> a few good auto-glass installers, no experience necessary
and,
> commissioned a study of company shortages. Energy, water, and land came up, but the No. 1 answer around the world was skilled labor
Perhaps no experience is necessary for the auto-glass gig, but the metal stamping and machining? Are these all trades one can pick up on the job, by walking in from the street? Because if so, potential workers are leaving money on the table.
More likely, they have stopped looking for work altogether. Unemployment is often discussed, but the Labor Participation Rate is less so, which fell greatly [1] after 2008.
The anecdote at the beginning of news articles is often meaningless, but people like hearing specific stories rather then trends in graphs so it's fairly de rigueur.
For a machinist, generally not, as there is usually a formal training program, either company based or through community colleges. Though an enthusiastic person with good technical aptitude could definetly pick it up via on the job training.
Draw that graph back further before 2006 and you'll see that labor participation was lower from 1948-1984, almost 40 years. It appears to have peaked between 1990 and 2008, but even today it's not quite as low as it was during a time of pretty solid prosperity (50s and 60s).
Even today's rate is only 3% or so lower than the 2006 rate, so if you add it to the unemployment rate it's still not very bad.
Just another perspective on this as it seems to be something that comes up over and over in these discussions.
I assume the low rate from 1948-84 was due to 1 person working in a married household. Then it increased as both persons worked to maintain middle class, followed by recession. So low labor participation with high prosperity back then, and low participation with low prosperity now.
I feel like I've seen a lot of articles about people who can't find jobs or who are worried about their increasingly-outdated jobs going away in the short term. This article says we also have a lot of jobs that can't find people. What's the missing piece? Re-training? What does that actually look like for a 30- or 40-year-old person who has a family to support and doesn't much care for government handouts?
I'm hypothesizing, but I imagine a lot of it has to do with geographical mismatch. How many auto-glass installers do you need in Elkhart, Indiana [1]? Or Casper, Wyoming, or Lafayette, Louisiana?
EDIT: to expand on my point, in metropolitan areas that are experiencing a population boom, demand creates opportunities for businesses, and therefore opportunities for prospective workers. It's a virtuous cycle. Meanwhile, a large employer's departure in established areas will leave behind skilled talent, but some of those people will depart and disperse, making the area less attractive for new job creation in related fields.
Funny you mention Elkhart because I live right next door.
Their main industry is RV manufacture. When the economy is rocking, RV sales go up, the Elkhart has a big lack of workers. When the economy is rubbish, they all get laid off and move elsewhere.
The metro area here has over 550,000 people. Not New York City, bit big enough that there SHOULD be enough glass installers, or at least a pool to train enough glass installers form.
It is the water getting into chips and micro-cracks in the glass. Not instantly breaking, but growing into cracks over the years from freeze thaw cycles.
IME, they dont usually train older people. Would be applicants are steered towards private trade schools for training. There is no option for apprenticeships.
It's speculation, but my take would be that there are two missing pieces:
1) Inadequate pay.
2) Unwillingness to train.
If you don't have the exact skills that the company wants, they won't hire you. But they will complain that they can't find anyone even though they are really only offering unskilled level wages.
If you're 30/40, odds are you have a family, roots somewhere, and maybe a mortgage. Your ability/willingness to move - especially after being out of work for a while - is near zero.
> If you're 30/40, odds are you have a family, roots somewhere, and maybe a mortgage. Your ability/willingness to move - especially after being out of work for a while - is near zero.
This is also true for someone like me as a recent grad with an older vehicle, a student loan to pay off, and lack of sufficient savings to move too far away from my hometown. One of the large issues of the education crisis that I don't hear being discussed is that a lot of students, like myself, often spend literally everything we have to get the degree after constantly hearing about success story after success story in the K-12 system. In these cases, it is implied that college is the only way to get ahead in life and we need to get there by any means necessary.
I mean, how the hell am I supposed to magically relocate halfway across the country (or even commute >50 miles away from my house on a daily basis) when the infrastructure doesn't exist and/or no benefits are offered besides "you should be glad that we're even paying you"?
But hey, I'm just a whiny millennial brat who should be glad that spanking/belt whipping is illegal.
One important thing to add to this, is that in the US, halfway across the country is somewhere around 2,000 miles, which can easily result in $2-3000 in moving costs alone. I just bring this up since I had a conversation about a very similar topic with a friend in the UK - where halfway across the country can mean a leisurely 4 hour drive.
1) is also connected to 2) - you can't effectively train yourself in a new field if you spend 8 (more likely 10-12) hours / day earning money just to feed yourself and your family.
There is no missing piece, because the first part of your statement isn't backed by fact. There's not a big dark pool of people who can't find jobs. The second part of your first sentence is maybe true, but maybe not. In surveys of Americans most people feel positive about their economic circumstances, at every level of income. 75-80% of Americans report they feel their job is secure[1].
Expand the graph back to 1948, where it starts, and you'll see labor participation is higher now than it was from 1948-1984. So it's not that simple, unfortunately.
That process runs both ways. When the economy is doing better, labor participation can go down due to incomes going up. The grandparent pinned the qualitative judgement "permanently discouraged" upon this graph, but that's just one way to read it.
If we're generous and say that the auto-glass installer job pays a bonus of $10,000 a year that leaves $60,000 earned at $12/hour ... which is about 96 hours a week. I can think of plenty of reasons why you'd have trouble finding people to do that job.
Or a realistic interpretation of what was intended by having content after "starts at $12 hour" would be that they demonstrated they could both do the work and demonstrate customer service skills, and began earning more like $25/hour to get to that "up to 70k/year" more easily.
I see that they have to do that as a moral failing of capitalism, both that public schooling is insufficiently good for their children and that a worker's base wage is insufficient to provide for that worker's child's education.
