Category Archives: jobs

Higher Education Improvement

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal has a summary of the House’s The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, to be proposed this week.  It’s aimed at

filling that gap [in college graduates’ skills, with 6 million jobs left begging] by both deregulating parts of the sector and laying the conditions for shorter, faster pathways to the workforce. The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.

Highlights include these:

  • revamp of the $1.34 trillion federal student loan program
    • graduate students and parents of undergraduates would have overall caps on tuition and living expense loans, instead of borrowing whatever schools charge.
    • end loan-forgiveness programs for public-service employees
    • eliminate a program that ties monthly payments to income levels for private-sector workers.
  • community colleges would get more funding to team with the private sector and create or expand apprenticeships and learn and earn programs
  • for-profit college sector would be on equal footing with nonprofit schools regarding limits on federal aid and measurements of graduate success: overall, competency-based education
  • functional repeal of the gainful employment regulation, which ties access to federal student aid to whether career programs lead to decent-paying jobs. Government will no longer be the decider of what jobs are suitable; the graduate and employer will.
  • increased accountability of schools by improving the quality of information available to prospective students
  • “historically black” and developing Hispanic schools would have to provably graduate or transfer at least 25% of their students in order to get funding from the pile otherwise earmarked for these schools
  • require schools to pay back some portion of federal loans if the student didn’t rather than leaving the schools strictly as loan generators that get the proceeds from the loans without regard to suitability or outcome.

All in all, this could represent a major improvement to our higher community college/college/university education system, especially in its core: graduates’ employability and the costs incurred (and by whom) in achieving that employability.

Naturally, the colleges and universities, whose funding oxen are going to get gored, will squawk.  Ignore them, and move past the dinosaurs and vested interests.

Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”

Posted on by
Reply

After being unable to get a job with any team in the NFL this season, Colin Kaepernick has filed a formal grievance against the NFL, each of the 32 team owners, and President Donald Trump—who supposedly “influenced” league management and team owners into not hiring him—alleging that they colluded to not sign him at quarterback, or end-of-bench monitor, this season.

Coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he routinely attacked our flag and national anthem and insulted our veterans by taking a knee during the pre-game playing of our national anthem.  Also coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he led his last employer, the San Francisco 49ers, to a 1-10 record before the team tired of losing and benched him.

Let’s set aside Kaepernick’s beef against Trump.  Aside from being utterly laughable, it casually insults the team owners as being cowards unable to run their businesses in the face of a Presidential tweet parade.  That’s a minor point.

What illustrates the risible nature of Kaepernick’s grievance is its centering on his free speech rights and his claim that he’s been blackballed as a result of his so-called protests.

Carefully elided is everyone else’s free speech right to object to his behavior, just as vociferously, including with ticket dollars and TV viewing.  This particularly includes team owners, who don’t give up their free speech rights to respond in the same forum to Kaepernick’s, et al., free speech “protests.”

Also: a private company employee’s free speech rights, within very broad limits, are matters of employment contract parameters. The 1st Amendment limits Government, not private entities.

Beyond all of that, neither a broad functional consensus—paralleling the fans’ broad consensus—of owners disliking this particular misbehavior, nor a separate broad functional consensus that employees publicly disparaging our national symbols and insulting those who fought to defend them is bad for business, even remotely approach collusion.

There is no case in this lawfare assault.

Another Bit of Foolishness

Posted on by
Reply

And another incentive for businesses to relocate.

San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do.  They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish.  Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply.  Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:

He doesn’t complain.  He’s quiet.  No lunch break.  He’s starting exactly at 10.

The robot also doesn’t take sick leave or parental leave or any of the other labor froo-froo that San Francisco has mandated, regardless of what an employer and employee might work out between themselves without Know Betters’ dubious help.

If a business is going to be prevented from lowering its cost of doing business, it has little incentive to stay put.  And human consumers, facing artificially elevated prices, aren’t helped a whit.

Some Labor Day Questions

Posted on by
Reply

First published in 2015, I’ve updated it for today.  In an ideal world, I’ll be able to update it again next year, with a more optimistic tone.

The Wall Street Journal asked some questions on Labor Day 2012, and supplied some answers.  Here are some of those questions and answers, which remain as valid this Labor Day.

  • Q: How are America’s workers doing? Not good. Over the past decade, over the ups and downs of the economy, taking inflation into account, the compensation of the typical worker — wages and benefits—basically haven’t risen at all. … The Labor Department recently said that 6.1 million workers in 2009-2011 have lost jobs that they’d had for at least three years. Of those, 45% hadn’t found work as of January 2012. … Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday that unemployment is still two percentage points higher than normal….
  • Q: Things ARE getting better, though. The US economy is creating jobs, right? Back in December 2007 when the recession began, there were about two jobless workers for every job opening.  When the economy touched bottom in mid-2009, there were more than six unemployed for every job.  At last count, the BLS says there were 3.4 jobless for every opening.
  • Q: How much of this elevated unemployment is because the unemployed just don’t have the skills that employers are looking for right now?  …the bulk of the evidence is a lot of the unemployment really is the old-fashioned kind: the kind that would go away if the economy was growing at a stronger pace. Mr. Bernanke said as much at the [2012] Jackson Hole conference….

