Data Scientist at major company here that was pounding nails in construction circa 2005. This to me is no surprise. At the time I was early 20s and needed that job that would be sort of an apprenticeship. The problem was, these jobs just didn't exist. The young guys (me) got laid of every winter to keep on as many senior crew members as possible and every spring the jobs were less skilled and more labor (think demolition vs. the skills needed for finish work). Young workers need a solid 5-7 years to develop those skills, but from the years 2005 (yea, that early things started slowing down in construction) to 2015 we didn't really train anyone new. My story was a common one; unable to find work in the trades, I eventually gave up and looked for work elsewhere. So there is a gap in the training of skilled labor. How long will it take to recover? Easy, the same 5-10 years we took a break from training new labor.
Your career path (and its determinants) mirror mine to an uncanny degree. Nonetheless, I disagree that there's a long-term shortage of skilled labor in the US in general, or that any short-term shortage has its root cause in underdeveloped supply channels. I saw first hand how easy it was to procure non-union labor, even at the height of construction boom circa 2004 (when I left construction trades) or 2015 (when I left the construction industry as a licensed engineer). Like yourself, I couldn't compete (or refused to put up with) what's essentially become a migrant work force. While it does take about as long to become a skilled carpenter as it takes to become a software developer (and a strikingly similar mindset too), it's infinitely easier to employ migrant skilled workers, the workers are highly mobile, there's a ready supply of them anywhere there's active construction going on, and everyone in the construction business -- from employers to clients -- has de facto acquiesced in the status quo where work permits are not enforced. Union labor is indeed rather inelastic during the periods of boom and bust, but it's also chronically underemployed, historically shrinking and in the big scheme of things a tiny portion of the overall labor.
I was a land surveyor from 2000-2008, it's a subset of civil engineering. But unlike CE, there's a lot of field work and a small amount of office work. In my case I'd say it was anywhere from 80-90% field and 10-20% office. But even though surveying is hardly unskilled labour and usually requires a degree, it was still subject to the same effects the grandparent comment mentions: constant layoffs in winter, culminating in 2008 and the subprime mortgage crash (which, surprisingly to some, affected commercial property) when all 12 staff surveyors at the office where I worked were laid off on the same day for good, with no expectation of being called back ever again.
It will be no surprise to anyone reading this that land surveying is dead now, especially two/three-man team land surveying. Nobody was trained during those "gap" periods, and meanwhile the older generation of baby-boom surveyors (of which there were many) retired. Furthermore, LiDAR, scanning, survey-grade GPS, and robotic total stations meant that some engineering firms cut corners and took a chance by sending CEs out into the field solo to do the field work. That dynamic ensures no training of new surveyors in the field is possible.
So what are you saying? Surveyor pay is booming now, or no surveying is needed any more? ('Needed' as in, people are actually paying to get it done, not 'needed' as in 'people theorize that it would be useful')
The point I'm trying to make is in support of the grandparent comment in this thread: not many young people choose land surveying as a career because even though it's hugely needed and necessary to create the built environment, it's boom or bust. You can't be trained properly and stay in the job if you're getting laid off every winter. And since LS is protected by a guild (professional licensure), this drives prices up.
Yes I got that. My point was: as far as I know, surveyors aren't raking in $250k plus salaries (probably <$100? You probably know better than I do). And also as far as I know, not all building has stopped because of a lack of surveyors. So clearly, there are still enough surveyors, potentially using more productive work methods than they used to to make up for the reduction in labor supply. People in this thread (like GP) are spinning narratives of real 'choke points' in skill supply; for which there is simply no evidence on the ground. Sure, some project managers' lives are harder because they have to account for longer lead times and more uncertainty on resource availability; and costs go up here and there; but in the end, these are simple issues of supply and demand that don't even register over the medium (5-10 year) term.
'Labor shortage' is always 'I can't find people at the price I originally thought I'd have to pay', modulo some time lag dependent on the exact skill set (i.e., training time).
> While it does take about as long to become a skilled carpenter as it takes to become a software developer (and a strikingly similar mindset too).
Sorry for the non-contributing anecdote but I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Once you start to understand things more clearly as a system and how to work on that system you come to realize it's a lot of tacking things together any way possible.
I agree. The ability to employ people from just about anywhere makes demand very sensitive to any wage increases.
Further, the economy doing well when people see wage increases reinforces that marginal increases in income for the 99% highly benefit the national output.
I had a long talk with a guy getting his general contractor's license yesterday. He told me that down in San Diego they are continually short on construction workers, so much that one of his friends said that there is 10 years worth of construction that needs to be done and no one to do it. Wages at ~$45/hr, and probably rising, some projects paying perdiems for commutes from Orange County.
I always find it a bit strange when people talk about shortages of non-price-controlled goods and services. When you say that the industry is "short on construction workers", there's an implicit "who will work for what we used to pay them." It seems to me like it's someone who hires in that industry trying to entice more talent to come help lower the price again, rather than an accurate description of the state of the world.
To be sure, bona-fide shortages can occur transiently. For example when a natural disaster happens, it will take time for the local tradesmen to work through the backlog. But at a relatively steady state, it seems silly to talk about a shortage of construction workers. Pay a bit more than the next guy, and my guess is, your shortage will quickly disappear.
In my very limited personal experience, it's not that hard to get a worker to come do a job on my house. It is EXTREMELY hard to get someone who actually does quality work and is reliable. You could argue that I'd get better and more reliable people if I paid them more, but the fact is, I pay them what they ask for. I have very low confidence that just offering to pay double would make a bad worker into a good one.
Consumer services aren't really the point being made upthread, it's employers looking for supervised labor who can tolerate some spread in skills.
But you can do this too: call up the elite contractors who you can't schedule because they're "too busy" and give them a big number upfront. "I need my carpets replaced, I figure this will be $30k, does that sound right?". They'll be there.
But you have to do the work to know what the right wages are. Employers already know this stuff, obviously.
If someone called me up and said, "I've got a software development contract opportunity for you in Country X, $1000/hr, job should be about 6 months." My ass would be on a plane that afternoon. So much for the shortage of software developers.
However, there's quite a lot of friction hiring unknown software developers (so I guess that's why I don't get those offers - I'm not actively hunting for them).
I used to hire temporary workers all around the country as part of my job as GM of a small travelling pro sports league.
I always found that there is some "market price" where people are decent and paying less gets you less quality and paying more tends to get you better quality.
Specific example: we needed security guards for an event in Las Vegas circa 2006.
* $150/day got us off duty professional guards who were fantastic
* $125/day got us college kids/retired folks who were pretty good
* <$100/day high school kids or people with questionable backgrounds who were usually terrible
I remember Joel Spolsky saying something like "You don't always get what you pay for but it's true enough of the time to be a useful phrase"
Shortage at what price? There’s always a shortage of bread for people willing to pay 1 cent per loaf, and never a shortage for people willing to pay $10.
One could argue that, while you think you’re experiencing a shortage, reality is that you’re simply not willing to pay enough.
Which gets right to the point. Bread supply is elastic,you could quickly set up shop and produce more bread to satisfy demand whereas skilled labor is highly inelastic. Training, gathering hands-on experience, it's all a time-consuming process so there's a long time delay between when demand rises and when supply can rise to meet it
> there's a long time delay between when demand rises and when supply can rise to meet it
Yes, exactly. The demand curve shifts right and the markets find a new equilibrium (most likely at a higher wage than the old equilibrium), but there’s no “shortage”. It’s just markets clearing at a different price level than what people are used to.
Calling it a “shortage” is like saying every time Starbucks raises their prices there is a shortage of coffee — at the old price, sure, but not in absolute terms. That’s not how equilibriums work.
A. Takes time for new workers to be adequately trained.
B. Takes even longer to get people that have been raised to look down on the trades to change their worldview and all of a sudden consider working with their hands, no matter how much money is involved.
You do not normally get a shortage in the labour market because as price goes up, the appeal of hiring someone goes down. As you would expect, the formal definition of shortage is not "not being able to get what you want", a shortage is defined as "a situation where an external mechanism, like government regulation, prevents price from rising."
There are real cases of shortages in the labour market. Where I live, the law defines a fixed rate for doctors. Even if I had all the money in the world, I could not legally pay more than my neighbour to employ the services of the doctor in town. Here, a shortage is a real possibility as there is no monetary way to decide who gets the appointment with the doctor. But these tend to be exceptional cases.
Without that legal requirement, I could simply offer more than my neighbour to get the appointment and the neighbour would have to choose to go without seeing the doctor. There is not a shortage in that scenario as the neighbour was not in the market to begin with. This is the same reason we don't say there is a shortage of Ferraris, even though the vast majority of people will never be able to get their hands on one, no matter how much they wish they could have one. They are simply unaffordable to most people.
