This Article is about unemployment. And I do not know about you, but I've become accustom to seeing things like this run in papers and over the years the story does not seem to change. This article was a little different however. What I liked most about it was the section on occupational mismatching. The author acknowledges a big point that even those that are employed may be a "waste of talent" in their current field. This is an aspect of unemployment and the job market that I usually don't hear about.
What about you, did you find this article interesting or different?
Similarly to Travis, this didn't appear to be a standard unemployment article that I am used to seeing. In terms of the part that intrigued you, I was interested by this statement, ..."indicating that the overall unemployment rate is high because unemployment rates remain high across all industries and most skill groups, not because of a growing skills gap relative to the gap that existed before the recession." I have never heard of a skills gap and I never thought of any mistakes with matching jobs to appropriate skills was a problem. Additionally, reading this makes me think I have thought of this perspective, "And the longer workers are unemployed, the more their skills, contacts and links to the labor market atrophy, the less likely they are to find a job and the more likely they are to drop out of the labor force." This is an interesting point that seems obvious to me but also is a valid point that she writes on.
ReplyDeleteI also find this article interesting. In regards to the first part of the article, the author states, "Increases in educational attainment levels and effective training programs would ameliorate such differences and the growing wage inequality they have generated." This is one of her solutions to the mismatch issue, but even with training and educational attainment, would this solve it? Also to point on the long term employment issue, I thought that when she stated, "As a result, what is currently a temporary long-term unemployment problem runs the risk of morphing into a permanent and costly increase in the unemployment rate and a permanent and costly decline in the economy’s potential output. That’s what the Federal Reserve is worried about. It’s too bad that more members of Congress don’t share this concern," is extremely important, and I have never really thought of this issue before. She states that President Obama has tried many policies to fix the issue, but they have failed... what could be done about this?
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this article. Speaking of "anecdotes about how employers cannot find workers with the skills they need," I recently spoke with my mom about this exact thing. She works as a manager in a branch of HR at corporate Walgreens and she told me about a manager level position at Walgreens that has been open for over 8 months. They have "been unable to fill this position" for over 8 months. This seems unbelievable to me. They could at least promote someone into the position and open up lower level jobs for college students or lesser experiences workers to fill. If this is just one open job at one major corporation, I can only imagine the untapped potential these companies hold. I think companies claiming that they can't find the right skilled employees is bologna. I think one factor in this disconnect is the fact that companies had to greatly decrease their work force when the economy took a turn for the worse, and now as companies are recovering, they are simply making do with less employees to get the same amount of work done. I am basing that off of what I have seen my mom go through and what she talks about. Even if that isn't the case everywhere, I do believe it is the case in some places and it is only providing the current employees with more to do and the unemployed without a job.
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