Tag Archives: jobs

A Thought from the Border Crisis and Immigration Generally

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…it’s not limited to those topics, but it was triggered by a quote by Dr Manny Alvarez in his piece about the bias of the Latino press in its coverage of the current children border crisis. What Alvarez said was this:

The crisis reminds me of that old saying: “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Alvarez offered this aphorism in the context of needing to address the root cause of the crisis, not merely treat the symptom that is what the crisis is.

Let me modify the aphorism slightly; it’ll illustrate another part of the root cause.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime and deny the donor man the opportunity to maintain the dependency of the recipient on him.

College Isn’t for Everyone, Revisited

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I touched on this a while ago. Here’s another look.

Dakota Blazier had made a big decision. Friendly and fresh-faced, from a small town north of Indianapolis, he’d made up his mind: he wasn’t going to college.

“I discovered a long time ago,” he explained, “I’m not book smart. I don’t like sitting still, and I learn better when the problem is practical.” But he didn’t feel this limited his options—to the contrary. And he was executing a plan as purposeful as that of any of his high-school peers.

The questions that keep him up at night aren’t about inequality: how rich am I, or, how rich is my neighbor? What he worries about is the kinds of opportunities open to him. Can he get an education that equips him for a job he wants? Can he find that job and build on it to make a career? His concern is economic mobility.

Indeed, there are lots of opportunities—good opportunities. Tamar Jacoby, in the WSJ article linked above, outlined three requirements for these opportunities actually to be opportunities, and paths like Blazier’s meet those requirements [emphasis added].

The first requirement of any upward path is entry ramps at the ground level. The Craft Training Center of the Coastal Bend, in Corpus Christi, Texas [for instance], teaches welding to 200 high-school students, mostly at-risk youth.

The second requirement of any good upward path is for training to lead to a job. [Anthony, 19 years old] Solis’s big break came last August, when he and 20 other Coastal Bend students auditioned for JV Industrial, which does high-risk, high-paying maintenance work in oil refineries. JV had never recruited at the Corpus Christi center, and Mr Solis was so nervous that he was almost ill on the day of the hands-on test. Still, he made the grade and headed off to Houston for more free training—with the possibility of a big job if he finished.

A third requirement of a good career path is that it must be aligned with economic needs. This is where employers like JV can make all the difference.

Indeed. RTWT, as they say.

The Word of a Union

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The UAW broke its pledge to cease organizing activity at the Chattanooga auto plant that rejected unionization, announcing on Thursday afternoon that it would form a voluntary union for factory workers.

The union signed a neutrality agreement with the German auto manufacturer that gave organizers an advantage during its campaign.

However, that agreement also contained a provision barring the union from any organizing activity for one year following the vote.

The union decided to break that pledge on Thursday, announcing the formation of a new local that would allow workers to join voluntarily.

Who can trust a union’s promise?

Another Thought on Immigration

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Gordon Crovitz, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, pointed out some statistics.

The Congressional Budget Office last year estimated that legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants would boost federal revenues by $48 billion over 10 years while costing $23 billion in public services. Adding more skilled workers would bring in $100 billion over a decade, mostly from increased income taxes.

In addition to this, I add (and reiterate) immigrants start more businesses than Americans who’ve been here for two or three or more generations. Those businesses employ people, and more so than “just” immediate family members.

There’s also the demographic question: the Unites States has only just returned to a birth rate that even barely replaces our death rate. We need immigration for continued population growth; we don’t want to face the population implosion risk from aging that Russia, the People’s Republic of China, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and lots of other nations are facing. When Social Security was enacted, there were seven workers to contribute to the SS payments for every retiree, and that retiree had a retired life expectancy of some five to seven years. Today there are three workers per retiree, and that retiree has a retired life expectancy of nearly fifteen years. If we don’t intend to change the structure of Social Security, we need immigration.

Friday’s Jobs Report

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…which came on a Thursday last week…. Some tidbits from the BLS, behind the headline number, the unemployment rate of (now) 6.1%.

The number of unemployed persons decreased by 325,000 to 9.5 million.

That’s a couple million and four or five years late, but still: cool. Who is it, though, who’s newly employed now?

  • The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more), while declining by 293,000 in June, is still 3.1 million
  • The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 275,000 in June to 7.5 million.
  • 2.0 million persons still are only marginally attached to the labor force, even though this is down by 554,000 from a year earlier. … These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
  • Among the marginally attached, there still were 676,000 discouraged workers in June; although this is a decrease of 351,000 from a year earlier. … Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.
  • The number of people employed full-time (according to the household survey that also counts self-employed) declined by 523,000, while the number of part-time workers increased by 799,000 [see the various tables available at the above link for these two aggregated data]

Hmm….