Posted on 11/04/2007 8:01:31 PM PST by floozy22
A revolution is playing out right before our eyes. Peter Gustaf has warned us for months now, since he took over as president of Wichita Area Technical College. Most of us are not paying attention, he says, and that has already cost us dearly.
In the 1950s, 60 percent of the American work force was unskilled labor. Today, it is 15 percent unskilled.
The technological revolution of the past half-century has made it so. What should have happened with such a dramatic change in the work force is a dramatic change in how we prepare our children for the world.
That didn't happen, Gustaf says, and now there are 8,700 unfilled jobs in the six-county Wichita area.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansas.com ...
...we need more illegals...
Oh wait, SKILLED labor is in short supply.
Well we need more illegals to vote for Dems anyway...
This issue rings true everywhere. Skilled jobs are the future. Workforce requirements will only get more complex as time goes on. America's economic future, and it's security depend, just as they always have, on the productive brainpower of its citizens. And to those who belittle corporate America for hiring foreign workers to fill skilled U.S. jobs - let the folks in Wichita and elsewhere know where they can find the U.S. workers to fill them.There are plenty of Americans available for "skilled" jobs, they just won't work for the wages that corporate America wants to pay.
Those who laughed at we who chose to be tradesmen rather than desk jockeys are now paying us dearly for our skills. Yet they insist on sending their progeny to university rather than blessing their entry into a trade.
Why do plumbers charge $80/ hour? Because they can < BG >.
“bosses can’t find enough nurses, aviation workers, plumbers or air-conditioning techs to fill open jobs.”
I find that there’s a shortage of eggs at 99 cents a dozen. But at the the market price of $1.69 I can buy all I want.
Employers who complain about shortages of skilled workers usually aren’t willing to pay the market price.
I went to college but also learned a trade many of my friends have done so. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Those who laughed at we who chose to be tradesmen rather than desk jockeys are now paying us dearly for our skills. Yet they insist on sending their progeny to university rather than blessing their entry into a trade.The trades and even *professionals*, like doctors, are beginning to get hit by the "insourcing" boom as well.
Why do plumbers charge $80/ hour? Because they can < BG >.
ding ding ding. We have a winner :)
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Absolutely true.
But the reverse is true as well. EmployEES who complain that there are no jobs usually aren't willing to work for the market price....or go where the jobs are.
Hank
Ditto. Money talks, BS walks.
Pinging...
I had intestinal surgery in 1990, after recovery I was taking some classes at the Jr. college in my area. I ran into my surgeon there. I asked him what he did at the college and he told me that he was taking welding classes.
A year or so later he retired from doctoring and bought a body shop, he was in his mid 40s. He not only owns the body shop he is very involved in the dirty work too.
Hey, whatever makes him happy.
There are a lot welders with professional backgrounds.
Merchant mariners too!
You are kidding right?
America has an abundance of skilled workers for those jobs. If you think this isn't true then you don't have clue.
I am in the same position, I am a supervisor not the owner of a concrete batch plant for over 12 years, I to think its time for a change, I love to build custom cars and trucks and I think I will open up a custom body shop and call it something like “Major Bling”
I on the other hand with all the problems in the US it may just happen I will leave Alaska for Australia.
Went into debt big time to go to Carnegie Mellon, one of the top computer schools in the country, did well, graduated and couldn't land even an entry level job at $35K or so. All of his classmates, mostly from India, had no problem. So the kid takes any gig he can get with a temp agency. Two years later, the H1-B quota is filled and companies can't hire more foreign students, so the kid gets hired-- finally, but only because the American employers couldn't get a lower-paid foreign worker-- even though this kid was willing to take the same entry level salary. The corporate reasoning was that Indian workers couldn't leave their H1-B sponsors, but this kid would be free to fly the coop and earn what he is really worth . . . which he is doing now. But before, they wouldn't even give him a chance because lower risk cheaper alternatives were available.
Remember the "How Not to Hire an American" Seminars caught on You-Tube? The one they recorded took place right here in Pittsburgh just blocks away from CMU, where the skilled American kid with great grades, work ethic and skills couldn't get hired as long as businesses could get H1B workers from outside the country.
