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Article Artículo

Economic Growth

Workers

It's So Hard to Get Good Help

There is a growing chorus of sophisticated types telling the country that we could have millions more jobs in manufacturing, if only we had qualified workers. This claim has the interesting feature that it places responsibility for the lack of jobs on workers, not on the people who get paid to manage the economy (e.g. the Fed, Congress, the White House).

As they say on Wall Street, talk is cheap. It is easy for an employer to claim that he/she would hire lots of people if only he could find workers with the right skills. However economists claim that we look at what people do, not what they say.

If it really is the case that employers have job openings, but can't find workers with the necessary skills, then we should be able to find evidence for this fact. The first piece of evidence that we might expect to find is a surge in job openings. In other words, if manufacturers are unable to find workers with the necessary skills, then there should be a lot of vacant positions.

Well, the good people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) keep data on job openings in manufacturing.

Job Openings in Manufacturing
(click for larger version)

Manu-jobs Source: BLS.

The chart does show a recovery in the number of job openings, but we are still just getting back to the level of the middle of 2007. We are still far below the peak of the last business cycle and down by close to 40 percent from the January 2000 level, the first month in which the survey was used.

CEPR / February 22, 2012