It really doesn't matter how long it takes to train someone. As long as the price is able to rise, the business who really need the existing people will pay more, taking them from the businesses that cannot afford them, until everyone who still needs that service is fulfilled.
If there was a shortage of pilots and you "happily" offered to fly me safely to my destination for $100k, I'd happily ask the security personnel to escort you off the plane. Nobody is flying that day, and your naive idealism can't change that.
If you see two loaves in a store that are basically the same kind, you normally won't think too hard about which one you pick. As mechanical and indifferent as some hiring processes are, they don't approach that level of indifference.
But certainly somebody would weld for 10k an hour, and therefore the person willing to pay that will have as much welding labor as they need, and everybody else will have to match that price, bamboozle their workers into taking less, or find some way to complete their project with fewer welds.
Technically, a shortage is defined as a situation where price is unable to rise due to an external mechanism, such as government setting a price ceiling. As long as you have an opportunity to pay more, there cannot be a shortage. Rather demand for the given product/service shrinks.
That's not a shortage. That's just a time lag. It would be a shortage if nobody trains to become a construction worker because of price controls like minimum wage or maximum wage in an alternate universe.
How is that not a (temporary) shortage? When did it become part of the definition that all shortages must be permanent?
What if nobody trains to become a construction worker (for whatever reason) and then over the next 5-10 years demand goes down because people get used to making do with the buildings that already exist? Is it also not a shortage then?
You can't just create 100,000 new construction workers in San Diego because you raise wages from $45 to $60 per hour.
Labor availability + skill + time + market awareness = it takes a helluva lot longer than months or 2-3 years to meaningfully boost a skill trade.
Labor availabity means: how many people - heavily influenced by the unemployment rate - are interested in putting in the time to go retrain themselves to do a new job. Many people will not kill themselves to do so, if they're making $45/hour and you tell them the upside is $60/hour. A deep level of comfort sets in for a large percentage of the population once you get to $30-$45 per hour.
Skill means: it takes years to train someone to an appropriate level at being a professional anything, whether we're talking roofing or plumbing.
Time means: well, it simply takes time to rotate large numbers of people into blue collar jobs. The whole process takes a lot of time, from start to finish. There's only so much that can be done to speed that process up.
Market awareness: it can take years for people to believe that blue collar work demand is going to be sustained (history say otherwise, and people know that such work is often inconsistent; and they know that the downturns are brutal). It can take years to get the word out in just a mid-size city like San Diego, that there is high demand. It requires new entrants to take risk, which most people do not like doing. To be convinced to take a life change risk if someone is even remotely comfortable, the reward has to be extreme in most cases.
I believe the trick is the following: if wages increase from 45 to $60/hr, a lot of the planned constructions no longer make sense financially, and are abandoned.
For perspective, the going wage for a skilled (journey level) carpenter in the SF Bay area is essentially the same today as it was in 2005 (the last time I was part of the labor force). This is from a quick survey of Craigslist ads. If anything, the real wage seems to have decreased.
Apart from "packing donuts" type jobs, most jobs require some degree of knowledge and skill. Some jobs have higher knowledge half-life than others. While IT has notoriously short knowledge half-lifes, construction has rather long half lifes.
Suppose that we train x+y construction workers a year, x work in the industry until retirement, y - retrain to different profession. This means that there are y*years dormant specialists that can be brought back to industry.
Construction is becoming more and more specialized. There are many machines that need to be operated, together with regulations it requires high skilled people.
Another key factor is that a lot of baby boomers are reaching retirement age. With every kid being told college is the only path to become "successful," there's going to be a lack of talent in the trades at least in the near term that's going to continue driving wages higher.
I've been teaching college students at non-elite schools for ten years, and it's obvious to me (and pretty much any intellectually honest person) that college has been oversold; many students floundering in college would be better served by trade schools: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost...
Not everyone should be specializing in abstract symbol manipulation.
And the all-too-common problem is that firms haven't prepared for the necessary knowledge transfer when those boomer workers do retire. If you've got a millwright who's been working in the same plant for forty years since it opened, he'll know every detail of how things work, where things don't match the schematics, what's been tried and how well that worked out. You can't just start that process when they turn in their two-weeks' notice; you've got to have somebody or somebodies working as assistants, and you've got to pay them adequately to keep them around. Nobody wants to do that.
No it won't last, because as soon as the wages start coming up then the fed will say "inflation is heating up" and raise interest rates, causing businesses to spend more on debt service and less on employees.
The US has a long-term severe labor shortage that has already begun. There isn't anything that can stop that, including robotics / automation and artificial intelligence. There's nothing that can happen in the next 20 years, except for a protracted recession-like economy (or big crash), that can significantly ease up that labor shortage.
It's a matter of facts. The population growth rate is too low. The rate of retirement is too high (boomers exiting). Immigration is at modest levels versus the total population base. Almost any consistent GDP growth with those factors in play, will generate an extreme labor demand squeeze. It's particularly bad for blue collar jobs; the boomer generation is loaded with blue collar skills / trade persons, and they're exiting in droves.
Major economies with low population growth like Germany are able to maintain perpetually low unemployment with very modest growth. The US routinely grows 3x to 4x faster than Germany, including presently. It's obvious what the consequences of sustained 1.5%-2% (much less higher) GDP growth must have on the US when it comes to labor shortages from this point forward, when all the labor factors are taken into account.
There's a long queue of people around the globe who would be eager to move to the US to participate in the American labour market, if they could. So labour shortages are easy to solve, if there's political will.
Higher rates only affects new issuances of bonds, rolling over of existing debt, or bank loans (which are a small fraction of the total debt market in developed economies).
The average maturity of a corporate bond is now 15+ years, and most bonds pay a fixed interest rate that doesn't vary due to current rates [1].
That means that any change to rates will not have much of an immediate impact on the interest expense line item. On the other hand, it will actually increase the interest income they receive on their cash balances.
Not to necessarily agree with the OP's prognosis, but the Fed rate also affects inflation which can affect the viability of every contract written in terms of dollars when it strays from where it's expected to be.
I agree that it won’t last, but I think exactly the opposite will happen: with wages going up, people will spend more money, which will increase the profits of businesses, who will use the profits to hire more people to keep up with the increased demand.
Retail shelf space is capital. If consumers empty shelves twice as fast, the return on shelf space-capital will double (assuming the markup doesn’t change). It’s not the Fed raising rates, it’s the market over-bidding the Fed.
If the Fed were able to stop these movements, our economy wouldn’t be as bubbly as it is.
Illegal border crossings on the southern border are down 78% and blue collar wages are rising. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but when there are fewer available workers to hire/train and demand remains constant, wages tend to rise.
Not a "dissenter" per se, just a rational human trying to draw connections:
In service positions, I could see a rise in wages attributed to those jobs that might have previously been filled with migrants.
I might see legal immigration also being discouraged, but to be honest that includes tourism from abroad which is shrinking and potentially having a negative impact on the service sector.
The only direct _policy_ link I can see is not a policy but rather a "business friendly" climate that might lead companies to start to invest more, understanding that they probably won't be taxed or regulated more heavily in the next 3 years.
That, plus cheap credit (a big overheat risk IMO) means opportunities for growth.
In terms of actual policy, I'd say not much has happened but rather the economy is now recovering from the housing crisis and growth has picked up again across the board. This was occurring before Trump, and will continue until another systemic issue occurs and people panic I'd imagine.
That said, in my opinion, Presidents rarely have much to do with economic outcomes except to either inject risk / instability with policy initiatives or pronouncements. Some big policies have costs, but most of the day to day impacts are quite spread out. There has been no action yet on health care or taxes that would influence employer direct costs. Perhaps some regulation has not been implemented and some executive orders rolled back, but nothing that would impact markets.
One way that Trump helped is that the illegal migration rate dropped as soon as he came into office. He scared people out of even trying. You've also got his halt to the ever-expanding regulatory environment and his opposition to the TPP.
However, just to show that with the right zoom level, you can make data show you anything, look at 3 year graph, and it shows that up until Nov 2016, the graph was flat-lining, even with some large dips, but then it started going up and has been doing so since. I am sure Trump supporters will say "see, there's your cause!".
And maybe they are right somewhat. This is the stock market, so perceptions, and perceptions of perceptions of future income get folded into the price. So maybe a hope of a more business friendly environment was started to be factored in.