They never should have in the first place, but somehow they did. There was a time when we were fat and happy and could pay $25/hr for people to turn screws for 4 hrs a day and screw off for the other 4 (then come in for double time on Saturday).
Trouble is, those workers actually thought they were worth what they were paid. Who needed to learn anything while the gravy train was running?
The market rate is what an H1-B will accept.
Yep. I’ve found that none of these articles screeching about a shortage of labor are accurate.
"Skilled workers" is an overly broad category. If you have too many lawyers and not enough engineers, well then of course the engineering firms will be saying there are not enough people.
Personally, I would blame cultural decay (stereotypes, for one) and the failure of public education for the imbalance.
First, the coursework required to enter a technical discipline such as mathematics, the sciences, and engineering is very demanding, and public schools on the whole do a terrible job of preparing students.
Second, it's not "cool" to be a "nerd" or a "geek" as a child. Believe me, nerds and geeks are stereotyped heavily in popular culture (this goes for anyone with academic achievement).
Last, well...this is for the folks who practice the "trades": you guys are important too! Plumbers, electricians, etc. keep America running. (They make it possible for scientists, engineers, and mathematicians -- the backbone of America's advanced economy -- to keep doing what they do best.) However, you too are stereotyped in popular culture, mostly as dumb, uneducated, with low pay.
My two cents. Being productive in America is just not cool, or at least, that's what the popular culture (thanks to the lefties) is telling America's youth. Oh, but you know what is cool, according to the lefties? Captain Planet. Destroying the evil capitalists (depicted as freakish monsters). "Saving the world," being dumb, and other such poppycock.
You cant fathom the complex nature of work and technology that goes into making products these days.
Take up TMTT, JSSC or any international journal of repute and show me how many 20-something American researchers are publishing anything ?
They just dont want to go for higher ed because the local American pop cultural is not encouraging higher ed among youth. Or maybe its just the rising costs of tuition that compell students to work for a while after undergrad.
Now, if a company wants to grow, why should it be forced to hire an old, “experienced” guy with outdated skills rather than a fresh, graduate researcher with several journals and industry-specific skills ?
Jobs should go the one who can do them best - either foreign or local.
Sadly, this is not how the market operates. Companies aren't trying to hire "the best". You might think they would, but they aren't. Companies want to hire "good enough" people at low prices.
Foreign engineers work cheap -- that's what makes them desirable. The federal government (through H1-B) helps US firms hire cheap labor from overseas, and diminishes the desirability of a career in the technical fields for American kids. It's dumb.
Too bad for that kid.
But H1-Bs themselves typify a HUGE category of foreign workers.
Even if you graduate summa cum laude with a PhD degree from MIT or if you arrive into US with just an undergrad degree from your homeland, if you are a foreigner intending to work on a tech-related job, you can only work on a H1-B.
Most Americans are familiar only with the latter category of people, who are not educated in US, and competing for entry level jobs.
On the other hand, there are people who have done 5-7 years of graduate study in American universities and still only qualify for a H1-B if they want to work in US. Would you rather have a Stanford, MIT PhD work for your country after exposing him to the latest technology and send him back to China or Iran ?
Of course I can. Making assumptions based on no knowledge is is not really that bright.
Wonder if there is a school for trackhoes and bulldozers. I may look into that myself!
Globalism is coming to an end soon. The next WW will guarantee that.
Our middle son just started college. He is majoring in IT/Computer Programming...he could have gone to a tech school...but he felt incredible pressure to go to a four year school (for the BS degree) as opposed to getting an Associate's Degree. He is struggling with a class called (unbelievably) Thinking and Writing.
If you had told me this a few years back, I would be dismissive of you as being “protectionist”.
But after seeing how CISCO hires its employees from India as H1-B contract workers, I can understand what you mean.
The way they import hundreds and hundreds of engineers and split a single job among groups of dozens, its definitely hurting a local American engineers.
But once again, not ALL companies can afford to hire cheap labor at the expense of quality.
