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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."
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.
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
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."
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.