One thing I have little doubt of is that had the market done the opposite and gone down the same amount, every media outlet and Reddit's politics subs would immediately become macroeconomic experts and blame everything on Trump. The reason I say it is because there was a dip the night of the election, and I clearly remember how MSNBC hosts printed out after-hours and Japan stock market results on paper and happily were telling people how their 401k will burn, and jobs will be lost and how they, how had just had a major failure predicting the outcome of the election, had finally validated themselves regarding the stock market crash. But then the very next day the stock market shot up and has been going up since. That's why you don't really find them talking much about the economy. This was one of the surprising articles, and even that from a British company.
yeah i remember that election morning. upset liberals were saying how the market is going to be down 2000 points, etc and pointing to pre-market price changes. having invested before, I know you cant trust pre-market numbers at all, its extremely volatile.
i say that as a fly on the wall. i feel like i am outside some bubble where everyone flips out about the smallest things, and they forget that they did it at all. try asking people about how they flipped out about the premarket trading the day after the election and people are oblivious
In the US, the president (wrongly) gets evaluated on the economy, as if he were the only one that controls it, and as if it responded almost instantly to his direction. It's false every time, whether praise or blame, whatever the party of the president.
In particular, in this case, the rise started before Trump assumed office, so it seems reasonable to say that no, he didn't cause it.
also the massive increase in stock prices, which some attribute to things trump might do. companies do act very differently when their stock is doing well - hire more employees, take on more projects, etc. when stock is down - lay off employees, cut costs
Probably none [edit: in manufacturing]. Most illegal immigrants don’t work manufacturing. The three most common jobs for illegals around here are construction, yardcare, and building cleaning via nested subcontractors. Manufactures have hard assets they could loose. Sketchy subcontractors can just disappear and rename.
The growth is from the demand side - people are buying more right now.
> Probably none. Most illegal immigrants don’t work manufacturing.
You say that as if the jobs taken by illegals exist in some alternate universe where simple economic principles don't apply.
If an illegal immigrant's job is vacant (because he couldn't enter the country) and a would-be manufacturing worker fills that job, that obviously has a direct impact on the manufacturer's ability to hire that worker. He's no longer looking for a job because he filled a vacancy left by an illegal immigrant.
This makes little sense. Illegal immigrants usually occupy the least qualified and least-paid jobs. Few persons that are qualified to apply for a manufacturing would rather apply for a job that an illegal immigrant could get.
Do the illegal immigrants take those jobs because they pay so little, or do those jobs pay so little because there has always been a steady supply of illegal immigrants desperate to fill them at below-market prices?
If your business model relies on wages being suppressed by those illegal workers, then maybe your business deserves to go bankrupt when the supply dries up and Americans start demanding $15/hour.
First off, these businesses typically don’t “rely on” those wages, the owner is just taking a $20k bonus because they can and they like money.
Undocumented workers take the jobs because there is no financial incentive for an owner to risk breaking the law unless they are getting cash back. The worker is basically paying their employer to break the law.
Isn't lower class work interchangeable to some extent ?
Less illegals to do construction means a larger portion of construction it will be done by legal employees, which reduces the available pool for manufacturing.
Construction is not particularly more interchangeable than programming. Inexperienced workers can do some tasks, which have been prepped by more experienced workers. A worker operating out of their depth will cause problems that cost 10x to fix.
In other words: you can fill part of your staff with interchangeable workers, but not all of it.
Those jobs are unskilled, so they are easy to learn even if you don’t speak or can read the native language.
Most traditional manufacturing jobs require being able to read/write the native language. Also, manufacturing companies are sometimes audited by standard bodies that involve interviews with workers (mainly to see if they understand quality control).
>In some industries the labour shortage seems acute. Now is not a good time for Americans to remodel their bathrooms: tile and terrazzo contractors earn 11% more per hour than a year ago (and fully one-third more than in 2014).
This is exactly the type of jobs that have been flooded by immigrants from Latin America - both illegal and legal - for decades. I speak Spanish and often talk with immigrants at bars or wherever, and they work in numerous industries.
The one thing that changed my view of the whole system was realizing that absolutely no company gives a shit about the laws. Guys who had been here a year or less, couldn't speak any English, were hired for government contracting jobs on roads and the metro paying tons of overtime at near-union wages.
Also, labor markets are fluid. If a citizen can make more in construction, he might quit his shitty manufacturing job.
But, hey, anything to continue with the absurd narrative that massive immigration hasn't been a very major part of wage destruction for both blue-collar and also white-collar jobs via H1Bs, OPT, L1, etc.
You are right but there are other factors too. We've been pushing mediocre students through colleges at an exorbitant price when 30 years ago a lot of these people would have gone into the trades. Supply and demand plays into it domestically too. I agree that immigrants are filling the gap right now. Nature abhors a vacuum.
there is an SSN work-authorization test one has to pass when applying for most jobs. No SSN or SSN not authorized for work (all temp|visitor visas) - gtfo.
Source - been there done that.
The whole immigrant debate is so political now, it's hard to find any trustful source, including the stats put out by USCIS , DOJ, etc.
So if you want to know how the SSN game works for illegal immigrants, find some media who wants to paint it in a positive light, even if they have to admit that millions of workers use fake SSNs: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/undocum...
If you spend your time around highly-paid software professionals, $30k-$50k may not seem great.
When you consider that the median income in the country is $31,099[1], making more than half the population is pretty great. At the upper end of that range, you are in the top 30%.
I imagine there's an opportunity for a startup that let's someone who wants to do a simple job themselves Facetime with a plumber to talk them through the work. No idea if there's any profit in it though.
"Now grab a 3ft section of copper tubing, cut it to length with your pipe cutter, bend it with your copper bending tool, and flare it with your flare clamp... what, you don't have any of those? Wellll.."
Based on a fair bit of experience in these types of things (unskilled individual doing skilled trade work around various homes/rentals etc), anyone who's capable of doing these types of things while supervised via facetime is probably just as capable of and willing to do them with a youtube or web tutorial.
Sometimes you have to sink a lot of time into finding the youtube videos that have useful information in them. I am always annoyed at the extremely high volume of low quality self help content on youtube. I think some kind of guarantee that you were going to get useful advice or it's free would go a long way.
The return delivery costs are as much as the cost of the tools themselves.
I always tell people wanting to do a job themselves that the first time your costs are the same as hiring a pro, but the second time you own the tools and it is just time.
By the time you'd planned for all the tools and materials you'd need, loaded it into a kit, and shipped it off to the customer, you or the plumber probably could have just sent your business to someone more local.
And in the end you'll have spent more than you would have with a regular plumber, you'll have a bunch of tools you won't need for another 10 years, and the job will look terrible.
Source: had to retile a bit of a floor, too small to interest a real tiler. Guess how it looks now?
I'm not a professional but I cracked a tile on my kitchen counter and replaced it and you can't tell. Likely difference between you and me? My uncle is a tile man and he walked me through the whole process (remotely), from finding a matching replacement tile and grout to what kind of tile glue works best for this kind of tile to grouting and cleaning.
As someone who does as much as I can around the home myself, this attitude baffles me. I consider my tools and knowledge a financial investment: most are used at least monthly, some weekly. I'd never be able to afford living in my home if I paid a contractor to come out every time my toilet leaked. Likewise, my car ownership costs would increase substantially if I paid a mechanic $100 to change the oil or $1000 to service the brakes.
Also, most light everyday home maintenance work like laying tile, building a fence, framing a wall, installing plumbing, etc. is not rocket science. You don't have to be Bob Vila or go to trade school for years to learn how to do it.
> And in the end you'll have spent more than you would have with a regular plumber, you'll have a bunch of tools you won't need for another 10 years, and the job will look terrible.
That part of the business model worked well for Home Depot.
1. Tele-inspection of the job.
2. Ship parts required. Tools can come in the same box which then needs to be returned after the job.
3. Tele-supervise the job
I'm not allowed to cut a tree in my backyard because it's close to power lines, only licensed arborist. I CAN do it but not allowed, so it's just a legislation not an issue of knowledge.
Trimming trees near power lines is extremely dangerous and can lead to deadly electric shocks even simply operating near power lines. Metal ladders and tools can draw current from lines to ground and to a great deal of damage. Arborists have special training and tools to prevent deadly electric shocks when trimming trees near power lines.
My dad helped me disassemble a lawnmower to fix a carburetor float once via Facetime, and I felt like a living Apple commercial when it started back up on the first pull, especially considering I didn't know what a carburetor was beforehand.
A substantial factor in licensed tradespersons' ability to collect the wages they get is that many situations require the work be done by a license holder. For example electrical or plumbing repairs done to satisfy a building code violation are often expected to have permit paperwork documenting the repair. License = ability to pull permit.
What, can't a tradesman certify that a job was done to code remotely? We allow people to get degrees online.