Consider the implementation of a certain new technology called ULTRA-WIDEBAND. This technology will enable extremely high data rate transfer over very short range distances (something we call PANs - personal area networks). Using this technology, you would be able to transfer entire videos and songs from your laptop to an IPOD or digital camera wirelessly (without even a USB port).
Dozens of American companies are vying with each other to release the first product using this protocol. The only incentive to make it affordable for consumers is to use silicon based technologies like CMOS or SiGe.
But designing with these technologies is extremely complicated and designers require several years of coursework and experience to even get started on design.
So, the company (assuming its a start up) has the following options:
(a) A fresh undergrad who doesnt know a thing about design but is American.
(b) 10 year experienced, 40-something American who while doing his MS or PhD degree never even had a “sub-micron” silicon technology to design.
(c) Fresh graduate student from an American university who is well versed in modern technologies and also has modern coursework and research expxerience in design.
Just tell me who is the ONLY option for a company like this ?
My two cents. Being productive in America is just not cool, or at least, that's what the popular culture (thanks to the lefties) is telling America's youth. Oh, but you know what is cool, according to the lefties? Captain Planet. Destroying the evil capitalists (depicted as freakish monsters). "Saving the world," being dumb, and other such poppycock.I don't think this is true at all. I know plenty of Gen Y'ers that work very hard. The problem is that it's now obvious that they have to compete with cheap indentured foreigners for "skilled" jobs. When the relevant skills change they have to compete with hordes or new graduates and new immigrants to stay relevant. They are plenty smart to realize that skilled trades are increasingly a sucker's game.
I didnt mean “you” cant fathom.. I meant “you cant fathom”.. its not intended to insult you or something. Apologies anyway.
Otherwise there’s no point in hiring them.
That’s how it works.
If an employee wants more than what the company will make from what they produce then there’s no point in hiring them.
Many here that blame the “company” for what they perceive as low wages should start and run their own companies and show us how it is done...
Too bad. I’d suggest that the kid needed to broaden his search. I’ve seen very recent ads from the DoD looking to hire IT wizards, with far higher pay than the $35K you mentioned.
If the kid is eligible to get a security clearance and he’s as sharp as you say, he should look into it.
Exactly.
The best option is to get the required skills and prove yourself invaluable.
You pretend there is only one kind of citizen, that all are of equal capability and intelligence.
As a blanket statement, I don't agree. Depending on the company and the industry, an organization in hiring mode is just like any consumer. It acquires what it needs to do the job. For some, cost may be the first consideration. For others, a quality candidate is the primary goal, and they'll pay the wage they have to pay. Foreign-educated technical workers are viewed by many as being better-educated than their American counterparts - and perhaps also viewed as better workers.
I'm amazed at how protectionist Americans have become, like there's a conspiracy to put us all out of work, pay us low wages and keep us under the thumb of big, bad corporate fat cats. Businesses don't stay in business and keep making money if they don't have good (permanent) workers. Turnover of personnel costs companies lots of money. They just want good workers.
Why don’t we get more engineers from our schools?
The reasons often given for a lack of interest in the hard sciences obfuscate the point. One samestream media reporter was so clueless that he wrote, “And then something happened — and U.S. students turned away from hard science.”
I’ll tell you what happened: The environmental religion gave birth to the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1972, the EPA banned DDT for purely ideological reasons. Since then, science and engineering have become increasingly polluted by a religion that characterizes the Earth as sacred and mankind as an evil polluter with our gas and oil wells, nuclear power plants and chemical refineries.
The constant propagandizing in the textbooks is driving many away from the hard sciences while condemning others to sickness and death from malaria and West Nile virus.
Science has become increasingly politicized with the global warming fraud. Manmade global warming is a complete fiction. So-called scientists and U.N. sycophants have committed the “Enron of climate science” by intentionally covering up the medieval-era warm period to make the 20th century look like the warmest on record.
Expose the charlatans and let the boys and girls know that there’s no room for politics in science and engineering. Then they will regain the respect of moral and ethical people who wish to contribute to the betterment of society.
The best people are the ones who are motivated and love what they do regardless of their formal education.
