Thanks for this, Jim.
I got thinking about unfilled jobs after I sent that post last night. I've
applied for jobs where I had the qualifications, experience, etc., and didn't
get them. The employers had an opening but whether it was overbite, ethnicity,
height or weight, they didn't like me. So the job went unfilled for a time
after my interview. I know of one instance where there was an unspoken
religious qualification which I didn't meet. Maybe employers don't like
Southern accents, or Yankees, so don't hire until they find someone who fits,
and they are willing to let the opening linger for a long time. More obvious
are gender and race as plus or minus factors. All this keeps jobs from being
filled.
What bothers me about the current spin is a bald assertion that there
are not people in the market ready and able to fill the jobs. That's just
simple "blame the victim" and fits the need to denigrate an effort to develop
jobs.
Gene
On Jun 18, 2011, at 8:15 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
> The JOLTS survey measures the availability of job openings (vacancies
> = jobs offered). It started being collected at the end of 2000, but
> it's an old idea. The idea probably goes back to William Beveridge, a
> social-democratic economist who defined "full employment" as where the
> number of vacancies = the number of unemployed people (jobs offered =
> jobs sought), so that the problem of unemployment only reflected
> frictional and mismatch unemployment. (These "supply-side" or
> "matching" kinds of unemployment get all the attention from the
> conservatives, even when they're not very important. For these, people
> don't want the jobs available or lack the requisite skills.) Some kind
> of vacancy data has been been collected in Western Europe for years.
>
> Looking at the attached graph, the US had a unemployment to vacancy
> rate of about 1 in December 2000. That would be "Beveridge full
> employment" if the numbers were measured correctly (which they're
> likely not). Even with a measurement problem, changes in this ratio
> indicate improvement and/or deterioration in labor-power markets. The
> ratio rises during the 2001 recession and after. It's continued rise
> after the NBER recession suggests an employment recession or a
> "jobless recovery," The ratio began to fall only at the end of 2003
> (when the employment recovery finally began).
>
> The ratio hit bottom -- but still not as good as in December 2000 --
> in late 2006. With the crisis, it then soared until late 2009 (after
> the NBER recession had ended). It peaked at about 6 unemployed workers
> per job opening. It has fallen since then, to about 4 job-seekers per
> job. But that's very high (much worse than during the Bush #2 years)
> and its improvement has stalled. That fits with data on the employment
> population ratio which stubbornly stays low. This is much, much worse
> than the jobless recovery of the #2 years.
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Eugene Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Yes, there are -- good times and bad -- always unfilled jobs under the BLS
>> definition. But now the spin is that there are no people available with
>> either the qualifications or the brains/training to fill Immelt's jobs. I'm
>> unfamiliar, Doug, with the series you cited. Is there a spike in unfilled
>> jobs? Or is this just the baseline of jobs to be filled?
>>
>>
>> On Jun 17, 2011, at 10:25 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 17, 2011, at 12:54 PM, Eugene Coyle wrote:
>>>
>>>> My question: where are these two million jobs?
>>>
>>> Actually it's closer to 3 million:
>>>
>>> http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.htm
>>>
>>> Problem is, there are about 5 unemployed persons for every job.
>>>
>>> Doug
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>
>
> --
> Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
> way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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