Of course, some things (is the screw really tight?) can't be verified by video only, but possibly one could devise smarter tools like pressure gauges and some such that can be shown over a video call.
I'd be curious what the cost savings in the end were regardless.
An untrained hand takes so much longer to complete a task that a professional is used to regardless of the understanding. Do you want to slog along a journeyman in video conference for 8 hours or hire him for 2? What's your cost going to be with either?
Beyond that a lot of physical tasks can be done blind, does he "see" that you've threaded the hose properly or applied the compound properly when you're doing it by feel as your eyes can't reach behind whatever you're working at?
I like the idea but I always relate back to my own real world experiences and think about how inefficient it is to remotely task with someone. Ever try helping your parents navigate their computer over the phone? Imagine doing that with a professional @ $100/hr or whatever to replace your faucet or wire new fixtures and run cabling to a breaker panel
The licenses tradesmen carry also tend to be paired with some sort of insurance or bond to back up the fitness of their work. Were it my plumber's license and liability coverage, for example, I'd be hesitate to approve a sweated pipe weld just from video footage. And the market for cheap sonar/magnetic gadgetry or whatever for laypersons to inspect the welds on bathroom plumbing probably just isn't there.
That would be pretty funny, but plumbing can be pretty damned complex work.
I could see some potential in apprenticeships taking place remotely, though. At least in the latter years of one. And maybe compliance tests, journeyman tests, etc — depending on the nature of the work. And in that case, less Skype, and more AR.
The risk is pretty high, too. Instead of a $300 p-trap replacement, you can do it yourself, but if you do it wrong, you can have 4-5 figures of accidental water damage to the house.
Absolutely! And that's just in your bathroom wear-and-tear maintenance.
Never mind commercial plumbing! Small business owners trying to sort out a commercial block backup caused by a grease-trap failure could start to turn out a few issues...
Plumbers deserve higher regard than they're given (all great plumber jokes aside).
That said if the tech could be used to improve the training of specialists in remote areas/ areas that might be short a few journeymen or master tradespersons, or aid in especially complex problems, it could be a huge boon and reduction in cost (eg - travel costs).
I tried to fix numerous issues with my car and in my apartment by following very clear and detailed YouTube videos.
Unfortunately, it's the little things that usually push me to give up and hire a pro - wrong tools, don't know the tricks to get a tight screw loose, etc.
It's not dissimilar to how many non-technical PHBs watch developers typing away, and figure they can just get a random worker for half-price to copy the same code from a book or website. In reality, it's not the actual code - many times which can just be copied - that makes a good developer worthwhile, it's the years of experience to know what to do when something goes wrong.
I worked at a startup doing exactly this last year[1], [2], [3]. Unfortunately, the parent company shut us down after we ran out of runway but it was starting to gain traction. One issue we had was ultimately a lot of people wanted someone to come out anyway and to make sure we had the right quality (and so gain customer/brand trust) we had to do this in-house - i.e. hire actual plumbers and handymen to be on call as well as building logistics software to support all of this entirely outside of the video call aspect.
It was more than a bit depressing the parent company pulled the plug because it really did feel like it was about take off. Maybe we could've instead integrated into a set of preferred suppliers cross country as a lead gen service. Though if you read the TrustPilot reviews it was the fact we were the whole package that customers loved.
We started by first charging for calls but in order to grow switched that to free calls with the assumption that people would then book a home visit if needs be. Nobody wanted to pay £10 on a call and find out they needed a plumber to come out. It felt like something that with Uber-style levels of investment (i.e. tons) could be pretty profitable if you owned the sector. To expand on our offerings we would do things like allow people to simply book a handyman for an hour to do whatever - put up a curtain rail, fix that loose light fitting and so on.
People were using the video aspect as a precursor to someone actually coming to do the work so the video bit was never the end of the transaction. As soon as you start needing a team of people to field customer calls, do support and manage your countrywide team of tradesmen it gets expensive.
It definitely did have a lot of value and customers, once they used it, loved it. From perhaps an emergency "this has stopped working" first call out you would have people then asking about exactly the sort of thing you mention with window blinds and become a repeat customer.
One thing we were looking to do was to offer it to companies as an employee perk - so the company would buy a certain amount of hours that could be used. Then staff could have a face to face call with the relevant tradesperson to discuss anything they like. It was too near the end though to get going :(
If you ever revive it, I worked for an insurance company that loves giving those kind of services as add-ons to their homeowners insurance (they're usually little-used and serve as great promotional copy).
Alas Homeserve, the massive insurance company who were the primary investors, took over all the IP and I think they just killed it. They bought CheckATrade [1] around the time we shutdown, so maybe it will see the light of day as part of that someday.
If the job would take a plumber 30 minutes, it'll take me an hour - so instead of paying a plumber for 30 minutes of work, I'd need to pay him for an hour of supervision; so I'd be paying more for the privilege of doing it myself.
Presumably a single plumber could handle multiple clients, plus you are already paying for his commute, which you probably don’t need to do (in your own house)
Define expensive. 200$? That's the cost of the plumber's time, and now I've got that tool forever. That and I've gained knowledge and know how to fix or build something that I didn't before which is something I take pride in.
In my experience, there's been very few things where it makes more sense long term to just pay someone else to do it so long as you're willing to do a little bit of learning.
I was thinking more like having someone assess the job, point out potential tricky bits, advise on different approaches, etc before you start. Like I said, I have no idea if there's a profitable business there, I was just suggesting a way a plumber could actually work remotely.
If backflipping robots do the easier work, then what is left for humans is the more complex well paying work. When you remove the lower paying jobs from the average calculation, the average will rise. Indeed the article even states that at 89%, male prime-age [labour market] participation remains close to a record low. The article also has an opinion quote stating that some of the recent wage gains are misleading, because they have occurred in industries, such as textile manufacturing, in which employment continues to fall.
That's the point, it will take A LOT longer for the robots to replace these menial jobs. (And they are not all as low-paying.)
I remember articles from one or two decades ago about the attempts to automate a very dangerous and not even low-paying job of window washing in the high rise buildings. It is a real problem, it does not require HAL-9000 grade AI that can analyse Shakespeare, it is economically viable, and neither then nor now it is completely automated. I see that in Australia, window washing jobs are paid as high as low to midrange software development.
I am not even going to mention more complex tasks like a work of a plumber, a gardener, a janitor. Is the work of a janitor the more lucrative occupation?
It takes very long to get from the first demos to a prototype working most of the time, and even longer from the prototype to a system that can be relied upon in a mission critical environment (a category that most applications of robotics fall into). The Silicon Valley prophets got it all backwards.
The gap is closing but it means amenities are getting more expensive and since the people in the middle aren't getting raises it just isn't attractive to work in a smarter role
Hence the growing disdain for globalization. It's a race to the bottom to see what country will provide the lowest wages and quality of life for its workers.
I'm unclear from this article whether wages are going up or costs. Wages are take-home earnings of workers. That is something different than costs to employers. I need clarification as to whether insurance/tax costs are part of this math.
Ideally, in such articles I want to see actual numbers. I want to see "the average wage for a carpenters in 2015 was X, and today is is X+10%". I'm not so sure that those numbers are changing all that much.
Maybe this is simple fact of exhausting of 'Chinese advantage' of lower wages in developing countries, that used to drive jobs abroad? Even about 2007, there were forecasts that Chinese wages will rise to the level which no longer drives American jobs away - to ~20% of American level, rest is compensated by lower productivity - by about 2015. It was long ago expected to be a turnaround year. So why are everyone surprised?
It is interesting that wages spiked and yet hourly rate is being considered the only relevant factor by many. Most of these jobs require behaving in a servile manner toward some assholes who have zero respect or commitment and start the process with a drug test in order to make the fundamental lack of trust explicit. The way corporate America treats candidates and employees is unacceptable at any price for many people.
Have you ever worked a construction or labor job? I don't recall ever having to act in a servile way.
Service jobs on the other hand were the most humiliating experiences of my life. We were expected to take harsh abuse from customers while issuing apologies.
It's a labor shortage more than anything else they listed. It's not an energy boom, weak dollar, Trump etc.
The question should be "why is this a surprise?"
Does our culture esteem people that work with their hands?
Do parents encourage their children to aspire to learn trade skills?
Does our educational system encourage students to learn trade skills and explore the trades as highly viable alternatives to going to college?
We've looked down at the trades and blue-collar work for decades. The evidence is everywhere. Of course there is a shortage, students have been listening to the adults in their lives, their peers, media outside of Mike Rowe etc and have heard the message loud and clear.
Solutions; I see two things that need to happen.