I mean your child gets an education either way, its do you get top 5% private school or public school? You can't give everyone free access to a top private school, or it is no longer a top by definition ;)
I'm always baffled by the people in these articles. From the anecdote at the beginning: he's having trouble hiring people for $12/hour (up to $70K/year with bonuses, etc).
I am also having trouble hiring people: I need a senior software engineer. Pay is $12/hour. It's taking me a long time to find workers. I guess people are just lazy and don't want to work.
Yeah, the journos who are writing big articles about big trends always seem to want to anchor them with anecdata from the 2 local guys they talked to, as if that actually sheds light on the situation. Usually it just confirms whatever narrative their story is pushing.
I don't know what's a fair price in every area of the country for all of these jobs, so beats me if $12 is good or bad, but beyond this one anecdote, people have been saying for years that there was a shortage of skilled labor in the country. So aside from whether this one guy is paying fairly or not, it does appear to be a real issue.
People relate much more to anecdotal examples than statistics. A good journalist for these types of stories has hard data underlying their premise and usually a good in-person interview or two to put a human face on it.
Agreed, people relating to them is why they do it, no question.
It's just that engineers and scientists are typically trained to know that anecdata is a very poor way to reason about the world, it consistently leads you into the wrong conclusion, making you feel like you have support for a fact when you actually don't.
If the good journalist has hard underlying data, I would not at all begrudge them the anecdotes, and yet I'd still like to see their data thank you very much.
It doesn't really matter if $12/hour is good or bad. If you're having trouble finding new workers, you're going to have to poach from the existing labor pool (aka from your competition) with higher wages and better benefits. If you can't pay the same wage as your competition because your business is swimming in overhead costs, then you will soon go out of business in favor of your more efficient competition. I believe this is supposed to be the good bit of the capitalist system.
> I don't know what's a fair price in every area of the country for all of these jobs, so beats me if $12 is good or bad, but beyond this one anecdote, people have been saying for years that there was a shortage of skilled labor in the country. So aside from whether this one guy is paying fairly or not, it does appear to be a real issue.
If I say something and I make $N per year for believing that.
Why would they stop saying it?
The truth is, the "shortage" is largely in the poor quality of hiring screens and and a desire to pay the real market rate (rather than the lowest # they can hire the bare minimum of workers to function and work them 50 hours a week).
If a shortage genuinely existed, you would see substantial wage growth.
We don't have such wage growth.
-------
Similarly, when labor organizations get too powerful you see the opposite effect that creates an artificial shortage:
> The rapid expansion in medical education was halted twenty years after it started as researchers,
policymakers, and the educational community reassessed the need for further growth. This change
recognized that the doubling of medical school graduates would lead to a growing supply for at least 35
years. In 1980, the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee (GMENAC) reported
(based upon the number of physicians needed to provide “necessary and appropriate” services) that a
surplus of 70,000 physicians would be likely by the year 2000.20 With the promotion of tightly
controlled managed care in the early 1990s, many groups reaffirmed the belief that the nation was facing
a surplus. The national Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME),21 the National Academy of
Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM), the Pew Health Professions Commission,22 the AAMC,23 the
AMA24 and other national physician associations expressed concerns about an impending potential
surplus of physicians.
> The medical education and training community responded to these recommendations. The number of
graduates from U.S. medical schools remained virtually unchanged between 1980 and 2005. Despite this
stagnation in medical school enrollment, the doubling of medical school enrollment during the 1960s
and 1970s led to a steady stream of new physicians entering the workforce at a rate greater than those
leaving the field. Consequently, the ratio of physicians to population increased steadily from 1980
onward. However, few health policy experts in the year 2000 would have argued that this constituted a
surplus of physicians, even though this number grew from 202 per 100,000 in 1980 to 276 per 100,000
in 2000. 29 Bureau of Health Professions projections had estimated that physician demand - not a
defined need - would increase over time. In fact, per capita utilization of medical services did rise as
they had suggested it would.30 Other analyses had assumed major cost and utilization controls in health
care.31
> Washington, D.C., April 5, 2016—Under every combination of scenarios modeled, the United States will face a shortage of physicians over the next decade, according to a physician workforce report released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). The projections show a shortage ranging between 61,700 and 94,700, with a significant shortage showing among many surgical specialties.
So this job pays $12/hr. Which is $1,555.05/month after tax, assuming 40hr work week. And the average 1-bed apartment rents in North Charleston, SC is roughly $1100/month (according to Zillow), leaving the employee $450/month to cover all food + medical + debt + transit + utilities and any other expenses.
I can't imagine why no one is taking the position. It sounds like a fulfilling opportunity to install auto glass while living on the poverty line.
It's like employers don't even attempt to think about anything from the employee's perspective -- even after they've struggled to fill their own positions. "Cheap business owners" couldn't be a more accurate byline.
That's the Fordist school of thought, which is not universally accepted. Labor unions and employee protections have been weakened to the point that the working class has the choice to either work for subsistence wages or die of starvation/exposure.
>It's like employers don't even attempt to think about anything from the employee's perspective -- even after they've struggled to fill their own positions. "Cheap business owners" couldn't be a more accurate byline.
Or maybe the job their trying to fill isn't worth that much to them (the employers, that is)?
As an example, let's take a speech-writer for a presidential candidate.
Company X (let's say it has 100 billion in the bank) wants a website, so it looks for an SEO firm, but it's cheap and not interested in investing in the website.
X doesn't get skilled SEO consultants.
X now has three choices - get minimum quality workers, drop the website project or pay more for better workers.
Obviously, workers would prefer if X choses 3, but there are times when it just doesn't make sense to do so (or the company doesn't _think_ it needs to do so, and goes out of business):
What if a company has a small audience comprised of people who don't find things online.
