Where Are the Skilled Laborers
Education Secretary Linda McMahon just made her case in USA Today why her department should not exist.
Ms. McMahon: The recent government shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states. The US government’s bias – that of steering every high school student toward college – is doing tangible harm to the labor market and to the young.
Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley gets kudos from the WSJ for his courage to speak with candor on another hard truth that all voters should recognize.
The WSJ editors give kudos to Ford Motor’s CEO Jim Farley for speaking out last week on a hard truth about the American labor force.
Mr. Farley told a podcast last week that he can’t find enough skilled mechanics to run his auto plants.
Specifically, Farley lamented, Ford can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 a year.
From CEO Farley
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough. We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”
Ford Motor, admitted Farley, is struggling to hire mechanics at salaries that Ivy League grads might envy.
“A bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it—are you kidding me? Nope. We do not have trade schools” in this country.
Farley is right. Few high schools teach trades these days. Community colleges are mostly remedial high-school education programs. Government worker-training programs have poor results.
Blame the Government
Today’s young are encouraged to go to college even though they might be better off learning a trade. This has resulted in a skills mismatch, warns the WSJ, referring to the labor market.
Unemployment among young college grads is increasing, while employers struggle to hire skilled manufacturing workers, technicians and contractors.
The WSJ reports that only 114,000 Americans in their 20s completed vocational programs during the first 10 months of last year. Compare that to 1.24 million who graduated from four-year colleges and 405,000 who received advanced degrees.
Yet recent bachelor’s recipients in their 20s were 5.6 percentage points less likely to be employed than those who finished vocational programs.
The report from the National Federation of Independent Business: this month, one-third of small business owners reported jobs they couldn’t fill, and 49% reported few or no qualified applicants for positions they were trying to fill. Twenty-seven percent cited labor quality as their most important problem.
A Scarcity of Skilled Workers
Two factors are disrupting companies and causing them to move production offshore (to the extent that they can): 1) it’s increasingly hard to find skilled workers in the U.S., and 2) companies are prohibited from legally importing skilled workers from overseas.
But notes the WSJ editors, an American whose F-150 truck breaks down will still have to pay more at the repair shop owing to the mechanic shortage.
