April 08, 2015
That’s what Yahoo Finance effectively told us in the headline of a piece on the Labor Department’s release of new data from its Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey. The headline said, “U.S. jobs opening data points to skills mismatch.” The evidence was a modest rise in the overall rate of job openings from 3.4 percent to 3.5 percent. But if this is evidence of a skills mismatch then the biggest problem is in the restaurant sector where the jobs opening rate was 5.1 percent. Apparently there are just not enough people who know how to wait tables and wash dishes.
If we used the standard economist measure, we would be looking for rising wages as evidence of skills mismatch. There is not much evidence of that anywhere, as is pointed out later in the article.
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