Let's say the company runs a program only senators would use. That's a hundred person market which practically requires personal connection to their staff to make a deal.
Hiring someone for $250,000 website is just not worth it.
Practically, in a capitalist environment, workers are "contractors" selling themselves.
The same way I would not pay for a big-iron computer when all I need is a laptop, companies don't want to pay $200,000 when they can find someone for less.
>Or maybe the job their trying to fill isn't worth that much to them (the employers, that is)?
Just imagine the businesses that suddenly become profitable if employers could provide nothing beyond room and board and employees weren't allowed to quit!
$12 per hour is somewhat less than the median personal income in the US [1], so I would not expect the auto glass worker to pay median rent. There may also be an option to live in a cheaper area outside North Charleston.
I agree it's not a fulfilling job, but I wouldn't characterise it as "living on the poverty line". The job pays $24,000 per year but for a single person the official poverty line is $11,770 [2].
Yeah, and imagine what it's like to make less than $12k and live near any halfway decent city (in economic terms). 4 people to a studio apartment situations are due to stuff like this.
Personally, I'm not sure I'd like to live in a 1 BR apartment where the cost was around half[0] the going rate. Something would have to justify the lower cost - poor condition, a poor neighborhood, a large commute...
[0] Based on the recommendation your housing cost you around 30% of your gross income.
North Charleston isn't exactly a large metropolis with a high cost of living. $12 isn't terrible for an job with almost no requirement except a warm body and two arms.
And you're exactly right, but these days, that now works two ways. What I mean by this: Previously, economic theory theorized that people would move to where the jobs are. These days, it looks like more and more millennial (and read more educated, more sociopolitical advantaged specifically) want to move to a place they would like to live, and then find a job there.
Cities are becoming larger, small towns are disappearing. Agglomeration is playing an ever larger role in where people live and work. People are tending to cities which have more opportunities, entertainment, etc.
So my point is this, why would you want to live in North Charleston? Of course as I alluded too in my brief definition of advantaged millennial, not everyone has the choice/ability to move to wherever they want. But given that choice, why not move to another larger city where you have more options for better jobs with better pay?
I think in some places, even thouguh cost of living is low, employers will need to sometimes pay more to attract the talent they need, and not just say, "cost of livng is low, live with the $12/hr wage and like it." But of course, that's how capitalism is supposed to work. If you can't find employees, it simply means you're not paying enough. Literally Economics 101.
Granted, all of the above argument is a bit simple, and there's a lot of nuance involved in reality. Especially when it comes to peoples decision making about what job they choose and where they live. I also have little evidence to support my contention about less desirable places to live meaning higher wages, but it applies to jobs, so I don't see how it won't apply to places in the near future (well I do, it may never happen, but I think it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on).
Exactly! The article starts off trying to sell you on $12/hr. You can make $12/hr at much easier, less demanding jobs. They try and hold that carrot over your head of eventually making $70k, but even that isn't all that great, and how long before you get there?
I agree with the article in that there are plenty of jobs out there. Just not good paying jobs.
There is not really a talent shortage. Instead there is employers who pay good salaries shortage.
You're missing the point. The thesis of the article is that "There are Plenty of Jobs Out There" and people are happily working at them.
The article isn't claiming people are lazy and don't want to work. It's claiming that plenty of jobs exist and people are already working at them. It's also claiming that if you really are having a hard time finding one, there are plenty of people willing to hire you at a wage possibly lower than you might desire.
Exactly, raise it to $20/hour to start and he'll have no trouble. Also, there is probably only 1 job in that company that can pay $70K (~$35/hour) + bonus. They'd be better off at $12/hour to work at a restaurant since they can eat free food to offset food costs. My guess is that for most areas the highly skilled glass installer has to cap out at more like $25/hour and that is someone who is also filling the role of training new hires, etc. Even so, there are one of these for every 4 "grunts" at $12/hour at the same company.
As someone else has already said, the biggest shortage is skilled labor, not unskilled.
Trouble is, it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate, and it's unwise to train someone when they could get poached by the next company not willing to shell out for training.
I also wonder how sticky their wages are. If a business can endure not filling a position until they can find their person willing to work for peanuts, why offer more? It's amazing how little bargaining power workers have even in this extremely tight labor environment.
I'd be shocked if the Republicans that now control most layers of government will be willing to step in and help this situation, and I doubt they'd know what to do to help even if they were willing.
Does anyone here know a good way out of this situation?
There's no fast way out of the situation. Training and education is ultimately the answer, but to fill today's jobs, that needed to happen 2-4 years ago. So today, I think we're up a creek in any case.
Still, best get to training and educating people ASAP, because 2 years from now is coming sooner than most people think. We could complain about how much it costs to do this, or we could just shut up, do it, and then enjoy the sweet, sweet tax dollars that those high educated, high earning workers throw off.
The article talks a lot about under-investment in infrastructure like roads and bridges. I guess I'm making the same argument in the end, I'm just pointing out that people are infrastructure, in that you can't do business without them, just like roads. So maybe we should invest in them.
Of course there is and at least some Republicans at least claim they're going to take it: slash immigration, lower the labour supply, raising its prices.
Yes, no matter how big or complex the problem, there will always be someone promising a quick and easy fix. And there will always be those in enough pain that they want to buy the quick fix.
I'm not a big fan of magic beans though, because I'm young enough I still have to live here for a long time, I'm not cashing out of this place next year. If the problem is not enough skilled workers, it would seem that lowering the labor supply is exactly the wrong thing to do.
People aren't stupid. They don't just want jobs; they want careers.