The Democratic Party President has taken a bad situation and done little to improve it, even though he’s had four more years in which to do so.  He has, though, actively attacked businesses—the hirers—demonizing them, (over)regulating them, demanding to raise taxes on them.

At least as importantly, the current Democratic Party Presidential candidate has vowed to continue these Democratic policies, and to extend them.  Even with nearly eight years of empirical data demonstrating the bankruptcy of these policies.

Under the new Trump administration, the jobs situation seems, at least superficially, to be improving, although still too slowly.  The headline unemployment rate is at an historic low; however, the labor force participation rate—the denominator in that headline rate—remains at an historic low, also.  And, wages aren’t growing as they would in a normal, more robust economic recovery.

Further, the Federal Reserve Bank management, aided and abetted by the Progressive-Democratic Party Representatives and Senators, are highly resistant to removing job- and job growth-restricting regulations that were emplaced 10 years ago (under Dodd-Frank, for instance) with the ostensible purpose of mitigating the Panic of 2008.  With that dislocation long behind us, those regulations no longer serve a useful purpose.

Happy Labor Day.

Brain Burp

Posted on by
Reply

[Because this is a family blog.]

I had this one this morning while out on one of my walks.  It concerns a free market economy, bankruptcy, the bankrupt company’s employees, and what we ought to do about those employees.

In an ideal world’s free market, then, here is my gaseous expulsion.  It comes against the backdrop of my long-held disdain for the citizens of one State being forced to send their tax dollars to another State via the mechanism of Federal transfer payments in order to indemnify the recipient against its own foolish spending.  That backdrop also includes James Madison’s remark, on the occasion of Congress’ considering money transfers to Haitians after a devastating earthquake

that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

However, our prosperity has grown to the point that our free market imperatives need not remain so cold, and it is in our society’s interests to help the dislocated—employees who’ve lost their jobs due to their employer’s bankruptcy, in the present case—get back on their feet and resume being productive members of their communities and the nation.

Thus: I say, regarding companies faced with bankruptcy, that if the participants in our free market economy—private citizens and their businesses—do not think a company worth saving, then the Federal government should accept that judgment and not intervene to bail out that company: the company, regardless of its size, should be allowed to fail.  I think the same tack should be taken by State governments, but that’s for the citizens of each State to decide.  In the event, Federal monies supporting bailouts should not go to those States that choose to do them.

Against that, I propose assistance to the employees of the bankrupt in the form of a Bankruptcy Jobs Retraining Program, which would operate along the following lines.

Employees below a certain level in the bankrupt company (the idea being, after all, to help the employees, not the “managers,” even if it was market events and not strictly management failure that generated the conditions leading to bankruptcy) would get a job retraining stipend.  It’s important to specify, too, that the stipend would not be an education stipend, but only a job (re)training stipend.  The stipend would have the following parameters:

  • expire after a specified number of days elapsed in training
  • be issued as a loan to the retrainee, with payments—principle and interest—due monthly. If the retrainee gets a job within a specified time after graduation and holds it for a continuous year (with “continuous” defined by the nature of the job: some, like construction, tend toward seasonality), the loan would be converted to a grant with no loan payments due.  Disposition of the loan in the event of the retrainee not working for a continuous year should include at a minimum these possibilities: the retrainee would make payments from the day of graduation, payments would simply accrue and not be due until failure to get a job or on leaving the job for any cause before the first year was up, retrainees aging out of the training program without graduation
  • could not be used more than once in any specified interval (for instance, a 10-year period). A lifetime cap seems infeasible because the (retrained) employee has no control over market events or management failures that might drive his new employer bankrupt
  • a retraining expense amount, not a living expense amount

The issuance of the stipend would be managed by two or three private enterprises that are independent of the Federal government and independent of each other.  These Stipend Issuers would be funded by no-strings grants from the government, and they would be solely responsible for dispensing the funds.

Stipend Issuers would develop market indices that identify and track the most employer-needed jobs that have the shortest labor supply—the largest job gap—independently of geography.  The Job Gap Indexes would rank the gaps, and the Stipend Issuers would pay the largest stipend to retrainees training for those jobs with the largest gap and that have the most expensive training.  Whether the expense and gap should be measured at a national level or regionally is a question to be settled in open debate.

Job Gap Indexes shouldn’t be that hard to develop.  Lots of investors and investment companies and other entities (e.g., The Wall Street Journal) already are quite skilled at developing indexes for assessing/tracking investment markets; a Job Gap index is not that different.

Retraining could be done anywhere, independently of where the retrained-to job is located.  A San Francisco resident, retraining for a job type where the largest gap is in New York, for instance, would be able to take the retraining program in San Francisco.

From that, Stipend Issuers would be authorized to commit a small per centage of their Federal Retraining Grants to relocation assistance, with the proviso that this diversion would be for assistance, not for the total cost of moving.

Since unions are, by their own definition, in the business of helping their membership, union members would see their stipends reduced by the total amount of union dues (including the portion the union claims was earmarked for political activities) paid by the union member retrainee in the twelve months prior to the employing company filing for bankruptcy.