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Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report:Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates. After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere. "We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others." Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need. "It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."
There's several EU countries that have young adult unemployment rates at, near or above 50% now. Seems to me that there's a more serious problem then simply that. Either they don't want to hire people and train them for the jobs, they have requirements for jobs that are stupid or they're shitcanning people who could have been retrained and kept within the company.
Om, nomnomnom...
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country. Just the same happening but at an international level.
The summary suggests that the Spanish labor market is not raising wages to draw the migrant workers back home, but rather importing workers from Argentina to keep wages low. Given the high unemployment in Spain, it also puzzles me why the Spanish government and employers association are not actively providing facilities to educate unemployed workers to take the vacant positions. Or look for skilled Syrian workers, but that is another discussion.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.
Originally, you were good at a few things, but you had a sizable interest in other topics as well. Perhaps you have a film industry, a steel industry, a car industry, and a farm industry that produces the world's best avocados. You're proud of all of these, and so are your people, even when you're not the best.
But now you're global, with little to no trade barriers, and the only thing the world wants from you are avocados. As a global country, the flourishes of your nation that made you interesting, unique, and gave you a culture instead cede the floor to meet the increased demand for your avocado.
At first things seem okay. Your workers retrained and are in the fields now. The ones that wanted to stay in the other industries are subsidized (either on the corporate level or the personal level), by the hugely successful avocado industry. There's so much money flowing in from the world that no one is poor.
Then the world decides it doesn't want your avocados anymore. Consequently, it all falls apart. What would have otherwise been a single industry faltering among a healthy selection of many others, becomes an economic collapse.
Bankrupt, you seek help from the countries that were happy to be your friend in better times. They liked your avocados, but they're not interested in helping you now. Depending on your prior arrangement with them, you can neither declare bankruptcy, nor receive money without strings or interest attached to it. You become indebted to your former friends, and your people decide that this arrangement isn't working out.
They assert themselves again, and through a referendum, convince you to leave your friend's club in favor of defining your own destiny and reasserting your own unique culture of cars, steel, film, and... undeniably the world's best avocados. If anyone else wants them, they can work for it... but it's not for them anymore. It's for you.
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I don't know if this is a good characterization of events. If I'm mistaken about something, feel free to criticize it.
A quick Google search shows the US unemployment rate in 2015 was 5.5%, with the UK showing an unemployment rate of 5.4% for the same year. Why don't those evil, socialist, employee protections cause massive unemployment in the UK, I wonder?
I would never let anybody come close to touching my codebase without them training in my company on a standard set of test projects for a few weeks, which is the training they are receiving. The test projects are the same ones for everybody, they start with a completely empty machine, installation of the OS and of all systems and software, compiling the db, doing a bunch of training with he os first, building the same test applications that everybody else working for me already built, learning the concepts they are missing that they must know before touching my code.
The people that are able to perform in the test projects and who show good team skills are hired.
As to Spain, you have no idea how difficult and expensive it is to hire and fire people there, which is the reason for the insane unemployment and it is not just Spain. Italy, Portugal, France as well, they are preventing employment with laws designed to prevent employment under the guise of 'protecting the employees'.
You can't handle the truth.
What's the average pay for American engineers in fantasy land?
Same as it was ten years ago, and only marginally higher than it was 20 years ago.
When I graduated in '01, the median starting pay in my field was $65k, and average pay was $91k. Today, the median starting pay is $70k, and average pay is $93k. That is an average annual increase in starting pay of 0.45% per year. The increase in average pay across the whole field has only increased by 0.133% per year. Meanwhile, unemployment in my field is pretty close to zero. There are almost no qualified applicants out of the hundreds of resumes we receive for any given opening. In spite of the incredibly low unemployment, there has been no increase in salaries, due to several factors. First, employers know that their employees will not be able to get significantly better elsewhere, so they do not offer any better than they have to. Second, filling open positions is typically done by job postings, and referrals, not by "poaching". What this means is that the company has to wait longer to find a qualified applicant, but they don't have to pay the premium in cost that is associated with poaching employees (10-20% higher salary than the poached employees current salary). It is the effect of poaching that significantly drives salary increases. When companies have to resort to poaching to achieve staffing levels, industry salaries rise fast. That is why the anti-poaching agreements between silicon valley companies should have been punished by virtue of an automatic 15% raise for all of their current employees. This would have been sufficient punishment to make the companies rethink that policy, and also would have effectively undid the damage that had been caused by the anti-poaching in the first place.
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"
You would think so, but no.
That is more of an American thing I think.
I am an American expat living in Germany. I was recently offered a job in Spain for a lot of money. Much more than I make in Germany. I don't speak a single word of Spanish. Poor German and English only.
I actually thought about it, but at the end of the day, it's Spain. Great to visit, but not to live.
This discussion reminded me of this now nine-year-old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers."
Here's an interesting anecdotal evidence that confirms your point.
My team has an opening for a Business Intelligence person. HR provided us with 4 candidates. Three of them were below our expectations and one was way above (both by target salary and skillset, not surprisingly). My manager went back to HR and asked for another batch of candidates, and HR "found" another candidate which was almost perfect but was "overlooked" in the first batch. HR lied by saying the candidate only applied during round two, which the candidate proved it wasn't so by showing the job application date.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
Absolutely. Not everyone is capable of doing every job, no matter how much training you give them. Even of those who can be trained, some are going to be a lot better than others. This has a lot of consequences, because the low-skilled but high-paying jobs of the old days are vanishing at an increasing rate, and they're not coming back. When we put 3 million professional truck/etc drivers out of work, we can't just stick them all in a web development class and call it even. At some point - maybe not today, but eventually the day will come, where we have to entirely rethink our employment paradigm, institute a minimum basic income or the like, and accept that not everyone will be directly employed the way they used to be.
I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.
In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.
As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.
WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.
I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.