First, we need to reach and communicate to students and adults across the country that trade skills are valuable and a career in the trades is an outstanding option.
Create a more efficient, affordable and accessible resources for people to learn trade skills, no matter their location, age, income, nationality etc. We need to make it 10x easier for people to learn the skills that are in demand.
I’m working on both those solutions at Tradeskills.io
Definitely a lot to figure out!
it's just a repeat...something goes up and everyone jumps not realizing that the boiling water has already started to simmer...I am referring to the general lack of economic growth per country...the longer that goes on..the worse the boiling water will feel at the end..will we be boiled or will we finally understand our grave future economic peril
When blue collar wages rise it is due to flawed economic policies!
When white collar tech wages rise it is because they are creating an incredible amount of economic value and deserve all of it! It is absolutely all because of their own genius!
I worked with small / medium manufacturers in the prosperous part of the Southeast. Hiring is brutal currently.
Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.
Sub $160,000 houses (3-4 bedrooms, land, average schools, 15-30 minute commute) are now selling in 1-3 days, compared with 3-6 months five years ago. There’s definitely a boom getting started here.
I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time?
The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast.
And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why?
It would be interesting to test white collar workers.
It is BS, but I was under the impression it's more a CYA strategy for liability if a worker has an accident that puts the company at risk. IE imagine a roofer drops a shingle on someone's head, accidents happen and the roofer was sober but if they can't pass a drug test the company could be in serious hot water in a negligence lawsuit. BS runs downhill, so to speak.
You can also deny workman's comp claims if somebody blows a drug test. They are powerfully financially incentivized to fish for a hot sample in the case of an accident.
Basically shit rolls down hill-most of the factories I work with care because of 2 reasons:
1) Contract language that says your workforce has to be drug free (government sourced contracts doubly so)
2) Insurance. If you have a fork lift driver run into a rack of transmissions (or drive your work truck into a building) your insurance is going to demand a urine test. If the urine test comes back unclean they will deny your claim.
stealth intelligence test. For a variety of interesting historical reasons, the government hates intelligence tests as a hiring criteria and this is the blue collar stealth/workaround IQ test. Its the blue collar equivalent of fizzbuzz or a gitlab repo.
Look, you got one task, one task only, it's not even hard to figure out, do not, repeat, do not, get high the week or two before your pee test. That simple. There are human bipeds burning valuable oxygen right now, who can't follow a test that elaborate and complicated. They are literally the kind of people where if you told them not to lick a circuit breaker, would turn around and an hour later electrocute themselves and probably a coworker or two by licking a circuit breaker on the jobsite. Whats the minimum IQ and discipline level necessary to pass a pee test? Not much, but there are failures out there walking around...
Its interesting that as far as I know this is the first strictly chemistry based IQ test. AFAIK there is no "pee in a bottle to determine if you can fizzbuzz" test for code monkey work. No chemical marker that can identify if you know the modulus operator... not yet...
> ...do not, get high the week or two before your pee test.
In case someone is wondering, hair follicle tests are apparently problematic [1]; had to look that up because I remembered correctly that follicle tests can show use over the long-term, but didn't know some of the intrinsic challenges with that method. Come to think of it, I've never been asked to submit a hair sample when I've had to pass FBI interviews and drug tests to gain admittance to extremely-sensitive data centers at some of my clients in the past.
The "week or two" needs contextual guidance. An article on Wikipedia [2] gives a good run down of the detection periods. I would imagine detecting pot is the most common request, so that's about 100 days on the conservative side for a heavy (daily?) user, but apparently three weeks is fine for more casual users (what, once a week?).
My addiction to coffee involved no poor choices, I don’t regret it and it makes me a better person. Lack of it makes my performance much worse, I get a migraine with vertigo and vomiting.
You seem to be confusing physical dependence with addiction. By your definition, you'd be addicted to food, as I'm sure you'd have adverse consequences, including worse performance, in its absence.
Addiction is continued use in the face of adverse consequences. [1] You may have a physical dependence on coffee, but it doesn't sound like you're experiencing negative consequences in your life from its use.
If you are unable to refrain for 2 weeks, then you are not the kind of person who they want to hire, because it means you will also not refrain when you are on duty.
Its a different sort of refrain problem. We expect you'll refrain from activity X when we tell you to for a short reasonable period of time. When X is smoking weed this is seen as a big problem, mostly by weed smokers. When X is applying electrical power to this machine's cabinet someone is working in by hacking around the lockout-tagout locks, this seems a common sense test for a jobsite. We can't test for the latter but we can proactively predict by testing for the former. There are plenty of blue collar jobs where lack of awareness and self control and logical analysis of cause and effect mean someone dies. Weed smoking is a simple test of self awareness and self control and intelligence (WRT understanding the whole problem situation)
> I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober
Have you ever seen a lathe accident, for example?
You can't spot test for being high on marijuana or pills like you can for drunkenness, so you rely on the urine test to keep everyone on the floor safe from being crushed in a press by a stoned co-worker (or themselves.)
I’ve seen a fair few industrial accidents including amputations and deaths. I don’t think that the injuries we have each seen are very relevant.
The things that are detected and punished are not necessarily the things that cause harm. Smoking pot a week ago isn’t actually a problem. Being tired from watching Netflix all night is far worse, as are a few other things, including drugs which aren’t readily detected. The imperfect system currently used causes one hell of a lot of harm. There needs to be something, but the current system isn’t right.
You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not.
Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate?
We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.
If the complaint is that you can't find enough workers because too many are failing drug tests[1], then your hypothetical of having "two job applicants" (for an implicit one spot to be filled) is already moot.
I mean, that's the thing, it's a hypothetical. The non-existence of workers with clean drug tests in the real applicant pool doesn't mean that a failing drug test is less of a risk signal in real applicants.
Remember, new hires are not guaranteed to add value - even if they worked for free, there is always a risk that some will reduce value. If a new hire's inability to show up on time holds up a production line, or a new hire's irresponsibility damages equipment, then you're better off not making the hire, even if you desire, in the abstract, to hire more people and expand your business.
I have never had a drug test, and that includes several jobs working for defense contractors. (The law said they had to have a plan for testing anyone they suspected of drug use. It didn't say they had to suspect anyone.)
I've never had security clearance of any kind. Highlights that all required drug testing were: restaurant national headquarters, towing/insurance national headquarters, theme park, defense contractor for non-secure projects, and a bank.
Though now that I think about it I have technically worked at two companies that didn't drug test: my own, and a small 3-man startup I did some work for.
It's worth mentioning that I live in a red state. I suspect blue states have cultures that are a little more lax on drug testing, though I have no real data to back that up.
Here's the sectors I've worked in throughout my career: Insurance, banking, marketing, entertainment (theme park), restaurants, and defense. Every single one of my jobs in those sectors required drug tests prior to employment.
It's not about whether they can or can't. It's about the massive liability for the company if they fuck up on the job and cause property damage or bodily injury.
That could be true in a causative sense, but not a correlative* one. Not that it's ethical to do so, but by testing for marijuana smokers, businesses/insurance companies may by proxy be testing for other traits likely to cause accidents
Can someone who smoked a joint a couple days ago be trusted not to smoke one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker smokes a joint just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)
> Can someone who drank a beer a couple days ago be trusted not to drink one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker drinks a beer just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)
As others have pointed out, wages for these job openings that cannot get people to show up are frequently so low that its not worth showing up for them in the first place. Many of these No-Shows have to prove that they are "actively seeking a job" to continue getting whatever benefit they currently receive. And these people are doing the (short term) math, the wages from the job + a full work week < money they get for free from the government. Brutal problem, but paying wages that are market for the kind of employee you want _should_ change that
Let's define Southeast as below the 36°30' and east of the Mississippi (i.e. we're definitely excluding VA, DC, WV, KY, and anything west of the Mississippi including Louisiana).
Those actively gaining on rankings of 'prosperity' include Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston SC, and Raleigh-Durham [1]. Atlanta has a good amount of preexisting prosperity, though it's not ranking as high now. Greenville has seem a fair bit of growth as well.
Subjectively, you can perceive that these metropolitan areas are doing a lot better than others in the Southeast.
One of my memories of that job was sleeping fully-dressed for work, then leaping out of bed when my alarm goes off. I'd carefully balance on my feet and wait for the tiredness to pass.
That's not sustainable. I can't do that more than a week at a time.
So there's all this anger focused toward people who are genuinely lazy, and it's impossible to separate it from people who have a genuine medical condition. What's the solution?
One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work. Recruitment in software has heated up to the point where any small flag against the candidate is enough to pass. No one would voluntarily jump in with someone whose attitude is "Well, I couldn't sleep until 3am because of being wide awake since 10pm, so I'm gonna show up around noon if that's ok."
