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(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)
When people ask me why someone with my education and background has had such a difficult time obtaining long-term employment (with or without benefits) in the last five years, I've generally responded by citing reasons that mirror the ones found below. Since I come from the software world, I knew exactly how those programs were written, and it's really nice to see someone at Wharton's analysis of these facts.
Automated Job Rejection
Robert Oak
14 Jun 2012
Finally someone speaks the truth about U.S. employers claiming they just can't find people for job openings. Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli has analyzed why employers dare to claim they cannot find people to hire when the United States has over 27 million people needing a job.
There is no skills shortage, none. In fact employers are being absolutely ridiculous in their hiring practices. It's so bad, employers use software and third partyrejectionjob application websites, which pretty much guarantee a candidate will be rejected. These websites and software are like virtual wastebaskets for your resume. No human involved, it's automatic, guaranteed rejection. It's so bad, an HR executive applied for his own job and was rejected.
A Philadelphia-area human-resources executive told Mr. Cappelli that he applied anonymously for a job in his own company as an experiment. He didn't make it through the screening process.Another factor that contributes to the perception of a skills gap is that most employers now use software to handle job applications, adding rigidity to the process that screens out all but the theoretically perfect candidate. Most systems, for example, now ask potential applicants what wage they are seeking — and toss out those who put down a figure higher than the employer wants. That’s hardly a skill problem.Meanwhile, applicants are typically assessed almost entirely on prior experience and credentials, and a failure to meet any one of the requirements leads to elimination. One manager told me that in his company 25,000 applicants had applied for a standard engineering job, yet none were rated as qualified.Below is an interview with Professor Cappelli on the real problem with employers these days. It is not that people are lacking skills, it is employers have impossible requirements.
We've written about this many times, so it's thrilling to see a Wharton School Professor amplify the insanity.
A 2011 Accenture survey found that only 21% of U.S. employees had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years.This is so obvious it hurts. If employers really wanted people they would train them. That's what employers did right up until the 1980's or so. By 2000, companies wanted instant ready disposable workers.
Cappelli is hitting the press. The truth is employers do not want to hire U.S. workers, Americans. In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled! Hopefully this time some employers will wake up, realize to grow a business, one needs people. Maybe some will actually train some people.
The challenge will be getting top leaders of organizations to admit they are a big part of the problem, and to change their ways. Software can be coded so it is less restrictive. Leaders could pay higher market wages where necessary. And they could make more investments in training. That costs money, to be sure, but so does leaving jobs open that could be of significant value to the company (not to mention the economy at large).Judging from employers’ initial reaction, however, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. After writing the initial Wall Street Journal story, Cappelli heard from a few corporate leaders who told him there was really nothing they could do. He suggested he’d come out and take a close look at what they’re doing. “Nobody ever takes me up on that,” he says. “That usually shuts things up pretty quickly.”We can only hope this time, some executives will actually listen. We've often wondered how many billions are wasted on automated screening software and absurd job requirements. Some of our personal favorites are engineering job ads. Many require more years of experience than a particular technology has been in existence. Pretty interesting, to qualify for a job, one should claim they have 12 years of experience with a technology invented two years ago?
If you don't believe that cheap foreign labor (no matter how unqualified to bring excellent results) has taken up the majority of these jobs and that the high unemployment rate works out to the benefit of U.S. businesses, there are always other voices to consider.
Romney’s Inane Campaign
Ralph Nader
Mitt Romney’s daily dittohead assertions make one wonder what he got out of the law and business degrees he received from Harvard University. One of his regular blasts blames Barack Obama for the daily reports of bad economic indicators. Unemployment increases – blame Obama. Retail sales decline – blame Obama. Profits not rising – blame Obama. Housing crisis continues – blame Obama.
At the same time, Mr. Romney will be the first to tell you that government doesn’t create jobs. In the same breath he’ll brag about creating thousands of jobs as a one-term governor of Massachusetts.
Are there contradictions here?
Welcome to the land of “Republican-speak” and the media dutifully headlining every absurd charge or claim made by the foregone Republican nominee for president in 2012.
First, government can both create jobs and cost jobs. Public works programs by state and federal government have created jobs in America for over 200 years. So do long-overdue safety and health regulations such as those requiring seat belts and air bags and smoke stack scrubbers, which can all be manufactured by American workers.
On the other hand, the “government – global corporate alliance” that created one-sided tax and trade policies like those advanced under NAFTA and through the World Trade Organization have cost millions of net American jobs. After all, the massive annual trade deficits recorded by the United States over the last thirty years have meant a net export of both blue and white collar jobs.
Mr. Romney correctly scoffed at then rival candidate Newt Gingrich last January when the latter claimed that he (as Speaker of the House of Representatives) and Bill Clinton created 11 million jobs. Mr. Gingrich and, in his day, Mr. Clinton took credit for this job surge which really was the result of the tech boom out of Silicon Valley and Seattle which l(a)unched off past government research and development programs.
In the 24-hour news cycle, Mr. Romney is everywhere and nowhere. Even his argument that government can only create jobs by getting out of the way of the business world rings false. He wants more tax reductions for the rich and their companies. But business is already taxed far less as a percentage of profits than was the case in the more prosperous 1960s. Not since the 1950s have taxes overall been lower as a percentage of the GDP than they are today. This is a major reason for the growing federal deficits.
Next Mr. Romney trumpets fewer regulations as having a freeing effect on companies allowing them to create jobs. As always he is very vague about specifics. Since 2000, diminished or no bank regulations have been a major cause for the spiral of reckless speculation and the growth of the complex, abstract derivatives monster which brought down large companies and cost so many millions of people their jobs.