Training makes sense for a job that has a career path. If you learned to drive a road tractor, you started by working for a transport company until you save up enough to buy your own rig, then you were a contractor for one of those companies until you got an agent to get you the loads you wanted on the routes you liked. Maybe eventually you got off the road to work in the management office for a transport company. With automated trucks on the horizon, young folks are less likely to even bother learning how to drive such vehicles.
No one wants to be told that the skill they already spent half their lives honing will not carry them through to retirement.
Big companies have been dismantling careers and repackaging them as cheaper and more fungible jobs for decades now. There is no consideration given whatsoever to the fact that employees are people that cannot spring fully formed from Zeus's brow when the company calls, nor store themselves in a closet and turn themselves off until needed again.
If you won't pay for people to live their lives outside of your workplace, they won't waste any of their finite time in it.
It isn't just training. The company needs an ecosystem that moves humans from graduation to retirement. They don't have to own or control the whole thing, but all the pieces have to be there. And if a piece breaks, it has to be repaired or replaced to keep other parts healthy. That hasn't been happening since the 80s, so now there are huge, gaping holes in the career pipeline, and what companies remain are often parasites upon it rather than contributors to the ecosystem.
So, yeah, good luck finding someone to install your auto glass, buddy. All those kids know that you will never be paying that $70k/year (with bonuses!) you teased them with, because three years from now, you might just replace the guy you hired this year with yet another sucker at $12/hr. What happened to your previous glass guy? Did you promote him, or fire him?
Generally people don't give a shit whether you call it a job or a career as long as it helps them achieve their life goals.
The reality is that unless you're doing something related to IT or got a cushy management job through nepotism, or getting massively subsidized by your parents, you're unlikely to progress to major life goals, like house ownership and starting a family, both of which require the ability to save a decent portion of your paycheck.
People just want jobs that leave them with something after rent+food+healthcare and the reality is that the pool of these "good" jobs is shrinking by the year and requires multiple years of expensive education and at least above average intelligence, because you're competing globally against the upper middle classes of other countries as well.
I don't think people care what you call it, but the parent's point was that they care whether there's opportunity for advancement (internal or external).
> it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate
Few jobs disappear in a few years. A few decades, maybe. (Yeah, yeah, we'll have flying autonomous vehicles in 2020 putting all taxi drivers out of work.)
You are correct there is a shortage of skilled labor. Physicians, engineers, lawyers, accountants etc. have been and will continue to be in demand. Blue collar jobs too: mechanic, plumber, electrician, HVAC.
Sure, getting an psychology undergrad from a $40k/yr tuition school is a bad move, but there are plenty of reliably good moves out there.
The core problem here is that we can't adapt quickly enough to change. To ensure we can adapt quickly enough, we can either slow down change and make progress more difficult (which seems to be the popular sentiment), or we can make adaptation easier and faster.
When framed like that, IMO it's obvious--we need to focus on adaptability, not conservatism.
We are ineluctably bound by the laws of survival and natural selection, and if we can't sufficiently adapt to changes, then we will die (figuratively and literally).
But how? If it takes 4 months to train on a new CNC machine or 8 to learn the latest web design tools, how do we make people more adaptable?
There are certainly some jobs that are currently over trained, as evidenced by nurse practitioners taking over some common general practitioner roles. But I'm not convinced that's the situation in manufacturing.
I honestly don't know. I'm mainly concerned that it's not part of the conversation--the national conversation currently revolves around getting back lost jobs, or preventing jobs from being lost, instead of adapting to change.
Jobs will be lost, industries will die, money will shift--it's inevitable. How can we adapt? It's something I don't have a good answer for, but that I'm confident can be solved if we actually try.
Case in point: my employer has a vacancy that has been unfilled for the better part of a year now because they want to hire a full-time Database Administrator and not pay more than $65k.
My theory is that they're intentionally low-balling it so that no one will apply and they can hire an H1B.
Job vacancies below market rate should not be counted as openings. Pretty easy to determine market rate from data provided by payroll providers (ie ADP).
I've mostly encountered them in banks where there is regulation or a strong desire not to let developers access production data/systems (Sarbox or something, I forget). However their use seems to be declining in most other industries.
In most parts of the US, community colleges already work with local businesses to offer the right courses for workers to acquire skills relevant to local unfilled positions. Here's an example program from the area I grew up in:
Let's do this experiment: let's have all businesses double whatever wage they are currently paying. Is there still a shortage of workers? No? Ah, in that case, we have solved the problem.
You miss the point. Labor is inelastic. If you double the wage, it might take the market years to respond if the skill in question is not quickly acquired.
Buying high skilled workers is not like buying gumballs, where prices and high demand can quickly stimulate supply, and the two meet in the middle.
Gumballs don't have to sell their house and move. Gumballs don't have to take care of their kids while going back to school.
True, but this OP's scenario is very similar to what happened during the ND oil boom in 2010. Guys with certain skills (heavy equipment operation, truck driving, ect) could make two or even three times what where in their current jobs.
What was the result? A flood of workers coming in how left their families, homes, and everything to live in trailers (or even the truck cabs) for the opportunity.
If the this had happened near a real city like Sioux Falls SD with available housing and had been long term (like the OP's scenario), people absolutely would have moved their families and put down roots.
This is a flipped version of the lump of labor fallacy. If the price of a service is too high, some consumers will do without. So sure, you can double the wages of housecleaners, but that might drastically shrink the number of houses being cleaned.
You've already seen this play out in manufacturing: industries with high wages have tended towards automation and/or offshoring work to low wage countries. If you're building automobiles, there's a limit to what consumers are willing to pay for an auto.
The mismatch between available jobs and the skillsets of the workforce has baffled me. Is it just that autoglass installers aren't in sufficient demand for people to train to become autoglass installers? And so would it be economically inefficient for the government to subsidize the education of more autoglass workers?