It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?
I still two years later have no idea what to do about this. I'm working remotely part-time, putting in full-time hours, just because I feel lucky to have any sort of job.
The point is, the next time someone posts in a company-wide Slack channel that they're feeling sleepy and will be in later, consider there might be more going on than meets the eye. Relationship problems and medical conditions both need to be concealed, and it takes a toll.
The thing is, it's not up to you to care. We have to deal with it or we're cut. And that's fine. But maybe some context will help, somehow.
> One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work.
It's a medical condition. Employers need to provide reasonable accommodations if you're able to fulfill the job. Are you able to do the job on a slightly shifted schedule? Chances are it's the case.
> It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?
No employers will not make reasonable accommodations. Business is profit over people, you requiring accommodations means more effort for them. Just try to tell your employer you have depression and see how "reasonably accommodating" they will be.. capitalism is disease
When you graduate, at your first tech job you'll have to sit through various mandatory training. One of those describes the employer's requirements under U.S. (or EU) law.
One of those requirements is "reasonable accommodation," which is a term that means that employers face big lawsuits from the government if they don't reasonably accommodate employee disabilities.
This means that if an employee has a condition that allows them to do the work, but needs special stuff, such as software to allow them to write code while blind, or a wheelchair-accessible entrance, then the company has to provide it. Otherwise, the employee can ask the government to sue the company on her or his behalf.
Yes, those things can happen. Doesn't mean they will. Remember, a large chunk of people in this country are working under at-will employment. That means that if the company doesn't want to accommodate you, they don't have to; they just let you go without saying why. The onus is now on you to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (and spending large amounts of money on legal fees to do so) that you were let go because of that.
Fair enough, the employee will notify their state office that handles ADA complaints.
There's no guarantee for anything in life. There is even a strong likelihood that justice won't be served. But that is a far cry from throwing up our hands and claiming a rigged system. There is a reason why so many malls, stores, and restaurants have disabled-accessible entrances, and it's not wishful thinking. It's enforcement at the state and local level.
Start with putting in an effort with the employer, and your final means would be the justice system. It's the law. But you could start with the manager, move on to HR, move on to the courts if you need to. And don't skip levels. Only elevate as necessary.
This doesn't quite work. The official reason for firing me had nothing to do with my narcolepsy, for example. It would normally be a minor infraction. But when someone wants to get rid of you for showing up late, they can almost always find a way.
And then you're in a situation where you've raised litigation at past employers, and that will follow you around.
The point is, the worst possible situation to be in is that everyone knows you're narcoleptic and knows you're not choosy about raising legal action. No one will touch you. The best option seems to be to conceal it and part ways as amicably as possible.
I know a lady who runs a hospital pharmacy. She was telling me that one of her employees has narcolepsy, and about the accomodations they made. It wasn't even that much - supervisors asking the employee if they needed to get up and walk around, and not being surprised if the worker was asleep at their desk.
It's also, if I understand correctly, kind of legally required that they make "reasonable" accomodations. This sounded pretty reasonable to me - they didn't even have to buy any equipment.
Ultimately, my solution was remote work. Interestingly this also solved the problem of high cost of living on the west coast (moved to the Midwest). It also helps distribute economic and social influence across the whole of the country instead of densely packing it into a few privileged areas.
> Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.
> Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
So don't give drug tests?
> Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.
The thing about manufacturing jobs is that they often involve operating heavy machinery. Drug use and intoxication drastically increases the chance of death or dismemberment - for the inebriated, or often, others around them.
As a pilot, I seriously don’t care if you show up to work high or not - unless you’re doing maintenance on the jet I’m supposed to fly.
Drug tests don't test for intoxication. They just test test for something that correlates somewhat with having been intoxicated sometime in the recent past.
Better is to use impairment testing. An impairment test is a test of cognitive function, alertness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and similar objective things that actually correlate well with how well you can do your job now, instead of sometime in the past.
On top of that, impairment testing can catch when you are impaired for reasons OTHER than intoxication. If your aircraft mechanic is not fit to do maintenance on your jet that morning because last night he found his wife sleeping with his best friend, they argued all night, and she announced that morning she is getting a divorce, leaving him a tired, emotional wreck who will make mistakes left and right at work...an impairment test can catch it. A drug test cannot.
In addition, generally there is lag between drug testing and results. Impairment testing can be quick (a few minutes) and cheap so that you can do it to every employee, every day at the start of their shift.
Exactly this. Pot is probably the most common and it stays in your system for 30 days after use (probably the longest that is tested). Essentially the screen will fail a guy who smoked pot two weeks ago, but pass a guy who shot up heroin all last week. Like the polygraph test, they are deeply flawed, in this case, for testing for intoxication.
Also, imagine if drug tests failed an applicant for having a beer in the last 30 days. Like it or not, pot is replacing beer for a large portion of Americans, time to adapt.
That sounds like a much better idea; any reason this hasn't caught on as a replacement for drug testing? It opens up for a lot of good workers who'd otherwise be rejected, and it is more robust against the thing you actually care about preventing.
But what would it have to be about, for employers to consistently turn down an approach that gets them access to a bigger class of labor and better filtering for safety?
Good question, and worth investigation. While you do, please keep in mind that employers are not monolithic, but made up of lots of different humans with their own agendas. (And lots of those agendas include the objective of "cover your ass".)
There's a great book about (what might be) the general problem here: that there are many factors that keep us at a bad equilibrium, where a bunch of people would have to change at once to accomplish anything.
Here, I think it's something like, "insurers move very slowly to new systems, and until this new testing has a lot of data behind it, they won't adjust premium. to account for it being better. Furthermore, juries will continue to give punishingly big damage awards for using it, on the mistaken believe that a toker shouldn't be on the job even if he wasn't high and passed the reaction test."
My grandpa took a part time job after retiring after 30 years at chevron/ortho. Failed his drug test. Turns out, they lost the sample, and in the testing companies mind, he couldn't be proven to pass, so he failed.
But it's the best signal we've got. Ignore it at your peril. Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
Except that's not true. We can actually test for sobriety. And by doing drug testing instead, we're actually using a worse signal in place of a better signal!
> Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
I'm not really sure if there's more than a vague analogy connecting Diamond's hypotheses to drug testing policy. And I don't find that exceptionally vague analogy to be compelling evidence. (And I'm one of those people who doesn't even buy a lot of Diamond's work anyways; in fact, I think I'm in good company on this one among the sober, grown-up anthropologists out there...)
My weathered experience tells me to prefer hard data over vague analogies to pop science writers who are themselves known more for their well-written vague analogies than their well-researched hard science :-)
I'm not suggesting you do (although I know others on this thread are suggesting that).
Administer sobriety tests the same way you currently administer drug tests -- upon application, and randomly. They're a lot cheaper so you can actually get more data for less $/time.
Drug test measure whether you smoked weed anytime last weeks, up to three months if I recall right. It has little to do with whether you are high first day on the job. It has more to do with drug war then with incidents.
It's basically only about weed; pretty much all other "hard drugs" (cocaine, meth, etc) flush out of your system within hours to a few days (assuming you can abstain that long - which isn't a given depending on how far into them you are), while THC and such from weed hang around in the body for about a month (30 days or so), and as you noted - up to 3 months (for a hair sample test).
So you could smoke a joint today (ok, maybe a bit more than a joint), and nothing more - and three months later they take a hair sample and find you a dirty guilty pot smoker. Yer fired! Or not hired in the first place.
Even in the best case scenario, you have to abstain for 30 days; so if you're a regular user of weed, and you want to change jobs, you'll have to plan ahead, or just be out of work for 30 days while you let it get out of your system. Doable if you have savings, I suppose.
As far as "random drug testing", I honestly think its more of a threat to instill fear, than something actually done. Drug testing isn't cheap, and a true random test would test all employees, but due to the expense, only the larger companies could conceivably do it. Smaller organizations would tend to only do testing "after the fact" or if there is credible reason to believe that a certain person is having issues (visibly impaired or something) - then a "targeted test" under the guise of a random test can be done.
Even then, such a test might only be correlative, and not indicate the true cause; someone might, for instance, cause an accident or such due to a heated argument they had just before the incident with a coworker, but they get tested and fail the test because of a party they went to a couple weeks before where they smoked some weed.
No it isn't. You've probably been seen and healed by a great doctor that smokes or has smoked weed recently. There is a good chance your financial advisor, lawyer and/or boss smokes or has smoked weed recently. Most professionals who do certainly don't boast about it with the witch hunting Puritan culture in the US, but there are a lot of them out there, and you've probably never noticed because it's not noticeable.
