Depressing Employment Claims
erco
Posts: 20,256
According to http://finance.yahoo.com/news/what-it-takes-to-get-a-good-manufacturing-job-these-days-171712072.html , 50% of potential candidates for "good manufacturing jobs" can't qualify for two reasons:
1) Can't pass a drug test
2) Can't do 12th grade math & English
A pretty grim outlook for America, if those numbers are accurate. As I've told kids for 30 years, "Stay in School and buy Hot Wheels".
1) Can't pass a drug test
2) Can't do 12th grade math & English
A pretty grim outlook for America, if those numbers are accurate. As I've told kids for 30 years, "Stay in School and buy Hot Wheels".
Comments
The statistic you quoted is a tremendous surprise, though. I'd have guessed the number would be more like 25%. If they added "credit check" or "background check" into their pre-qualification I bet the number of capable employees would dive to 25%.
Ken Gracey
I am clean as they get for drugs .
Sigh, I was laid off on Monday .
So perhaps I need to Bold this on my resume...
Sad but true:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/29/americans-in-debt_n_5629137.html
Not the only place I have seen this.
Trust me, I want the "failed to graduate' people to work for me. Know why? because they have to work! they have no where else to go. So you get way more 'try' from them.
If you have try, I can train you to build houses. Lots of college kids come to the job site at 7:00am and are pretty much done by 9:00am,
so I hand them $50 bucks, and say "thanks, we can take it from here..." Seems like so many of them want an easy way out. Carpentry is not easy, (just ask MattG.
I guess I don't blame them, I have spent my whole life either looking for work, or looking for a way out of it...
@Peter and erco, I realize that you guys, as "professional office workers" may have never been laid off, or at least not very often. and it is probably a very big deal for you.
To me, it's just another day, I have built more than a hundred houses personally, and been involved in the building of thousands more as part of a crew, and not once in
all those years did I finish building a house and have the owner/buyer ask me to move in with them... So getting laid off is a way of life, and no big deal...if your a carpenter.
Everything happens for a reason, You guys will come out on top, just focus on doing something you enjoy, and the rest will come.
Remain bless
-Tommy
That's the 1% I'm in.
-Phil
Having one layout and cut a valley rafter or a set of stair stringers might be a good indication
EDIT: Or simply a piece of crown molding - down to one minute
PhiPi: You're enjoyable, much better than employable.
I've seen some of those drug tests, and they're whoppers. Here's an example:
Which of the following is the chemical descriptor of lansoprazole?
A) ethoxy-1-oxo-4-phenylbutan-2-yl amino-propanoyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydroisoquinoline-3-carboxylic acid
C) dichlorophenyl-N-methyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydronaphthalen-1-amine
Harrumph! No wonder I can't get a decent job.
I darn near sprayed coffee over my keyboard! LOL!
-Phil
Talk about reaching for the stars...
Disqualifying manufacturing workers (probably get like $12-20 an hour) on the basis of 12th grade english? Why would the instructions ever need to be in senior level prose pontificating the peculiar procedures to perform the perfect process in prepping the piece? Same thing with 12th grade math, isn't that like at least pre-calculus, if not Calculus 1? If the engineer didn't take the derivative of the formula you need to plug numbers into to get the correct result, he's not doing his job (speaking as one) Although, I do wish trigonometry was more broadly understood...
Where I work, I constantly hear "dumb it down for me"... and I do... among other things I create wiring diagrams that space out the wires far enough to go over with a highlighter, make sure the numbers and text are large enough to be visible at 4 feet away (approximately), use thick lines, and avoid technical jargon like "parameterize" in favor of "program" and if I have something important to say, I make it noticeable by using bright colors because yay, we're beyond 2000 and we have Color Printers.
Also, I get irritated at the people that seem to have taken upper-level "Creative Wiring" class. Just stick to the drawing, please.
Not a specific attack, but I personally could care less about "rising early" unless it is an outside job dependent on the weather. Inside a windowless soul-sucking factory the ambient brightness and noise do not change no matter what time it is...
Me: "ok, just put one of these 2X4's from this pile and line them up on the marks on these longer 2X4's, Like this"...(give demonstration)
Prospective Carpenter: "these marks?, from this pile?"
Me: "yes, just like this"...(demonstrate again)
Prospective Carpenter: "DUDE! there is like a 100 2X4's in this pile, it's going to take all day!"...
Me: "More like 350 peices, but no worries, it goes fast, we should be have all these walls standing by noon"...(demonstrate one more time)
Prospective Carpenter: "they are kind of heavy"
Me: "yes, some of the boards are more heavy then others, you will need to carry more than one at a time though... try three or four at a time until you get warmed up"..
Prospective Carpenter: "they are kind of heavy"
Me: "yeah, some of them are still wet from the mill, could weigh 10 pounds each"
Prospective Carpenter: "are they all this heavy?"
Me: "just start putting them where they go, you will get used to it in a day or two"
Prospective Carpenter: "We have to carry boards tomorrow too?"
Me: "(sigh) Yup, tomorrow too."
And so on, it goes on like that for 30 minutes, while you negotiate the Prospective Carpenters work ethic... Then you realize, none of the wood has moved...
You are not allowed to shoot them with your Nail Gun, You are not allowed to hit them with sticks either... Rules is Rules, bah!
LOL... Okay been there.... But that is the Prospective Carpenter.....
I suppose asking them to read a ruler would be another indication.... If they cannot read 1/16THs... They would be gone
As for the ones claiming experience, if they don't know what a spring angle or a bird's mouth cut is, then they would be gone to
Me: Give me a measurement....
Prospective Carpenter: 24-1/8 heavy
Me: Give me a measurement.....