But maybe it's not a question of insufficient demand for these skills. Maybe it's a question of matching up job opportunities, workers, and the capital necessary to train the workers for the jobs.
Imagine this: a site/app where employers post job openings with certain skill requirements, and where workers apply for jobs. These sites already exist. But add to it an element where workers can say they want to work a certain type of job but need additional training to do so. Then investors can put forward the money to train the worker, in exchange for 10% of the worker's future earnings until the loan is paid back plus interest.
Microfinance not as foreign aid but as grease for the labor market.
The problem with this is that its often difficult to tell whether a person is suited for a job or even would like a job until the person starts training in it. You could decide you want to go into HVAC because there's a lot of money in it. But six weeks into the training you hate it or you realize you suck at it. Who foots the bill for that failure?
These types of articles are part of a stealth propaganda campaign primarily designed to push for more immigration for the purpose of driving down wages.
If people think there are not enough skilled workers domestically, they will support more immigration. Don't fall for it!
Employers can't find skilled workers... at slave-wage salary. That's the part they never include.
How is an app going to fix the problem of employers posting fake jobs domestically, in order to circumvent the immigration rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
Part of it is that we've stopped training our workforce. I have a friend who has been a machinist his entire life. He taught me a lot, and is one of those guys who has probably forgotten more than I will ever know.
But when he started, he was an apprentice for 5 years. And he worked with guys who taught him everything he knows.
Now, if you want to become a machinist, you have to pay your own way to a community college to become a trained machinist. It'll probably take 2 years. But I hope you've got money to support yourself with over those 2 years.
We have almost no real apprenticeship programs anymore. Companies want their employees to come out of the public education system full formed to be exactly what the companies want, but they're unwilling to really put down the cash to train them and educate them.
So we've created a system that once again privatizes rewards for the companies (not having to pay to train an employee), but "publicizes" risk (the student/community pays for the training.)
That, and we don't want to pay people a decent wage after they've done their training. Why should companies pay them barely more than minimum wage? The same thing is now playing out at the University/4 year degree level.
Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Iceland, Poland, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Spain, the UAE, and Israel (although there are more depending on your definition of a developed country).
The US unemployment rate is based on people with zero jobs actively looking. It doesn't include people who've given up on their career and are looking after their kids, hermits in their parents' house, homeless, etc.
That's why you have to include other data, such as the Labor Participation Rate. The LPR which shows how many of the working-age people actually seem to be doing so:
You can check this kind of stuff out by looking on your local Craigslist postings.
Machinist wanted (with decent level of understanding multiple machines, reading blueprints etc.) - 5 years experience - $25/hour in the Denver/Boulder area. e.g. http://boulder.craigslist.org/trd/5902683986.html (and you have to supply some of your own tools) ... this is not a cheap area to live in BTW. $50-60K is barely middle class for this area.
We've been praising the guy who hires 10 plumbers and then automates his back office (he is scaling), while looking down on the plumbers who do the actual work. Then we wonder why it's tough to find plumbers...
I sometimes see job placements come in for machinists which demand almost every machinist skill one can have. Manual machining on every available type of machine, CNC machining on every type of machine, CNC programming, CAD and CAM Design in all the main software, GD&T, Blueprinting, etc.
And for a list of requirements that takes up a full page, and frankly sometimes even requires skills that you would earn with a bachelors in mechanical engineering. All for $10/hour. And they wonder why no one has taken them up on their offer. And this is also in a major Southern city, with an ever increasing cost of living.
America recently redefined what unemployment means.
It used to mean "the amount of people currently capable of working, who are not employed in work."
The new definition is "the amount of people who want a job, but can't find one".
Basically the difference between structural unemployment and transitive unemployment. America used to track transitive unemployment, but through a series of reforms have narrowed in on measuring structural unemployment.
Originally if you were not employed you would be unemployed. Slowly this was altered so that if you were not employed and hadn't found a job in a month you were unemployed (because you were looking and not finding, and therefore there was no job for you). Slowly that got moved out. I don't have the most recent numbers committed to memory, but an not employed person is not considered unemployed unless they've been looking and have not found for a large amount of time.
This article hits on that theme. The argument/opinion it expresses is that the jobs ARE there - that structural unemployment is low - but that workers aren't finding good work ("transitive unemployment is high").
There's been huge moves in the labor market as middle skilled jobs are disappearing. The only move for the labor pool is down to low-skilled labor jobs, work that masses of the labor pool are not only overqualified for, but will be compensated significantly less for and which represent much less socioeconomic mobility.
The issue is that US workers now compete with the whole world.
Until the 70s, the US really had no competition. To compete, you need a stable (legal) system - No one would invest money in a country where it's not far-fetched that someone will overthrow the government, nationalizes your company and throws you in jail.
Oh, and because of geo-politics, one couldn't invest in USSR friendly countries (both from the US side and the other side)
So no one would invest in the USSR, Africa, the Middle East, China or India, Europe and Japan were in shambles. So who built up industry? The US.
After the 60s, different countries started stabilizing. First Japan, then China, now most of the world is actually quite stable, so now the average US worker has to compete against all of India, China, Bangladesh, etc.
You have more supply and the same demand (the world).
And the problem is nothing can really be done about it.
US workers are having to deal with reality itself after an entire history of avoiding it.
"Free land" from genocided native Americans. No equivalently armed and organized opposition from Virginia to California.
"Free labor" from slavery.
Poverty wages during the gilded age; easy-to-access industrial fuels like lumber and coal, and later oil. Again, all available on stolen land.
Early 20th century, Europe was beating itself up so often America became a superpower by pure virtue of being the only power not bombed to shit by 1945.
