Two personal anecdotes to go with this.
1) I used to get excited when I'd see the phrase "Willing to train the right candidate" for a job I'd genuinely want to do. I'd bust out my A Game for the cover letter, telling them I'm the right candidate because I'm actually interested in the field, would find the work rewarding, have background knowledge or interests that would help me learn more quickly, whatever. Very rarely would I get calls from those listings to set up an interview, which means even though in my mind I'm the right candidate, in their mind, they're looking for something else.
2) A few times, I've been offered supervisor/management positions for insultingly low amounts. As in, they'd be pay cuts to what I'm currently earning but I'd be expected to take on 4x the responsibility and the stress and worry that comes with it. I think for larger companies, there's a disconnect between what HR is willing to pay compared to what hiring managers seem to think is good pay, because in almost all of those instances, when it finally came down to pay, hiring managers would talk wages almost apologetically.
There is your problem right there. Oh, and hiring people, keeping them happy, investing in bringing them up to skill with training and education, then working to retain those same people is cheaper in the long run. It is almost like we forgot how to employ people in the US."They're just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it," Cappelli says. "And as a result they [can't] find those people. Now that [doesn't] mean there was nobody to do the job; it just [means] that there was nobody at the price they were willing to pay."
The local NPR affiliate ran a story about a local firm that couldn't find enough candidates with strong mathematics skills for a high tech manufacturing positions with excellent pay. I was in Calculus II at the time so I gave the company a call on a lark. They were offering something like 10.50 an hour to start. I chuckled and went off to my bartender cook job that paid over $20 an hour. You can't find good candidates if a you can't match barista wages. Anyone with a brain and decent teamwork/social skills will work somewhere with flexible hours, better pay and a better environment before they'll work graveyard making widgets. Service jobs develop skills that easily transfer from job to job giving workers more freedom to move around or and self select what kind of asshole they are willing to work for. Most skill intensive manufacturing jobs aren't going to offer near the type of flexibility that service experience offers. When minimum wage goes up to $15 dollars in this town the only people who are going to work non-social labor jobs will be the bottom of the barrel. Manufacturers are going to have to get prisons to teach math if they want workers that are numerically competent.
I wonder if this line of thinking will further create more prison work plans . . .When minimum wage goes up to $15 dollars in this town the only people who are going to work non-social labor jobs will be the bottom of the barrel. Manufacturers are going to have to get prisons to teach math if they want workers that are numerically competent.
I subscribe to the "companies have forgotten how to pay" take on this. My employer turned a $3+ billion profit last year. $4+ billion the year before. They've been reduced to offering newhires a $125 bonus each week in exchange for actually showing up to work every day. That's all. Clock in five times a week: make $125 extra. And here I am, making a killing in forced overtime every day because they can not get staffed. Why? Newbies start off at $10 an hour. Newbies have to wait a year to get benefits. The job is just part-time. The schedule isn't fixed, making it hard to plan another job around. Even with the bonus: why would they stay? Corporate is in a position where every new person they hire sucks. Because they can only get people who haven't done the barista math. And all their old hands don't give a flying fuck, because the company oh-so-wisely decided to leave them in the cold with those retention bonuses. It is a trainwreck that everyone could see coming a mile off as the unemployment rate fell. But nobody did anything about it, because properly compensating labor is tantamount to sharing profits.You can't find good candidates if a you can't match barista wages.
No unions are part of the problem. They are constantly negotiating down wages for new employees to help those that have retired in place or are near retirement. Look at all the tiered compensation schemes they negotiated where new guys can never earn as much as a legacy employee. Or all the benefit reductions for new hires. In some places unions actually negotiated for wages lower than local min wages because Fuck the new guy.
We are union. I'm proud to be union. I work where I do because of the union. That said: Business unionism sucks. snoodog has some valid points. I know that as a low-ish seniority part-timer, the union as an institution doesn't give a shit about me. Individual people can be great. The institution? Fucking frustrating.
I agree with both of you in that regard. Whether a union acts in the interest of employees in general (including new ones) or in the interests of some privileged clique (e.g. senior employees, the business) is down to a number of political factors, the way in which the union is organised, etc. Iron law of oligarchy and all that.