Tag Archives: labor market

When The Labor Market Changes Faster Than Education

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On Monday, Real Clear Markets posted the following headline:

The Labor Market Is Evolving Faster Than the Four-Year Degree

The article reports:

This summer, millions of graduates will face prolonged unemployment or underemployment in a frozen labor market – not because their degrees are inherently useless, but because employers no longer need the knowledge and skills they spent years developing. The real problem with higher education today is not access, cost, or quality, but its timing.

Each year, college freshmen are required to make long-term decisions about their education with little information about their strengths as job seekers, or the labor market they will eventually enter. Majors and coursework are often decided at the outset of enrollment, based on guidance or guesswork about employment conditions years into the future. Shifting gears is possible, but a costly endeavor involving additional semesters, sometimes years, of further schooling.

At the same time, a significant portion of coursework keeping students off the labor market is not directly tied to their intended career paths. In fact, a mere 40 percent of students complete internships or work-based learning programs prior to graduation.

The consequence is a growing disconnect between when education occurs and when it is most valuable. Students are asked to frontload their learning – acquiring most of their skills before entering the workforce – rather than developing them alongside real-world experience. This delays feedback, limits adaptability, and increases the risk that their education does not align with employers’ current needs.

There are some very good points made here, but there are also some things being overlooked. Years ago I worked for a company that I would describe as change-resistant. The person in charge of the day-to-day operations was set in his ways and resistant to computers and basic human resource requirements. He was pretty much running the company the way it would have been run in the early 1970’s. At one point the owner’s son came in and began running the business. He was young and had a much more contemporary business background. His attempts to bring the company into the twenty-first century were met with major resistance. Eventually the company failed. How marketable your college skills are depends very much on the career path you choose–there are many older companies out there that are looking for a slow transition to the twenty-first century. Today’s college students could probably meet that need.

Please follow the link to read the entire article.

Replacing The American Worker

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On Tuesday, Breitbart posted the following headline:

Analysis: 75% of American Job Growth Has Gone to Migrants Since 2019

That’s NOT good news.

The article reports:

The majority of job growth in the United States since 2019 has gone to newly arrived migrants as working-class American men continue to fall out of the labor force, an analysis shows.

The analysis, published by Steven Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies, shows the extent to which President Joe Biden’s agenda to grow the labor market with mass immigration — rather than enticing Americans on the sidelines back into work — has been largely executed.

Since 2019, before the Chinese coronavirus pandemic shut down the nation’s economy, about 75 percent of all U.S. job growth has gone to newly arrived migrants, both illegal aliens and legal immigrants.

During the same period, fewer than one million Americans have been added to the workforce.

“The government’s household survey shows that there were only 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019 prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million,” Camarota writes.

The article concludes:

For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the decline in labor participation among American men while Biden grows the labor market with primarily newly arrived migrants who are awarded work permits after being released into the U.S. interior.

Since 2023, for instance, nearly 300,000 native-born Americans fell out of the workforce while about 637,000 migrants were added to the workforce.

Biden has helped drive the foreign-born population, thus, more foreign-born workers for hire, to unprecedented heights.

Today, the foreign-born population stands at 51.6 million — the largest ever recorded in American history. Put another way, about three in 19 people living in the U.S. were born in a foreign country.

The only silver lining in this is that if the immigrants are working, hopefully they are not taxing the welfare system.

The Economy Is Questionable At Best

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I love it when a Democrat is in power–when unemployment rises it is always a surprise–even at Fox News.

On November 3rd, Fox News posted an article about the current state of the American economy.

The article reports:

U.S. job growth slowed more than expected in October, a sign the labor market is finally softening in the face of higher interest rates, stubborn inflation and other economic uncertainties.

Employers added 150,000 jobs in October, the Labor Department said in its monthly payroll report released Friday, missing the 180,000 jobs forecast by Refinitiv economists.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, unexpectedly ticked up to 3.9% — the highest level in nearly two years. The pickup in the jobless rate suggests that layoffs are on the rise; the survey of households shows that the number of workers laid off rose in October by 92,000 from the previous month.

The unemployment number of 3.9% is not really a good measure of the economy unless it is looked at in relation to the workforce participation rate, currently slightly down at 62.7. Just to give some perspective, the workforce participation rate was 62.8% when President Trump took office in January 2017. It peaked at 63.3 in February 2020 (the ‘stop the spread’ shutdown began in March 2020). The reported unemployment rate is calculated only counting people who are looking for jobs. I suspect that if you counted everyone who is able to work but not working, the number would be much higher.

