Posted on 04/19/2018 5:52:37 AM PDT by davikkm
Neel Kashkari has become the Federal Reserve’s foremost skeptic of the notion that the U.S. is experiencing a severe labor shortage. Kashkari, who is the president of the Minneapolis Fed, points to the lack of significant upward pressure on wages as evidence debunking the claims that the U.S. lacks workers. The logic is pretty simple: if the supply of labor is so limited relative to demand, the price of labor should be swiftly rising.
The fact that the price of labor is not rising much suggests that perhaps labor is not in as short supply as some employers and special interest lobbying groups claim. Maybe these claims of a labor shortage are just covers for those who want U.S. labor costs to fall, which would raise profits in the short term.
Another theory is that labor prices have become stuck at low levels because employers, after so many years of high unemployment and minimal wage pressure, have become reluctant to raise wages. The tool of offering higher wages to attract new workers has fallen out of the toolkit of many American businesses and no one noticed because it wasn’t needed for so long. But now that there are far fewer unemployed people desperately hoping for a job, employers do not know where to turn to find new employees. They’ve forgotten how to poach workers from competitors with higher wages.
On Tuesday, Kashkari returned to this theme in a series of tweets that lay to waste a Wall Street Journal article pointing to “historic, severe shortages” of labor.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
There is no major labor shortage but there are a lot of able bodied Americans who can’t pull their damn pants up or pass a drug test.
Um...any mention of 3rd worlders in the labor market?
Oh, and welgare???
That's part of it - the product of handing schools over to the NEA and its enforcer, the US Department of Education. The other part for holding wages down is the oversupply of illegals still, and companies willing to hire them at slave wages.
There’s also no shortage of off-shore remote support either. Seems I can’t call a help line for any company anymore without needing a translator. Even chat helps are about impossible to understand...
Likewise, they are getting a whole plethora of goodies from the welfare state and handouts from sundry “low income advocates.”
Why work when you can do better begging from an industry of professional chumps. Can you blame them. Demoralized blobs of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your souls.
And I thought that robots and AI were about to displace millions of US workers?
Also, we have more than enough unskilled, uneducated, low IQ people in the US, the last thing we need is more of those.
I think most immigration should be shut down with a small number allowed in purely on merit.
lay to waste a Wall Street Journal article pointing to “historic, severe shortages” of labor.
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The Cheap Labor Express does not want to be shut down.
The WSJ is their mouthpiece.
Right now, there are a number of people who are comfortable living off of Welfare, Food Stamps, Obamacare, Obamaphones and everything else that the government hands out. A lot of that was there before Obama but he loosened up the criteria to get it and massively expanded it — especially when it came to Food Stamps and SSI disability claims. If Trump is a able to roll that back, then a lot more people will work.
We live in a crazy world where we import illegals from Latin America to do the low / workforce entry level jobs but pay generous Welfare so that people are dis-incentivized to take those jobs. We need to get back to the day when everyone worked and government relief was for those who truly can’t work — the elderly and people who are totally disabled.
A $10 an hour wage is a job and I applaud all who work for their own living.
It’s 400 a week and 1600 a month and about 20000 a year. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to live on that should try it. It’s possible but very hard if you figure housing alone will take about 500 a month of it just about anyplace.
So, a lot of folks look at the difficulty of the job compared to $10 an hour. Hard physical at 10...no. Repetitive, not physical, yes. And they continue to wait for something better.
So, hard physical labor jobs expecting takers at low wages are playing the illegals under the table game. Just my opinion.
So, a lot of folks look at the difficulty of the job compared to $10 an hour. Hard physical at 10...no. Repetitive, not physical, yes. And they continue to wait for something better.
Same companies/groups that are pushing for an increase on H1b s, perhaps? As in "we're letting you go, but if you want your severance, you need to train your H1b replacement"?
There are jobs that exist at lower wages that cease to exist at higher wages. Example, you might pay $7/hr to have your grass cut but at $15/hr you will do it yourself or let it go to seed.
We have plenty of lower wage workers but unfortunately their employer is Welfare and the job is easy. Hard to compete against Uncle Sugar in the lower wage part of the economy.
There is a shortage of skilled workers but wages won’t make a difference in the short term because the people with the needed skills don’t exist.
At the same rate...not often.
In many places you can’t even rent a room for 500/month.
That being said, 10/hr is fine when you are 20 and can share an apartment with buddies.
If your 30 or 40 making 10/hr something went wrong.
But their are not nearly enough middle and high paying jobs in this country. The results of generations of a cheap labor policy.
UBER. How much do their drivers make? The laws of supply and demand suggest they will not ‘share’ their profits with their drivers. Greed? I think it the inability to recognize when you’ve got a good thing going.
AND:
Covered in tattoos & have various & numerous punctures in their visible skin.
All of which eliminate ANY perspective employee from my eyesight. PERIOD
Cheap labor policy has killed the ability of a lower middle class family to keep their head above water and to have a single wage care for a family. This results in kids gone wild, kids raised by socialist programming, and kids forever devoted to the liberal world view.
Cheap labor policy is not an accident.
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