A recent engineering graduate usually takes years of practical experience before they become very productive and profitable for the company. It isn’t hard to understand why an employer wants those years of investment to be somewhat locked into place if it is a choice for them. Otherwise all that time and money the employer invested giving the employee experience can walk out the door when it finally starts paying off.
Thats the bottom line. Boo hoo to those that don't want to pay market price and free economy wages.
I can’t get a plumber when I need one. I’d gladly pay $80. In this town I live in there are two plumbers who probably work 16 hours a day. When I need one I get him a week or two later. I keep telling high school kids if I were them I would go to plumbing school instead of college.
One American professor told me that the reason why very few American students dont prefer higher ed itself is the enormous debt they accrue after undergrad.
And at the entry level, they are competing with contract H1-Bs.
If they persevere and go for higher ed, they will undoubtedly have better career prospects.
Regarding why they dont take up engineering itself, I think its the pop culture which stereotypes people with interest in math and science as “geeks”, “nerds” etc which intimidates them from a young age. But maybe I am wrong.
There are. Google “Heavy Equipment Operators School.”
I will agree with you that "science" (pseudoscience) has become far too politicized, but I am hard-pressed to find an example of propaganda in any of my math and computer science texts (unless you count Chomsky's theory of formal languages in a class on computation theory).
Perhaps my school is an anomaly, but the only propaganda and politics going on here tends to take place in the humanities and liberal arts departments, although we do have a few outposts of liberal idiocy among a few faculty in the Engineering School and the various hard sciences departments.
I will have to disagree. Modern day research in engineering is exactly similar to what the industry is doing.
Many Profs are running their labs to implement products that are actually prototypes.
Journal paper writing in engineering is nothing short of filing patents. The same set of skills needed to do research in universities are necessary to work in the industry anyway.
Of course, with a few years of experience, any talented person could readily supplant fresh Phds.
Unless you are going for a START UP working on a new technology which wont have time to Train people and needs employees to get started right away.
“Camille Paglia (yes, I know...Salon) wrote an excellent piece on just this topic. That crafts/trades were not ‘endorsed’ by our feminized culture...and that young men were being forced into college and paper pushing jobs as opposed to learning a trade. And I couldn’t agree more.”
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Yes! I remember that. It was kicked off by a long exchange of comments in the discussion thread for Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about low-paid labor in America. It took on a life of it’s own and all sorts of fascinating people weighed in. There really is a prejudice against any type of labor that involves blue shirts with nametags and a lot of people are shocked to find out how much some of the skilled “trades” actually pay. An older friend of mine is an elevator mechanic and he makes $95,000.
Fascinating point.
Science has been politicized, ruining real science and engineering.
We need our culture to honor and praise the right things. This shows up in the comments that make the correct point that the trades are unfilled because the rewards arent enough. Reward real engineers more, and the pseudo-scientific eco-tards less.
That Which Gets Rewarded Gets Done.
I dont think there is any room for political propaganda in several branches of engineering.
We dont have “liberal” IC chips fighting with “conservative” transistors yet.
I can’t get a plumber when I need one. I’d gladly pay $80. In this town I live in there are two plumbers who probably work 16 hours a day. When I need one I get him a week or two later.”
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Ditto here for air conditioning/heating repairmen~
I think there may be another reason.
When I grew up in the 70’s I could take things apart, see how they work and even change how they worked. Tubes, transistors etc, were pieces to a bigger puzzle that could be visualized and understood. You could interact with it at the component level. I made everything electronic under the sun... High voltage supplies, transmitters, bugs, receivers, remote controls, dimmers, strobes, endless things... Most of those things were made from other junked things... Salvaged parts from old TV’s, tape recorders, military surplus etc...
With much of today’s highly integrated and dedicated electronics there’s very little to play with, experiment with or otherwise learn from. There’s now a barrier to what a child has access to in his or her home to learn from. It’s simply a black box that does cool things with virtually no way to penetrate how it does those things. So they are now beyond the reach of a child. The child's attention then goes to what they can reach and in many cases those things are particularly productive...
Just a thought...
Filing patents doesn’t make things. Prototyping something is a long way from making a competitive product that can be manufactured reliably.
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