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430,000 new jobs!!!! But wait out of that 411,000 were temp jobs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Thread starter S2007S
- Start date
Quote from S2007S:
Scores of job seekers wait in line to see potential employers at the Diversity Job Fair in New York on June 2, 2010. There is still much to do to get our economy back to full employment.
I won't be surprised to see many of these jobs are commission-only sales jobs disguised as "management trainee" or "admissions counselor".
I saw Farmers Insurance in job fairs. They were not hiring anyone. They were looking for people buy their franchises.
There other outfits similar to Farmers Insurance making the number of jobs available look good, but not a real job!
It is not a job if it cannot even offer the worker minimum wage! It is certainly not a job if the worker has to put in big investment (like Framers) in order to work.
Quote from Retief:
Robots will work for less than 87 cents an hour.
I highly doubt it. Fixed costs will rise so that anything that produces will only be slightly cheaper than a human. Probably wouldn't be any advantage to a robot except perhaps quality and various personal issues, ie one robot grabbing anothers robots ass.
GM robotics program was a failure.
Quote from noob_trad3r:
Obama cannot fix this. This is 25 years in the making. Policies designed to send US jobs out of this country. White and Blue collar jobs.
First there was the massive importation of H1B workers and those on business visa. As if that is not enough, now these H1B folks are helping to outsource jobs to their home countries.
The American Century is over! The 21st century belongs to nations with low-wage labor.
Quote from Retief:
He could fix it easily. He has Democratic majorities in both houses, and they rammed through a hugely unpopular health bill. Plus he has the legacy media on his side.
The fix is smaller government, much smaller. Reduce taxes for businesses based in the US. Eliminate double taxation of dividends. Deregulate and make it easy to do business. Lift the drilling ban.
Government is the problem, not the solution.
Your statement is beyond ignorant. Only socialists/communists believe that politics alone can solve any problem and that you can just pass a law or budget your way to a healthy economy, jobs and eternal bliss.
Quote from noob_trad3r:
How do you create private sector jobs. Americans cannot compete against someone in china making 87 cents an hour or a white collar engineer in india making 1.57 an hour.
Nothing the government nor future president can change that.
You missed my point. If stimulus monies were to be spent, then every penny should have been spent on the private sector.
It would be easy to compete with unfair labor practices in other countires. During America's boom period, between the end of the Civil War and the creation of the Fed, America had some of the most restrictive trade barriers in history. We simply need to re-enact those. If commodity prices rise, use stimulus to make up the difference in cost.
Also, keep in mind that despite the unemployment, America allowed in over 1Million immigrants to take jobs last year. If it would cost a company $20000 per year more to hire an American instead, then set aside $20B of stimulus per year to compensate the companies that would have hired immigrants.
I can easily think of a dozen more ways the stimulus could have been used to increase private sector employment. Can you?
The problem for the US (and rest of the western world) basically boils down to technology causing jobs to disappear and/or be outsourced. Look how much productivity is reported to be up just over the past year or two. If a company (hypothetically) fires 1/3 of its workers, then makes the remaining workers work 1/3 harder, then you have increased productivity but also increased unemployment. Such an increase in productivity would not have been possible say 20 years ago. But today it is. Its good that machines and cheap labor can now do a lot of our work for us. But the downside is that there are no longer as many jobs to go around.
The solution to me is simple. Everyone who works at a regular "job" just needs to informally agree among themselves to accomplish 25% less. For those that may have a moral problem with this, consider whether your wages have kept up with inflation (the real costs you pay for food, clothing, rent, etc.) over say the past 10 years. Also ask yourself if maybe a 25% cut in productivity might only put you back to what your original output level was prior to all of the "belt tightening" of the past decade. Once critical tasks are not getting done, companies will have no choice but to hire more workers.
I know everyone is going to scream "But then employers will outsource all the jobs to India/China!" True, but not because of the above. Employers already have and will continue to outsource anything they can as long as it remains to their advantage to do so. Going along with the cuts and extra work is not going to prevent that. Tax laws should be changed so that outsourcing is no longer lucrative. But that is a separate issue.
I think the biggest flaw in the above plan is that it basically amounts to a cartel. And cartels tend not to work, since there are always incentives for some people to cheat. So perhaps a better way to accomplish this would be with a law that, for example, prohibits any employer from having an employee work more than say 32 hours a week. Well, it could be allowed, but taxed very heavily (say 100% of the person's salary for any overtime over 32 hours a week). With a 20% reduction in labor output, companies would be forced to hire about 20% more people. This would put a big dent in the unemployment rate, probably dropping it to near historical levels.