The truth is that most federal regulations on the books are weak and obsolete. Many safety rules and standards are in that category.
Our country is dominated by large corporations. Their lobbyists and their PAC contributions shape how Congress spends large chunks of the federal operating budget to enrich the giant military-industrial complex and expand corporate welfare programs. These same corporate pleaders oppose an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. In fact, corporate lobbies have tied the hands of presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama.
To blame Mr. Obama so completely for the state of the economy is more than Mr. Romney trying to drape amnesia on the public about the role of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It is to assume Mr. Obama has the power to control the Federal Reserve and the stubborn, corporate indentured members of Congress who constitute most members of Mr. Romney’s party.
Blocking the repairing of America’s public works has been the priority of John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell – the Republican leaders. Mr. Obama’s failure is not to take them head on for these community upgrades all over the country.
Mr. Romney wants Mr. Obama to cut spending. Yet he accuses Mr. Obama of under-funding the bloated, massive military budget. Mr. Romney, moreover, never spotlights the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways and outrageous tax loopholes to Mr. Romney’s campaign paymasters.
The former “private equity” capitalist touts his experience in creating jobs as the reason for voters to choose him. Read The Buyout of America by John Kosman to really understand how these corporate strip miners arrange leveraged buyouts, load their acquisitions with large debt, drain off their borrowed dividends, lay off workers and often bury firms in bankruptcies after they have been sucked dry.
Stage Stores, Damon Corporation, Ampad, GS Technologies, Dade Behring, DDi and KB Toys all filed for bankruptcy after being acquired by Mr. Romney’s Bain Capital.
Too bad there are not dozens of presidential debates this fall where people in every region of the country could host the nominees for really substantive exchanges. Inane soundbytes may be good for Madison Avenue, but they are bad for our election campaigns.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.
Of course, we could always take a look at what's really happened at the top of our society to stop progress and invasion by the lower classes (unless they've been amply paid off and won't interfere with the political games).
Predator Nation
Russell Mokhiber
When Charles Ferguson accepted the Academy Award in 2010 for his documentary film Inside Job, he told 30 million people viewing the award ceremony that “three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single senior financial executive has been prosecuted and that’s wrong.”
Two years later, still no prosecution.
So, now Ferguson is out with a book – Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (Random House, 2012.)
It reads like an indictment.
Check that.
It reads like a number of indictments.
And Ferguson is hoping that federal prosecutors will pick up the book and get some ideas.
And why exactly have there been no prosecutions of high level Wall Street investment bank executives?
Politics?
“Not exactly,” Ferguson says.
“It’s important to bear in mind the direct personal incentive structures of many of the people involved,” Ferguson told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. “The revolving door phenomenon now effects the Justice Department and federal prosecutors to a very substantial extent.”
“The previous federal prosecutor for the southern district of New York, Mary Jo White, now does white collar criminal defense and makes a great deal more money than she did as a federal prosecutor. I think that phenomenon is very well entrenched, very thoroughly entrenched.”
“Indeed Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division was head of the white collar criminal defense practice at Covington & Burling. They represent most of the major banks and investment banks in the United States.”
And his boss, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, came from the same firm.
“Exactly,” Ferguson said. “So, when you say politics, you sort of think of Republicans, Democrats, ideology, large scale political and policy debates. I don’t think that’s the only thing going on here. I think you have to consider incentives – individual, personal, financial and professional.”
When Rudy Giuliani was U.S. Attorney, he had no qualms about prosecuting Michael Milken. What has changed?
“One thing that has changed is that the amount of wealth and political power held by the financial sector has gone up by at least an order of magnitude,” Ferguson said.
“Another thing that’s changed is the amount of money that the financial sector spends on politics and acquiring political power and influence has also gone up by at least an order of magnitude.”
“And thirdly, the divergence, the difference between public sector salaries and incomes and private sector salaries and incomes has widened enormously.”
“So again, for those at the level of large scale political behavior and at the level of individual incentive, things have changed dramatically since the 1980s.”
As an undergrad, Ferguson studied mathematics at the University of California Berkeley and went on to study political science at MIT.
He then went on to organize an early software company – Vermeer Technologies – which was sold in 1996 to Microsoft for a reported $133 million.
He was an early fan of President Obama.
“I donated my legal maximum to his campaign in 2008,” Ferguson says.
But at a press conference in October 2011, Obama addressed the question of why no high level Wall Street executive has been prosecuted.
“So, you know, without commenting on particular prosecutions – obviously, that’s not my job, that’s the attorney general’s job – you know, I think part of people’s frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren’t necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact,” Obama said.
Does Ferguson still support Obama?
“I’m now very troubled,” Ferguson said. “I’m going to vote for him because we face only two realistic choices, him and Mitt Romney, and between the two, I still think that, for various reasons, he is by far the better choice. He is the lesser of two evils and I can’t say that I will vote with any happiness.”
Are you going to donate the legal maximum this time?
“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” Ferguson said. “I certainly would find it emotionally difficult to donate money to his campaign given my feelings about the situation and his conduct.”
What was Ferguson’s reaction when he heard Obama say – the actions “weren’t necessarily against the law”?
“My reaction was very negative,” Ferguson said. “First of all the statement is thoroughly inaccurate and incorrect, but secondly it’s very difficult for me to believe that he doesn’t know that.”
“Given what we now know, it’s very difficult for me to believe that President Obama actually believes that there was no significant criminality in the housing bubble and the financial crisis.”
Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.
And although I've been predicting that Romney will never be chosen at the reality-bound Republican Convention in August . . . I'm not sure it's really good news for the Democrats.
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