Back in 2008, Sen. Joe Biden, D-NJ, then
a candidate for vice president, commented that the economic plan his Republican
rival, Sen. John McCain, R-NM, released does not address the number one problem
facing the middle class, and “it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter
word: jobs. J-O-B-S."
Whether you spell “jobs” with three or
four letters, having enough jobs is a critical issue today. President Donald
Trump has made bringing back jobs that were moved out of the country a major
goal, as well as improving the economy so that new jobs will be created. So
far, several companies have pledged to bring jobs back to the U.S.
The U.S. jobs picture at this time is a
subject of conflicting numbers. A contributor to a Bloomberg Television program
last week referred to the U.S. job situation as “near full employment,”
obviously referring to the currently very attractive, though horribly misleading,
U-3 Unemployment Rate, which stands at 4.8 percent.
The U-3, however, ignores the 95
million working age Americans who have given up and dropped out of, or are only
marginally attached to, the labor force. Leaving out this huge contingent of Americans
working less than full time and those not working at all, but wanting a job, pushes
the U-3 rate down into respectable territory. However, those folks are included
in the calculation of the U-6 Unemployment Rate, which shows unemployment of
nine percent, a long way from “near full employment.”
Not only are there tens of millions of Americans of working
age who want to work sitting on the sidelines, but there are also lots of
employers with millions of unfilled jobs looking for workers. The Glassdoor
Economic Research Blog lists 5.1 million unique U.S. job listings, and
calculates the total value of estimated base pay at $272.6 billion that the
economy is missing out on because the jobs are unfilled. Those open jobs, which
average about $53,600 annually, represent lost productivity to employers, and
good opportunities for workers.
“Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe puts the unfilled jobs number a
half-million higher than Glassdoor at 5.6 million. Many of these are blue-collar
jobs, for mechanics, welders, electricians and so forth – the so-called
“skilled trades.” Rowe notes that learning blue-collar skills actually
teaches you more than just that skill, and laments how the idea that everyone
needs a college education has redirected many young people who might have
pursued a blue-collar skill for their livelihood that fills an open slot. Instead,
they are in college pursuing a degree that they hope will serve them well as
adults.
The technology sector also has many open jobs, according to
cio.com, a branch of IDG Enterprise catering to chief
information officers. CIO utilized Glassdoor information and one of its
community experts, Scott Dobroski. “There's a lot of economic opportunity
that's going unfulfilled in technology right now, both inside and outside
purely IT companies,” Dobroski said. “Retail, professional services,
manufacturing, healthcare, web and mobile platforms – all these types of companies
are IT companies, and they all need software engineers," he said.
The CIO story noted that “When broken
out by job title, roles with the highest levels of demand and in shortest
supply tend to have the greatest value associated, like software engineers, for
which there are 13,198 open jobs with a value of $1.3 billion.” And,
"These aren't unnecessary roles that companies can simply ignore or leave
vacant – these IT roles, in particular, are critical for growth, innovation and
competition.”
On Rowe’s point, many young people
choose college who really would be better off pursuing a job that doesn’t
require college. “With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn
20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being
better educated,” according to a USA Today report on a new analysis of Federal
Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles. Further, the graduates have
to take lower paying jobs while they await a job opening in the field of their
college degree.
According to the College Board, the average “moderate”
budget for the academic year 2016-2017 was $24,610 for an in-state public
college, and $49,320 for a private college. A four-year degree, therefore, will
cost on average nearly $100,000 at an in-state public school and nearly
$200,000 at a private school.
Quite a few college graduates with tens of thousands of
dollars of student loan debt chose a career field that may have “felt” right
for them, but was not a vibrant field that would provide them a career
opportunity. Consequently, they cannot find a job in their chosen field and
they must work a lower paying job waiting for a job in their field to open up,
and their steep college loan debts eat away at their meager earnings.
All the while, many good paying jobs that fill an immediate productivity
and economic need remain unfilled because of a lack of trained job seekers.
Many, perhaps most, of these jobs, require much less of an investment than a
college degree, and some of them teach the skill on the job, requiring no up
front investment.