So if there was a test that could tell if you've eaten chocolate in the last 30 days, then you required applicants to not eat chocolate ever, passing that would be an indicator of a good employee?
Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.
I think it odd that the strongest opposition to testing is from people who clearly don't smoke.
Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
Its not a simple binary "have you been within 10 meters of the devils weed in the past month T/F" question.
To fail a test after 30 days of normal peeing takes something like weeks of Cheech and Chong 2.0 behavior to build up the level of metabolites in the body. There's a whole spectrum of use vs time required to test clean. A buzz a couple days ago will not fail a test. Wake and bake the morning of the test is a fail. The kind of person dumb enough to wake and bake the morning of a pee test is not the kind of person I'd want on a jobsite.
There's also the question of motivation. There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC and there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try.
Responsible intelligent users will not have trouble passing a test. Irresponsible or unintelligent users are doomed, but those are the kind of people that cause workplace fatalities anyway, so no real loss.
This is all aside from unemployment fraud type stuff.
Your first use will usually stay in your system for 5-8 days
If you use cannabis 2-4 times per week and then stop, you’ll test positive for 11-18 days
If you smoke 5-6 times per week, it’ll stay in your urine for 33-48 days
For Medical cannabis patients and people in the #smokeweedeveryday club,
THC-COOH will stay in your urine for 49-63 days
Marijuana, Single Use in urine wears off after 1-7+ days. So no, it is not just that the person baked in the morning. Regular usage, 7-100 days and that is not "going completely stoned every day at that period".
"There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC"
Frankly, there is level of education and willingness to study I don't expect from dude hired for simple construction or retail job and you are quite getting there. For the record, I know construction workers.
"there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try."
I mean, why would he wasted $10 on that? Cheaper to do the test and if you fail then look for job elsewhere. Claim here is that now is a good time for blue collar workers so presumably they can try elsewhere. And maybe they will pee enough from beer they drink more then they smoke in the meantime, so they will pass without really knowing why.
"Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline."
Self introspection and awareness? Yep, there is no difference between that and hypothetical chocolate or sex tests.
I used to approach drug tests with this mentality, but legalization and decriminalization across various states will muddy the picture. There will be a lot more everyday partakers as it starts being sold in safe storefronts, in forms that don't stink or make you hack a lung (cute vaporizer pens, delicious edibles). There will be a lot of middle class, white-collar people that prefer a "feel good" gummy bear after work over a beer.
At that point (and a lot of states are already there!), "Jeez, just don't smoke for a few days" doesn't cut it - 30 days is probably a safe guideline. When it comes to this for a lot of fine prospective employees, I would think it's time to reconsider the value of these tests as a proxy for introspection/awareness/intelligence.
> Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
If that was true it would be more efficient to design a test (assuming such a test is currently possible) to measure self-introspection, awareness, intelligence, and discipline. Oh, wait -- don't many people claim an undergraduate degree is also a signal for those things?
Yeah because you don't have to smoke pot to understand bodily autonomy, you just have to treat people with respect. If you've gotten drunk this month you don't deserve the job you have is basically what you're saying.
So a young person decides to sort themselves out, stops smoking and goes job hunting. They're ready to go! And then? What, wait around for a month with nothing to do? Eventually get bored, hang around with their mates and boom, cycle repeats.
Do you really think that's an appropriate job requirement? Should we also have fasting requirements for our jobs? For context I don't smoke, but I'm also not deluded enough to think that we should be testing arbitrary datapoints about their personal life. If they can do the job, they should get the job, and if they can't then they shouldn't. If you aren't hiring capable workers because of puritanical ideals you're wasting money.
Drug tests are completely arbitrary, unrelated to job performance, and employers who use those drug tests don't deserve any sympathy when it comes to labor shortage.
Meh. You have to write down any drug use on your application, and they will most likely ask you about that in the poly. The poly is what busts a lot of people.
It's actually ok to have used drugs in the past, you just have to be honest about it and write a letter saying something about not doing so moving forward (an acquaintance of mine had to do this... not sure what the specifics were).
Once people are have a clearance, most of the tests are decidedly not random. They can be requested for erratic behavior at work (e.g., passing out), but they are especially common for people who are formally busted somehow for illegal drug and/or alcohol abuse. Get a DUI, yeah, you're going to be "randomly" chosen for a test more often than anyone else you know.
If you look at the system holistically with regards to drug testing for folks with clearances, most people would say that the implementation is fairly reasonable. The rules seem incredibly draconian on the surface, but the actual enforcement is decidedly less so.
As I understand it practice the rules can be fairly flexible.
I have also heard they mostly stopped drug testing people as they where having difficulty finding enough competent, honest, non-drug users in technical fields. Or possibly more importantly they did not want discrete drug use to be a means of blackmailing someone.
PS: I can only recommend someone either answers all questions accurately and only those specific questions asked, or discreetly declines an investigation and looks for another line of work.
I know you can get a Secret and I have heard you can get a Top Secret depending on the agency. Though some agencies give random drug tests to people with Top Secret clearances and many contractors also have their own testing policy.
They do however ask about drug usage both on the application and when doing their investigation.
Id be surprised for TS I looked at a job at Hanslope Park which would have required DV (TS) clearance and you had to have drug tests. Didn't get a second interview was well over qualified - but one has to keep the DHSS happy or id lose my nugatory benefits.
Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test for alertness, judgment, and reflexes at the start of each shift?
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.
How exactly would an automated sobriety test make use of a qualitative metric?
Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses.
That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.
Exactly. The only downside I imagine is that it could give false-positives to retarded people. Reaction speed is pretty well correlated with intelligence.
I suppose the system could compare your current score with your baseline / sober scores. Or, mentally slow people would simply have less tolerance for being fucked up at work.
That could be fought while there is little leeway in terms of fighting "my training and 15 years of experience allowed me to determine that the subject was impaired".
No one is required to give you a job. The increased cost to do that everyday is not worth it to the company if they can weed out possible irresponsible workers from a drug test. It’s work, not a babysitter.
All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.
This whole tree of comments is a response to someone complaining that it's hard for a company to find workers. Nobody's saying that company is required to hire anyone - we are just making suggestions to help them with their problem.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
I think you underestimate the cost differential between contracting with a lab to drug-test your employees on an ongoing basis, and with hiring a software developer once to make a rudimentary video game that positively correlates a passing score with operating heavy industrial equipment safely for the next 8 hours.
Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing.
It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day.
It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.
Considering that drug tests for operators of heavy machinery are mostly about legal liability, has a system like you propose ever been tested in front of a jury?
You would have to ask a lawyer that specializes in corporate ass-covering. I'm more interested in practical solutions that result in actual safety improvements.
I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.
If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.
A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.
Right... but this thread is about employers complaining that they can't find qualified applicants. They can't have it both ways. If they want to continue to be picky, and carry on with the "No one owes you a job" bs, then they shouldn't be taken seriously when they complain about not being able to find people.
Other than being extremely complicated to setup, has the ability for people to socially engineer themselves out of it and costing 1 hour of work per day per person yea you could do this .
> I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.
I'm not sure exactly what industry the original poster was referring to, but broadly my experience has been that there are many people who are just unreliable. I worked in retail a few years ago, and it was incredible. People just don't show up, or show up so intoxicated from the night before that they're not actually capable of doing their job.
Now, as a developer, I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has shown up too hungover to work, and I can tell you exactly (0) the number of times someone has just flat out failed to show up when they were supposed to be working.
> So don't give drug tests?
For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.
> Try paying more?
Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
> People just don't show up, or show up so intoxicated from the night before that they're not actually capable of doing their job... Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
Anecdotally, I know several people who worked retail throughout college and showed up super hung-over basically every weekend, but who are now extremely responsible professionals in software, medicine, etc.
Again, I think salary and a sense of career prospects / something worthwhile to lose are far more important than individual proclivities or responsibility.
People know their retail jobs are bullshit, dead-end positions. There's nothing to lose and 10 more identical jobs waiting for them on the market.
> For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.
> Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
But in terms of initial applicants, who may not be as flaky, advertising higher starting salary may bump up the non-flakiness of people showing up for an interview.
Right, people can be flaky, and those that are flaky will continue to be flaky, regardless of the amount paid. But paying more can attract more of the people who aren't flaky.
Those who are good employees are already employed, and probably at a decent compensation level. Whenever this topic comes up, I always ask, "What compelling reason are you giving for people to come work for you?" I never get a satisfactory answer, usually because the people know that they have nothing compelling over the next job.
While I agree that drug tests are a scam as a white collar worker, I do think they're necessary from a liability perspective if you're in construction, manufacturing, or driving a company vehicle.