The article also notes:

The report also contained steep downward revisions to job growth at the end of the summer. Gains for August and September were revised down by a total of 101,000 jobs to a respective 165,000 and 297,000, the government said, suggesting that the labor market is weaker than it previously appeared.

The bottom line here is that the economy is not really growing although inflation is. For further details, please follow the link above to read the entire article.

 

Looking Behind The Numbers

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On Wednesday, Breitbart posted an article about some of the recent employment numbers.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden’s administration is growing the United States labor market by adding millions of foreign workers for employers to hire, leaving jobless Americans on the sidelines.

Data published in the New York Times shows that the Biden administration is aiding employers by adding millions of foreign workers to the labor force — ensuring wages stay stagnant — even as native-born Americans struggle to get back into jobs since the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

“The foreign-born workforce grew much more quickly than the U.S.-born workforce, Labor Department figures show,” the Times reports:

“When the unemployment rate goes down, you would normally expect wage inflation to go up, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. “So there must be something else moving in the labor force, and there is a very likely explanation here that immigrants are coming in and taking jobs.” [Emphasis added]

But despite the resurgence in the foreign-born labor force — about four-fifths of it are people legally allowed to work in the United States, by one calculation — there are bottlenecks. [Emphasis added]

The article includes the following charts:

The article notes:

By focusing on adding foreign workers to the labor market, the Biden administration is ignoring efforts to get native-born Americans back into the workforce. The administration’s foreign competition addition to the labor force adds tremendous weight for the nation’s working and lower-middle class looking to find high-paying jobs with decent benefits packages.

The is the place where the uni-party is revealed. The Democrats want future voters; the country club Republican (the Chamber of Commerce party) want cheap labor for their corporate allies. No one is looking out for the middle class right now. The influx of foreign workers, both legal and illegal, creates downward pressure on wages. Corporations are out to make a profit, and many of those corporations have forgotten their scruples. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is destroying the middle class. Remember, a strong middle class is necessary for the survival and growth of our republic.

 

The Predictable Truth

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The White House and the media have worked very hard to sell the idea that the economy is in good shape and that inflation really isn’t that bad; and if it is that bad, it’s because the economy is growing. They have also attempted to convince Americans that the supply line crisis is due to Covid. Hopefully Americans are waking up to the fact that neither one of those things is true.

On Wednesday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article that provides a much more honest assessment of where the American economy actually is. It is a rather long article, so I suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article. I will try to summarize some of the major points.

The article reports:

The business and financial wires are melting down today as ADP Payrolls, the nation’s largest private sector payroll providing service, releases data from January showing a drop of 301,000 jobs.  [ADP Raw Data Here]

The financial, economic and business pundits are completely caught off guard and using the words “shocked”, “unexpected” and “surprised,” within their analysis.  These employment numbers just don’t align with an economy growing at 6.9%, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).  However, for CTH readers who have carefully scrutinized the economic claims and looked at the bigger picture through the prism of kitchen table checkbook economics, these results are not a surprise.

Every sector of the employment picture on Main Street USA is hit.  The pundits, following the narrative first seeded by the White House on Monday, are pointing to Omicron as the justification inside their review.  That’s nonsense.  For the better part of seven months these same pundits first claimed Delta, then shifted to Omicron as a way to explain the structurally weak economy.  All of that is nonsense.

What we are witnessing are the outcomes of massive inflation now hitting the labor market.  A drop in demand, and a subsequent drop in the employment of goods and services, is an unavoidable outcome of inflationary pressure on wages.

Let me say it again, on a macro level, natural consumer DEMAND has dropped – we are only now starting to see it surfacing in the statistical measures.

This is why White House spokesperson Jen Psaki made that weird statement on Monday.

The article concludes:

We are in the inflation hurricane right now.

The good news is… if domestic demand continues naturally contracting, due to unsustainable inflation, eventually prices will have to stabilize. It seems counterintuitive, but a strong cash position is valuable despite inflation right now.

Inflation will continue hitting wages hard, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. If you have prepared to ride out this storm of inflation, we should see things start to turn around in about six months. Unfortunately, between now and then, there will be significant job losses as inventories continue to build and sales get stagnant.

Prices on fast turn consumable goods like food, fuel, energy etc. will never return to their pre-inflationary price. The high prices on highly consumable products are here to stay and will never decline. Unfortunately, there are several indicators that those prices will go even higher throughout the next six months until they plateau mid-summer.

However, on the backside of this inflationary hurricane, the prices on long-term durable goods will start dropping sooner as consumer demand continues to focus on prioritization of spending and employment becomes more tenuous.

Please read the entire article. It includes a couple of charts that illustrate exactly what is happening to our economy under the economic policies of the Biden administration.