Posted on 07/29/2017 3:26:08 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
HUBBARD, Ohio – An Ohio factory owner said Saturday that though she has blue-collar jobs available at her company, she struggles to fill positions because so many candidates fail drug tests.
Regina Mitchell, a co-owner of Warren Fabricating & Machining in Hubbard, Ohio, told The New York Times this week that four out of 10 applicants otherwise qualified to be welders, machinists and crane operators will fail a routine drug test.
In an interview Saturday with CNN’s Michael Smerconish, Mitchell said that her requirements for prospective workers were simple.
“I need employees who are engaged in their work while here, of sound mind and doing the best possible job that they can, keeping their fellow co-workers safe at all times,” she said....
(Excerpt) Read more at fox8.com ...
So you don’t think employers should have the right to know if their employees are using?
my son took a summer job leading into his 4th year of college with major in accounting and a minor in economics.
He was a year away from his degree, he like the job so much, he never went back to school.
He has 15 years tenure. Vested union pension (hope it’s still there when he retires). He just made journeyman mechanic.
Anybody who can turn a wrench or a screw driver or...and knows what they are doing, will always be able to make a decent living.
Help wanted signs everywhere around here...if you are breathing and just show up, you have a job. No takers.
Something is way wrong.
No qualified applicants means the wages being offered are too low. it’s called supply and demand.
Another Chamber of Commerce sponsored hit piece on how bad American workers are.
Hammer, meet nail. I’ve been involved in workforce development for several years, and every point you make is spot-on.
As Mr. Rowe has observed, the average age of Americans who can fix and make stuff is 58, and most of them will be retiring in the next decade. Where their replacements will come from is anyone’s guess; parents and school counselors have told two generations of young people that the skilled trades and manufacturing positions are second-rate positions, for individuals who “aren’t college material.”
So, anyone who can fill out a college application and financial aid form enrolls in “traditional” classes that provide nothing in the way of viable skills and little in the way of education. The typical student on the “gotta go to college track” spends a couple of years in school, then quits out of boredom, frustration or an inability to pass even freshman-level courses. In the mean time, those jobs in the trades and advanced manufacturing go unfilled, and (as the article observes) many of the qualified applicants can’t pass a drug screening.
On any given day, there are at least 300,000 advanced manufacturing jobs that go unfilled in the US. The community college I work for offers several certificates in that field, buy many of our class sections go unfilled because young people have an “aversion” to a job that might require them to break a sweat. Incidentally, today’s advanced manufacturing environment is anything but “dirty;” most plants have to maintain extremely clean, even sterile conditions.
And the jobs are not putting “widgets” on something as it rolls by on an assembly line. These positions require mechanical, electrical, and problem-solving abilities, along with IT skills. It’s their job to keep expensive robots in operation, so the product can be produced. Entry level jobs pay at least $50K a year (more with overtime) and full benefits. Additional certification brings a promotion to $75K a year, with overtime and full benefits. And these are not jobs that can be out-sourced or exported.
But most young people would rather make $10 an hour at Starbucks, because it’s a “cool” place to work.
Well, I’ve never belonged to a chamber of commerce, but my experience at the unemployment office circa 1988 to 2000 says that at least a quarter to a half of the workers we sent to apply at employers who used drug tests were disqualified. Supposedly the “opioid crisis” is worse now. Mix in legalized marijuana. There’s a problem.
But half were drug free right?
depends on the industry.
In IT, no qualified applicants means you, if you are not from India.
Has nothing to do with supply and demand as you know it.
Yes, corporations want fully qualified drug free applicants willing to work for third world wages. Pay has been stagnant for 30 years and I think this is the real issue. Maybe after all the old farts retire wages will go up.
It depended on what kind of job seeker we referred. Veterans, which my team dealt with, rarely tested positive for drugs. Normal unemployed people about 25% to 50% did. Welfare and food stamp recipients were slightly higher.
Most guys who are going to college major in Engineering or trying to and if they don’t succeed they are dropping out.
They are going here.
https://www.niche.com/colleges/search/best-colleges-for-engineering/
Texas Tech only has 4000 undergraduates and graduates in Engineering out of a student body of nearly 30,000 students and its graduating Engineering class last year was less than 500 students.
My sons graduating Engineering Class was over 2000 students and was slightly more than 50 percent of the entire graduates for the year. Engineers, Comp. Science and regular STEM majors are 60 percent of the student body at his University and are primarily males.
Guys are going to college but they are enrolled in cost effective majors. It really is not cost effective to major in much else.
One factor nobody is considering is that cannabis is a widely and increasingly popular alternative to the toxic treatments of the “health care” industry.
Those people testing positive for it are in general likely to be more intelligent than the average, because they’re smart enough to figure out for themselves that you can use this natural God-given cure for many human ailments, or you can at fantastic expense load yourself up with poisonous pharmaceuticals.
So bottom line, that’s why so many people test positive for it these days - it’s the only form of health care a lot of this country can afford anymore. And it works a lot better than what the pharmas churn out.
I don’t know, reports such as this seem to suggest that the tradesman lifestyle somehow has a major drug risk associated with it.
You don’t think it is a big deal that 4 out of 10 candidates qualified for this type of job in her area are on drugs?
My experience is the other way. 60% fail the drug tests. 40% have few if any skills. I wind up training then.
Yep. The good old, tail-end days of the Detroit oligopoly had drunken factory workers making our cars.
We, the taxpayers, are paying for it. When such working class stiffs get stiffed out of well-paying jobs because they are stiff on the job, they tend to go out “on disabililty” rather than work the menial, near-minimum-wage jobs that they can handle.
Of course, the Dems were happy as can be to pull them up onto the dole gravy-train for the last 8 years through the Obama administration.
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