Through mid 20th century, America artificially suppressed the domestic cost of living at home through economic imperialism by, among other things, overthrowing other regimes - including democracies - that threatened America's economic dominance and control of natural resources, like Guatemala for food and Iran for oil (although the U.K. started it).
So this is the first time the US has ever had to compete on anything close to an even footing.
115 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] thread> a few good auto-glass installers, no experience necessary
and,
> commissioned a study of company shortages. Energy, water, and land came up, but the No. 1 answer around the world was skilled labor
Perhaps no experience is necessary for the auto-glass gig, but the metal stamping and machining? Are these all trades one can pick up on the job, by walking in from the street? Because if so, potential workers are leaving money on the table.
More likely, they have stopped looking for work altogether. Unemployment is often discussed, but the Labor Participation Rate is less so, which fell greatly [1] after 2008.
[1] http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
Even today's rate is only 3% or so lower than the 2006 rate, so if you add it to the unemployment rate it's still not very bad.
Just another perspective on this as it seems to be something that comes up over and over in these discussions.
EDIT: to expand on my point, in metropolitan areas that are experiencing a population boom, demand creates opportunities for businesses, and therefore opportunities for prospective workers. It's a virtuous cycle. Meanwhile, a large employer's departure in established areas will leave behind skilled talent, but some of those people will depart and disperse, making the area less attractive for new job creation in related fields.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/metro.nr0.htm
Their main industry is RV manufacture. When the economy is rocking, RV sales go up, the Elkhart has a big lack of workers. When the economy is rubbish, they all get laid off and move elsewhere.
The metro area here has over 550,000 people. Not New York City, bit big enough that there SHOULD be enough glass installers, or at least a pool to train enough glass installers form.
More common, it is things like hail during thunderstorms or gravel from a road.
1) Inadequate pay.
2) Unwillingness to train.
If you don't have the exact skills that the company wants, they won't hire you. But they will complain that they can't find anyone even though they are really only offering unskilled level wages.
If you're 30/40, odds are you have a family, roots somewhere, and maybe a mortgage. Your ability/willingness to move - especially after being out of work for a while - is near zero.
* I'm late 30s with all of the above.
This is also true for someone like me as a recent grad with an older vehicle, a student loan to pay off, and lack of sufficient savings to move too far away from my hometown. One of the large issues of the education crisis that I don't hear being discussed is that a lot of students, like myself, often spend literally everything we have to get the degree after constantly hearing about success story after success story in the K-12 system. In these cases, it is implied that college is the only way to get ahead in life and we need to get there by any means necessary.
I mean, how the hell am I supposed to magically relocate halfway across the country (or even commute >50 miles away from my house on a daily basis) when the infrastructure doesn't exist and/or no benefits are offered besides "you should be glad that we're even paying you"?
But hey, I'm just a whiny millennial brat who should be glad that spanking/belt whipping is illegal.
4 years job experience and college degree required for entry-level job.
No training.
"We can't find anyone"
1: http://kff.org/report-section/kaiser-family-foundationcnn-wo...
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
It's only 5 million people or so, so I guess you're saying that's not "big".
So let's call it $24k (not including bonuses) up to $70k (including bonuses). That's my interpretation.
So.
While you and I might scoff at whatever amount $70k is before bonuses, if you're unemployed in South Carolina you could do a lot worse.
Other 28k he would make in 17 hours of overtime per week (Remember you get time and a half for overtime), for a total of 57 hour weeks.
Not out of the question hours in a busy factory. I did some of those in college summer days...
But that is how some working class people make enough to sound their kids to private school. Working their tails off.
I am also having trouble hiring people: I need a senior software engineer. Pay is $12/hour. It's taking me a long time to find workers. I guess people are just lazy and don't want to work.
I don't know what's a fair price in every area of the country for all of these jobs, so beats me if $12 is good or bad, but beyond this one anecdote, people have been saying for years that there was a shortage of skilled labor in the country. So aside from whether this one guy is paying fairly or not, it does appear to be a real issue.
It's just that engineers and scientists are typically trained to know that anecdata is a very poor way to reason about the world, it consistently leads you into the wrong conclusion, making you feel like you have support for a fact when you actually don't.
If the good journalist has hard underlying data, I would not at all begrudge them the anecdotes, and yet I'd still like to see their data thank you very much.
If I say something and I make $N per year for believing that.
Why would they stop saying it?
The truth is, the "shortage" is largely in the poor quality of hiring screens and and a desire to pay the real market rate (rather than the lowest # they can hire the bare minimum of workers to function and work them 50 hours a week).
If a shortage genuinely existed, you would see substantial wage growth.
We don't have such wage growth.
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Similarly, when labor organizations get too powerful you see the opposite effect that creates an artificial shortage:
https://members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/The%20Complexities%20of...
> The rapid expansion in medical education was halted twenty years after it started as researchers, policymakers, and the educational community reassessed the need for further growth. This change recognized that the doubling of medical school graduates would lead to a growing supply for at least 35 years. In 1980, the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee (GMENAC) reported (based upon the number of physicians needed to provide “necessary and appropriate” services) that a surplus of 70,000 physicians would be likely by the year 2000.20 With the promotion of tightly controlled managed care in the early 1990s, many groups reaffirmed the belief that the nation was facing a surplus. The national Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME),21 the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM), the Pew Health Professions Commission,22 the AAMC,23 the AMA24 and other national physician associations expressed concerns about an impending potential surplus of physicians.