I fully support the use of recreational drugs on someone's own time, but you have to weed out (forgive the pun) those who are under the influence when loss of life or limb is a risk.
I would be okay with drug tests that didn't fail you for weed. That can show up on a test weeks after it's been consumed. The drugs that would actually significantly impair you (alcohol, opiates) clear out of your system in hours/days.
There are drug testing companies that exist solely to farm out the work to a lab and remove any marijuana hits from the results. Some companies in places where weed is legal use these.
I imagine that there is probably an issue with these workers making half of what software engineers make, but with higher expectation of no drug use. I'd imagine recreational drug use is even greater in lower-waged workers.
Culturally, recreational drug use isn't that big of a deal, at least to millennials. You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.
> You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.
The problem is one of information from the POV of the employer: they are ultimately responsible for what the worker does on the job.
Even if P(no problem | drug use) = 0.99, the amount of negligent liability they will incur if an accident does occur, the person was intoxicated, and the employer could have checked for drugs, but didn't, is probably so high that they can't take that route.
At the very least, it'd be worth contacting the noshows and finding out the reasons, encouraging them to be honest. Work out what it might be -
- got another job but forgot to tell you
- changed my mind
- just too tired or busy
- didn't think I had a real chance, so I didn't bother
- too nervous about the interview
It's almost as if extended poverty has ruined people's ability to function in a job market that wasn't there for them sooner. Poverty is called a trap for a reason. It's a self-reinforcing cycle as much as it's an income bracket.
They say "There are no bad dogs, just bad owners." I think the problems are cultural.
(a) Two working parents or a single parent family may result in children "being raised by wolves" to some extent. These are good parents/people but child rearing is a time intensive business.
(b) Lack of jobs for young people. In my neighborhood, a lot of lawn mowing jobs are done by services instead of the neighborhood kid. The "entry level" jobs are often taken by older people who can't afford to retire.
(c) Single child families where parents spoil their children resulting in a sort of learned helplessness. I can't think of anyone of my friends children that mows their parents lawn of shovels the driveway. The dad or mows the lawn and snow blows the driveway. My brothers kids are the exception.
(d) Lack of exposure to real world failure or responsibilities. How many parents are going to let their kids walk to school never mind use a chainsaw or go hunting by themselves?
That's a good list...a lot of it rings true, especially point B. The chances for me to work when I was young were everywhere. I did mow lawns, I raked leaves, painted houses, and every other odd job that a 13 year old would be allowed to do.
Now I imagine explaining to my friends or wife that I hired a 13 year old to paint our house. With 0/0 stars on google, angies list, etc. It's hard for young people to "break in" to something as mundane as yard work and painting.
It's funny- I was an unlicensed grey market house painter for a while in college. I booked most of my jobs while standing on top of a ladder, where somebody would stroll up asking me if I'd do their house next.
Yep. When I was a teenager, I had a job delivering newspapers. I had to get up and out very early in the morning, even in bad weather, and deliver papers on my bike, and collect the payments for them in the evening.
Nowadays, far fewer people get newspapers, and the newspaper deliver jobs are looking for someone with a car. And I assume they pay for them online.
I think it's both the dog and the owner and our culture that looks down on the trades, or blue collar work. Kids are being raised and taught to work hard so they can avoid working with their hands. Trade jobs are almost seen as a punishment and schools do nothing but funnel all students into the college pipeline.
In the vision of life that is projected for students, the trades do not find themselves anywhere in that vision. It should come as no surprise that we have a shortage right now, it should only surprise us that it's not worse. Immigrant labor has long hidden the fact that American's are raising their kids to avoid the trades, and we will all pay the price for it.
Kids don't walk to school in many modern neighborhoods because they're not designed to be safe for walking, sliced through by wide high-speed arterials that encourage driving at dangerous speeds. I grew up in a 1900-1920s neighborhood and most kids walked to school.
For my first job out of highschool I applied to over 40 locations, and finally got an unpaid job tips only as a rickshaw driver. I'm pretty sure it was illegal for them to do that, but I also really needed a job. For context I'm 28 and live in the american south east.
You are right that this is a problem with personal responsibility.
Your parent comment is also right that this lack of personal responsibility is cultivated or exacerbated by poverty. Personal responsibility is as much a skill as it is a trait. Therefore, if one has neither work experience nor a role model for responsibility, one tends not to have good work ethics.
IMO, the solution is thus both to praise personal work ethics and to break the trap through social programs at the same time.
Wouldn't surprise me if this was achieved through apps as much as anything else in the future. Imagine an Uber-style app for odd jobs (lawns, etc) that focused on teen/young workers. The app could have gamification or reminders that if you commit to a job, you go hard and complete it well. If you don't have the energy or ability to keep performing jobs to that level, then take on fewer jobs or use a different app.
Sure, but personal responsibility is learned/cultural. It could take a while for people to break the cycle when they grew up seeing their parents make poor decisions, who also grew up seeing their own parents make poor decisions, etc. Not saying that all poverty is a result of poor decisions but that the two feed on each other
They do--but this (a difficulty in getting lower-paid workers to even show up) is a new phenomenon. We've always had lower-paid workers and poverty, but something else has changed.
My concern is that the "something else" might be counter-effective but well-intentioned policies intended to help.
Personally I don't think we should be incentivizing people to show up to work under threat of homelessness/starvation like we did in the past, even if it may be more effective. If people want to live their lives in the "comfort" of SNAP and SSI, I'm personally ok with it. The market will adjust and maybe those blue collar jobs will begin paying even more (or people will adapt)
Nobody questions your personal ability to voluntarily provide for them, though.
The question is how much the rest of us are involuntarily having to provide for them, and more relevantly, whether or not society is even really being improved if the result is an increasing number of people so unable / unwilling to contribute to society that they can't even be bothered to show up for an interview.
It is very easy to spend other people's money supporting people perceived as downtrodden. It just might not be the solution proponents think it is.
Well ok, but that's up to our votes to decide. You may vote one way and I will vote my way. If you don't want to provide for these people under these circumstances, vote for someone who will roll back welfare. The system wouldn't work if taxes were voluntary (how many people were poor before welfare when charity was the only way people got help?) so I see no moral hazard in coercing people who don't want to support the poor to do so
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome".
I see no moral hazard in coercing people
and that's the problem. Coercion is inherently immoral as it denies agency, which is the very essence of humanity. Agency / self-control is the fundamental difference between being a human being, and being a piece of property.
I used coercion because I knew that was how libertarians/other people who generally don't agree with me see it. I actually see it in the following way: the world is not a perfect free market, and in many cases letting a free market run its course results in the poor/disabled/children of bad parents needlessly being hurt or dying. I think its more just to pay to feed 20 poor people than to let 1 die due to poverty. Its not like this imposes some seriously constrained living conditions on everybody. I earn income in the highest nominal tax bracket and nobody I know making this much, including myself, is hurting because of our current system
There's also the argument that the money you own isn't truly yours. It's the product of a large amount of investment on behalf of your parents (which varies for everybody) and the government in terms of education (of you and everyone else to create an economy where you're able to perform your current job) and infrastructure, with the end result of you being able to perform your job. So its taxation is not theft because you do owe that money back to the rest of society. I think preventing hunger/homelessness is in general a good way to spend that money
Coercion isn't immoral any more than breathing is immoral. It's been a part of the human condition since before we were human.
Living in groups--and people are very much social creatures--means there are rules you follow that you didn't necessarily decide on, or ultimately you get kicked out of the group and probably don't continue your genetic line.
Left unqualified, that's kind of a silly claim to make--it sounds good to some but doesn't really get us anywhere.
We don't know what the circumstances of the interview were, though. It easily could be a minimum wage job, and the other people just found something else.
In those other cases, was the offering better than other companies in the area? Was there a compelling reason to choose that company over the others, and yet a majority of applicants still didn't show up to interviews?
This is what's known as a collective action problem. I don't have the answers, and the few people who've actually tried solving it haven't had much luck.
No, this is what happens when employers show their workers absolutely no loyalty over decades. If people have no reason to care about their job, they won't care about it. The labor market is tight enough so that they can't just fire everyone who behaves like that, otherwise everyone would quit.
That’s a factor, but the collective dumbing down is as well. We now have a nearly feral workforce and body politic, because contrary to expectations, they’re unpredictable and hard to control.
Graduation rates are are higher than ever. Over 30% of people have Bachelors degrees or higher. Literacy rates are higher than they ever have been.
Our people aren't dumber, they just realize that when the business managers and owners are making millions while they don't get wage increases above inflation, they have no incentive to care.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, especially on divisive topics? We eventually ban accounts that do this repeatedly and we've had to ask you before.