I just saw a news article today that talked about certain US school districts going to a 4-day school week for economic reasons. Other US employers could do the same. Some European countries already have laws limiting the amount of hours employees can work, mandating certain minimums for vacation, etc. So I think this idea has a sound basis and is not really as extreme as it may sound at first read.
Bettles
The solution to me is simple. Everyone who works at a regular "job" just needs to informally agree among themselves to accomplish 25% less. For those that may have a moral problem with this, consider whether your wages have kept up with inflation (the real costs you pay for food, clothing, rent, etc.) over say the past 10 years. Also ask yourself if maybe a 25% cut in productivity might only put you back to what your original output level was prior to all of the "belt tightening" of the past decade. Once critical tasks are not getting done, companies will have no choice but to hire more workers.
I know everyone is going to scream "But then employers will outsource all the jobs to India/China!" True, but not because of the above. Employers already have and will continue to outsource anything they can as long as it remains to their advantage to do so. Going along with the cuts and extra work is not going to prevent that. Tax laws should be changed so that outsourcing is no longer lucrative. But that is a separate issue.
I think the biggest flaw in the above plan is that it basically amounts to a cartel. And cartels tend not to work, since there are always incentives for some people to cheat. So perhaps a better way to accomplish this would be with a law that, for example, prohibits any employer from having an employee work more than say 32 hours a week. Well, it could be allowed, but taxed very heavily (say 100% of the person's salary for any overtime over 32 hours a week). With a 20% reduction in labor output, companies would be forced to hire about 20% more people. This would put a big dent in the unemployment rate, probably dropping it to near historical levels.
I just saw a news article today that talked about certain US school districts going to a 4-day school week for economic reasons. Other US employers could do the same. Some European countries already have laws limiting the amount of hours employees can work, mandating certain minimums for vacation, etc. So I think this idea has a sound basis and is not really as extreme as it may sound at first read.
Bettles
Quote from bettles:
The problem for the US (and rest of the western world) basically boils down to technology causing jobs to disappear and/or be outsourced. Look how much productivity is reported to be up just over the past year or two. If a company (hypothetically) fires 1/3 of its workers, then makes the remaining workers work 1/3 harder, then you have increased productivity but also increased unemployment. Such an increase in productivity would not have been possible say 20 years ago. But today it is. Its good that machines and cheap labor can now do a lot of our work for us. But the downside is that there are no longer as many jobs to go around.
The solution to me is simple. Everyone who works at a regular "job" just needs to informally agree among themselves to accomplish 25% less. For those that may have a moral problem with this, consider whether your wages have kept up with inflation (the real costs you pay for food, clothing, rent, etc.) over say the past 10 years. Also ask yourself if maybe a 25% cut in productivity might only put you back to what your original output level was prior to all of the "belt tightening" of the past decade. Once critical tasks are not getting done, companies will have no choice but to hire more workers.
I know everyone is going to scream "But then employers will outsource all the jobs to India/China!" True, but not because of the above. Employers already have and will continue to outsource anything they can as long as it remains to their advantage to do so. Going along with the cuts and extra work is not going to prevent that. Tax laws should be changed so that outsourcing is no longer lucrative. But that is a separate issue.
I think the biggest flaw in the above plan is that it basically amounts to a cartel. And cartels tend not to work, since there are always incentives for some people to cheat. So perhaps a better way to accomplish this would be with a law that, for example, prohibits any employer from having an employee work more than say 32 hours a week. Well, it could be allowed, but taxed very heavily (say 100% of the person's salary for any overtime over 32 hours a week). With a 20% reduction in labor output, companies would be forced to hire about 20% more people. This would put a big dent in the unemployment rate, probably dropping it to near historical levels.
I just saw a news article today that talked about certain US school districts going to a 4-day school week for economic reasons. Other US employers could do the same. Some European countries already have laws limiting the amount of hours employees can work, mandating certain minimums for vacation, etc. So I think this idea has a sound basis and is not really as extreme as it may sound at first read.
Bettles
Many workers already work over time w/o over time pay. Unless there is a law against not paying over-time to non-exec workers making under 100k ( or any chosen salary), such a plan will not work.
If a person is required to work the extra hours, then the employers (not the worker) should be the one to pay the overhead taxes for not hiring extra help.
Instead of being less productive at time, it would be better if everyone gets more time off to be with family and friends, or just read or enjoy the beach.