> The medical education and training community responded to these recommendations. The number of graduates from U.S. medical schools remained virtually unchanged between 1980 and 2005. Despite this stagnation in medical school enrollment, the doubling of medical school enrollment during the 1960s and 1970s led to a steady stream of new physicians entering the workforce at a rate greater than those leaving the field. Consequently, the ratio of physicians to population increased steadily from 1980 onward. However, few health policy experts in the year 2000 would have argued that this constituted a surplus of physicians, even though this number grew from 202 per 100,000 in 1980 to 276 per 100,000 in 2000. 29 Bureau of Health Professions projections had estimated that physician demand - not a defined need - would increase over time. In fact, per capita utilization of medical services did rise as they had suggested it would.30 Other analyses had assumed major cost and utilization controls in health care.31
https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/newsreleases/458074/2016_workf...
> Washington, D.C., April 5, 2016—Under every combination of scenarios modeled, the United States will face a shortage of physicians over the next decade, according to a physician workforce report released today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). The projections show a shortage ranging between 61,700 and 94,700, with a significant shortage showing among many surgical specialties.
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We don't have such wage growth.
Actually we'd have growth in compensation (wages + benefits). And we do, in fact, have that growth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
The fact there is a consistent 50+ year trendline of compensation growth is simply caused by a combination of productivity gains and inflation.
You'd see a 5%+ jump in a single year if a legitimate shortage existed.
https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm
2007-2015 : +1.3% (nonfarm productivity gains)
2007-2015 : +1.8% (manufacturing productivity gains)
2007-2015 : +1.2% (total compensation)
Notice how similar these numbers are? That is a sign of normal compensation growth.
I can't imagine why no one is taking the position. It sounds like a fulfilling opportunity to install auto glass while living on the poverty line.
It's like employers don't even attempt to think about anything from the employee's perspective -- even after they've struggled to fill their own positions. "Cheap business owners" couldn't be a more accurate byline.
There have been a number of headlines recently about how corporate profits are near record highs.
Isn't paying employees enough to buy the product considered capitalism 101?
Or maybe the job their trying to fill isn't worth that much to them (the employers, that is)?
As an example, let's take a speech-writer for a presidential candidate.
Company X (let's say it has 100 billion in the bank) wants a website, so it looks for an SEO firm, but it's cheap and not interested in investing in the website.
X doesn't get skilled SEO consultants.
X now has three choices - get minimum quality workers, drop the website project or pay more for better workers.
Obviously, workers would prefer if X choses 3, but there are times when it just doesn't make sense to do so (or the company doesn't _think_ it needs to do so, and goes out of business):
What if a company has a small audience comprised of people who don't find things online.
Let's say the company runs a program only senators would use. That's a hundred person market which practically requires personal connection to their staff to make a deal.
Hiring someone for $250,000 website is just not worth it.
Practically, in a capitalist environment, workers are "contractors" selling themselves.
The same way I would not pay for a big-iron computer when all I need is a laptop, companies don't want to pay $200,000 when they can find someone for less.
Just imagine the businesses that suddenly become profitable if employers could provide nothing beyond room and board and employees weren't allowed to quit!
In the US you can quit and look for another job, the same way how MS can exit the OS market.
The same way MS doesn't leave the OS market (too lucrative), most people don't walk off on their jobs.
But companies also have non-compete (or other exclusionary) clauses which are legal outside of anti-trust laws.
I agree it's not a fulfilling job, but I wouldn't characterise it as "living on the poverty line". The job pays $24,000 per year but for a single person the official poverty line is $11,770 [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unite...
[2] https://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines
[0] Based on the recommendation your housing cost you around 30% of your gross income.
Cities are becoming larger, small towns are disappearing. Agglomeration is playing an ever larger role in where people live and work. People are tending to cities which have more opportunities, entertainment, etc.
So my point is this, why would you want to live in North Charleston? Of course as I alluded too in my brief definition of advantaged millennial, not everyone has the choice/ability to move to wherever they want. But given that choice, why not move to another larger city where you have more options for better jobs with better pay?
I think in some places, even thouguh cost of living is low, employers will need to sometimes pay more to attract the talent they need, and not just say, "cost of livng is low, live with the $12/hr wage and like it." But of course, that's how capitalism is supposed to work. If you can't find employees, it simply means you're not paying enough. Literally Economics 101.
Granted, all of the above argument is a bit simple, and there's a lot of nuance involved in reality. Especially when it comes to peoples decision making about what job they choose and where they live. I also have little evidence to support my contention about less desirable places to live meaning higher wages, but it applies to jobs, so I don't see how it won't apply to places in the near future (well I do, it may never happen, but I think it's an interesting thing to keep an eye on).
I agree with the article in that there are plenty of jobs out there. Just not good paying jobs.
There is not really a talent shortage. Instead there is employers who pay good salaries shortage.
The article isn't claiming people are lazy and don't want to work. It's claiming that plenty of jobs exist and people are already working at them. It's also claiming that if you really are having a hard time finding one, there are plenty of people willing to hire you at a wage possibly lower than you might desire.
I.e., no shortage of jobs.
Trouble is, it's unwise to dedicate months/years of training for a single job that may not be there when you graduate, and it's unwise to train someone when they could get poached by the next company not willing to shell out for training.
I also wonder how sticky their wages are. If a business can endure not filling a position until they can find their person willing to work for peanuts, why offer more? It's amazing how little bargaining power workers have even in this extremely tight labor environment.
I'd be shocked if the Republicans that now control most layers of government will be willing to step in and help this situation, and I doubt they'd know what to do to help even if they were willing.
Does anyone here know a good way out of this situation?
Still, best get to training and educating people ASAP, because 2 years from now is coming sooner than most people think. We could complain about how much it costs to do this, or we could just shut up, do it, and then enjoy the sweet, sweet tax dollars that those high educated, high earning workers throw off.
The article talks a lot about under-investment in infrastructure like roads and bridges. I guess I'm making the same argument in the end, I'm just pointing out that people are infrastructure, in that you can't do business without them, just like roads. So maybe we should invest in them.