Prospective Carpenter: 74-7/8 light
Me: Pack your tools
"87.5% of internet statistics are made up on the spot" -Mark Twain
Sounds like my son....
He was a genius!
And no.... I'm not kidding.
Hmmm. and who has time for all that? Is the rest of the class held hostage to be an audience? Or does the teacher stay late to watch presentation after presentation?
I imagine many other states are similar, which sort of brings into question what they were actually looking for (or at) in this survey. Is it a lack of former high schoolers with the required *minimum* coursework to have even received a diploma? Or do they mean "12th grade math" is Algebra 2? -- a class not required to graduate if the student has another year of some other math, like plane geometry. If it's the latter, then the failure is in the high school counselors (and teaching staff) who should be steering students to the right kind of course work.
Another fluff piece about manufacturers whining about their problems that THEY created.
Export millions and millions of manufacturing jobs and then wonder why you have no local talent available.
When the kids see the parents laid off, there is little chance they will repeat the mistake of tying their star to manufacturingl
Check this comment out...says it all.
"I've had a manufacturing job for 20+ years. I run machinery and drive a forklift every now and then. I've never had to use algebra like this guy states in the video. The company now only hires temporary workers. Starting wage for these workers is from 8-10 bucks an hour. The turn over ratio is very high. There aren't good paying manufacturing jobs nowadays. The starting pay is low and sometimes the work load is very high. These companies are looking out for there bottom line and that's about it. They like when the senior employees quit or get fired. They replace them with a temp worker that gets 60 to 70%% less an hour when you consider much lower hourly wage, no medical coverage, no 401k match, no vacation, no holiday pay. "
It sort of sucks to get interviewed by someone half your age and getting all that biz (buzz?) talk. Been there and done that.
Funny thing is that I sort of work my resume backwards now. Working again for the same employers I worked 10 and 15 years ago.
Back to COBOL!
If this is going on and keeping the trajectory I will end up driving trucks and forklifts with 60.
Enjoy!
Mike
And with these factoids are interesting, other data indicates that those that start working in their early teens (before finishing high school) are much better adapted to live-long careers. (I always think of a guy I knew in high school from Sacramento that worked for Tower Records unloading trucks and stocking record racks. 25 years later he was still working for Tower Records, as the President!)
There are far more people that want a regular paycheck than those that actually desire the work that comes with it.
The costs of employing anyone to do anything are astronomical now a days. So many things to consider. Taxes, health care, rent, insurance, safety regulations. God knows what. That's before you think about what few cents are left to put in the workers pocket.
If all that makes employing people local impossibly expensive, i.e. nobody will buy your product at the resulting price. What are you supposed to do. Give up? Close down the company and join the unemployment statistics like every one else? Or take your business somewhere where you can actually get things done?
Don't forget, in the words of the great John Lydon in the Public Image Limited song "This is not a love song":
"This is not a love song....big business is very wise. I'm inside free enterprise..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az_GCJnXAI0
Or, would you like a command economy like the good old communist USSR? That's always an option.
I have often mentioned one of the smartest and productive programmers I ever met. That guy spend spent his early career as a dope dealer supplemented by sales of his game hacks. I have no idea which was more profitable.
Closing the door to drug test failures is as dumb as closing the door to women or the disabled or foreigners or whatever other stupid nonsense. If they can do the job they can do the job.
Back in the days of the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the steam engine James Watt and Mathew Bolton were complaining that they had very good engineers but the problem was that none of them could stay sober long enough to build those prototype steam engines.
One of those engineers was Trevithick who went on to build the worlds first steam powered railway locomotive.
In modern times a very famous and widely used C compiler for CP/M systems (BDSC), used in the Japanese MSX systems, was written by a guy who went by the name of BrainDamage. I leave it to you to work out where that came from. He is a member of this forum.
I don't want to work for anyone who does drug tests any more than I want to work for anyone who checks my gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origins, genetic propensity for heat failure or whatever.
Back in the mid 80's, There was a giant paper/lumber mill near Eureka CA. The bean counters wanted to "clean up" the place, (and they weren't talking about the dioxin spewing cloud making smoke stacks either.) They where talking about the "Hippies" cluttering up the place.
So they decide to try some of the first on-site drug testing ever...
They start pulling groups of workers from their work stations, and had them go to the parking lot, where they had a dozen tables set up, with Porta-Potties behind each table.
The line was moving fast, and last checks were getting handed out just as fast... No lie, the mill had lost 75% of its work force by noon.
The real kicker is, before noon, The mill was already receiving letters of intent to sue. Why? because it was the mills fault they all had to to drugs, too much work related stress.
This started on a thursday, and by monday, they had rehired everybody back...
I am very carefull to see what a new hire is up to, My workmans comp can go sky high for a "back injury", and for some folks, that is the easy way out.
I do not allow any ground up performance enhancing white powders on my job site, Not when you have to lift big heavy things over my head..
-Tommy
Having worked heavy construction in the USA, I am happy with drug testing for 18 wheel truck drivers, crane operators, heavy equipment operators, and so on. I have had to work around all of these and had to depend on their good judgment for my safety.
Programmers and drug abuse? It's a pity, but I don't think Apple or Microsoft would have gotten anywhere in their beginnings if either hadn't turned a blind eye to what was really going on. Silicon Valley was awash with drugs in the early days. Everyone was working 24/7 to get ahead.
I have been a general contractor and the guys that are stoned make great ditch diggers, but lousy carpenters. A stoned carpenter ends up wasting a lot of material. There is plenty of room in construction, mining, and fishing industries for sober workers as all are extreme hazard jobs.
It doesn't take a drug test to know a worker is non-sober... that is just to acquire proof that is actionable.
Working in the woods or pulling green chain in lumber mill has its own problem with amphetimines. The tree planters and timber cruisers are the ones that love pot.