if you look at the comments not one of the readers believe it. They say because their family and friends don't have great job, the government data is flawed, or at worst- a complete lie.
Does anyone remember what the people online used to say when there were articles about the low unemployment rate during the last booms with offical unemployment rates in the years 1997-2000 and 2005-2007. Did the people complain about the job market back then too?
The Great Recession shook out millions of marginal workers and made them long-term unemployed and unemployable. The job market today sucks for them and is good for most others.
The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi's chief financial economist, Chris Rupkey, circulated an email after the report with the title "Jobs market is literally on fire in most states in the union."
Yes, the job market is literally on fire and we need to send fire trucks over to the job market to put it out.
Anyway, while the labor market is unquestionably improving, the UE rate is just one number. It does not provide a complete picture of the labor market, as it omits people who've given up looking for work.
For this Chris Rupkey fellow to completely ignore that, I'm guessing that he probably has some kind of bias, in the sense that he wants rates to rise.
Employers are all over the campus this year. They are heavily recruiting. Many information sessions for the students and people who are in charge of hiring are coming to interview students. The students that are getting hired for full-time work or offered internships are really getting some sweet deals. The FEDS are doing it big this year too, and it is has been a great year for the number of companies we had at our Career Fair. It has been truly a pleasure working with the folks from GOOGLE. They will be hiring more minorities this year.
But they won't be hiring more working class anybodies.
That's very wrong. Look at places like Asheville, NC you have people with PHD's/Master/Bachelor degrees waiting tables.
The fact that people with Masters degrees are waiting tables in Asheville, NC does not mean that the labor market is good for high school graduates. That is a bizarre argument to make.
The linked article above says the job market is on fire. Though if you look at the comments not one of the readers believe it. They say because their family and friends don't have great job, the government data is flawed, or at worst- a complete lie.
Does anyone remember what the people online used to say when there were articles about the low unemployment rate during the last booms with offical unemployment rates in the years 1997-2000 and 2005-2007. Did the people complain about the job market back then too?
.
I have a cookie and you don't. A cookie represents a job. I split my cookie in half and give one half to you.....now we both have a cookie, but there has been no net gain in nourishment.
Lets say we lost a million good jobs during the last recession. Then 2 million jobs were created at half the benefit/pay compensation as the jobs previous lost. Thus, jobs are being created but the nourishment has been diluted. People are working but they are not getting full.
Here is the best example of what is going wrong: http://www.bls.gov/web/eci/ecconstnaics.pdf
Start with Table 8 on page 52 and see just how flat wages and salaries have been for the last decade.
Then go to Table 4 on page 3, and you will see that ~50% of the gain in total compensation is not in wages and salary.
Then jump to Table 12 on page 101 and see that the costs of benefits has ballooned despite cuts in retirement benefits.
For an interesting side story, look at page 105 and the difference between private unionized workers and private non-unionized workers.
(Btw, check out aircraft workers on page 104 if you want to see what happens when an industry with already contracting wages converts wholesale from pensions to no retirement benefits.)
And the last story is on page 106, cost of public worker benefits has jumped enormously. Now go to page 96 and you will see that public worker wages and salaries are almost completely flat. My first guess is that the difference is the cost of pensions as public workers retire en masse, but I actually wonder if this is more to do with public sector health insurance plans, especially considering this reflects current workers and the constant increases from 2008 to 2012 when public sector retirement plans (especially contributions to retirement plans) were getting slashed right and left.
Edit: A cursory glance through the metadata for these tables at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ect/#tables shows that there have been some changes in how the value of pensions are calculated starting in 2007. This might have a lot to do with that huge constant jump in the cost of public sector benefits, but I am not sure. The standard error on the value of portability of public sector pensions (which generally only exists in state government and local public health and education) is really high, implying that the value of portability might be changing dramatically over time. Portability can greatly increase the NPV of a pensions, because it means an employee can work decades at a low paying employer than transfer to an average paying employer late in their career and significantly increase their pension. Placing a value on those pension credits before the employee transfers while they are still at a low paying employer is entirely dependent on the portability of those pension credits.
Last edited by marigolds6; 11-24-2015 at 09:11 AM..
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