Of course there is and at least some Republicans at least claim they're going to take it: slash immigration, lower the labour supply, raising its prices.
I'm not a big fan of magic beans though, because I'm young enough I still have to live here for a long time, I'm not cashing out of this place next year. If the problem is not enough skilled workers, it would seem that lowering the labor supply is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Next up: solve hunger by setting food on fire.
Training makes sense for a job that has a career path. If you learned to drive a road tractor, you started by working for a transport company until you save up enough to buy your own rig, then you were a contractor for one of those companies until you got an agent to get you the loads you wanted on the routes you liked. Maybe eventually you got off the road to work in the management office for a transport company. With automated trucks on the horizon, young folks are less likely to even bother learning how to drive such vehicles.
No one wants to be told that the skill they already spent half their lives honing will not carry them through to retirement.
Big companies have been dismantling careers and repackaging them as cheaper and more fungible jobs for decades now. There is no consideration given whatsoever to the fact that employees are people that cannot spring fully formed from Zeus's brow when the company calls, nor store themselves in a closet and turn themselves off until needed again.
If you won't pay for people to live their lives outside of your workplace, they won't waste any of their finite time in it.
It isn't just training. The company needs an ecosystem that moves humans from graduation to retirement. They don't have to own or control the whole thing, but all the pieces have to be there. And if a piece breaks, it has to be repaired or replaced to keep other parts healthy. That hasn't been happening since the 80s, so now there are huge, gaping holes in the career pipeline, and what companies remain are often parasites upon it rather than contributors to the ecosystem.
So, yeah, good luck finding someone to install your auto glass, buddy. All those kids know that you will never be paying that $70k/year (with bonuses!) you teased them with, because three years from now, you might just replace the guy you hired this year with yet another sucker at $12/hr. What happened to your previous glass guy? Did you promote him, or fire him?
The reality is that unless you're doing something related to IT or got a cushy management job through nepotism, or getting massively subsidized by your parents, you're unlikely to progress to major life goals, like house ownership and starting a family, both of which require the ability to save a decent portion of your paycheck.
People just want jobs that leave them with something after rent+food+healthcare and the reality is that the pool of these "good" jobs is shrinking by the year and requires multiple years of expensive education and at least above average intelligence, because you're competing globally against the upper middle classes of other countries as well.
Few jobs disappear in a few years. A few decades, maybe. (Yeah, yeah, we'll have flying autonomous vehicles in 2020 putting all taxi drivers out of work.)
You are correct there is a shortage of skilled labor. Physicians, engineers, lawyers, accountants etc. have been and will continue to be in demand. Blue collar jobs too: mechanic, plumber, electrician, HVAC.
Sure, getting an psychology undergrad from a $40k/yr tuition school is a bad move, but there are plenty of reliably good moves out there.
When framed like that, IMO it's obvious--we need to focus on adaptability, not conservatism.
We are ineluctably bound by the laws of survival and natural selection, and if we can't sufficiently adapt to changes, then we will die (figuratively and literally).
There are certainly some jobs that are currently over trained, as evidenced by nurse practitioners taking over some common general practitioner roles. But I'm not convinced that's the situation in manufacturing.
Jobs will be lost, industries will die, money will shift--it's inevitable. How can we adapt? It's something I don't have a good answer for, but that I'm confident can be solved if we actually try.
My theory is that they're intentionally low-balling it so that no one will apply and they can hire an H1B.
Do those even exist anymore, in the US? In the UK I very rarely encounter UK-based DBAs, 99.99% are offshore.
http://www.gvltec.edu/cnc/
If the skill is rare enough or the pay is low enough, they will simply NEVER get anyone.
The job ads and the "we can't find people" will stick though.
Buying high skilled workers is not like buying gumballs, where prices and high demand can quickly stimulate supply, and the two meet in the middle.
Gumballs don't have to sell their house and move. Gumballs don't have to take care of their kids while going back to school.
What was the result? A flood of workers coming in how left their families, homes, and everything to live in trailers (or even the truck cabs) for the opportunity.
If the this had happened near a real city like Sioux Falls SD with available housing and had been long term (like the OP's scenario), people absolutely would have moved their families and put down roots.
You've already seen this play out in manufacturing: industries with high wages have tended towards automation and/or offshoring work to low wage countries. If you're building automobiles, there's a limit to what consumers are willing to pay for an auto.
-- based on a real story
But maybe it's not a question of insufficient demand for these skills. Maybe it's a question of matching up job opportunities, workers, and the capital necessary to train the workers for the jobs.
Imagine this: a site/app where employers post job openings with certain skill requirements, and where workers apply for jobs. These sites already exist. But add to it an element where workers can say they want to work a certain type of job but need additional training to do so. Then investors can put forward the money to train the worker, in exchange for 10% of the worker's future earnings until the loan is paid back plus interest.
Microfinance not as foreign aid but as grease for the labor market.
These types of articles are part of a stealth propaganda campaign primarily designed to push for more immigration for the purpose of driving down wages.
If people think there are not enough skilled workers domestically, they will support more immigration. Don't fall for it!
Employers can't find skilled workers... at slave-wage salary. That's the part they never include.
How is an app going to fix the problem of employers posting fake jobs domestically, in order to circumvent the immigration rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
But when he started, he was an apprentice for 5 years. And he worked with guys who taught him everything he knows.
Now, if you want to become a machinist, you have to pay your own way to a community college to become a trained machinist. It'll probably take 2 years. But I hope you've got money to support yourself with over those 2 years.
We have almost no real apprenticeship programs anymore. Companies want their employees to come out of the public education system full formed to be exactly what the companies want, but they're unwilling to really put down the cash to train them and educate them.
So we've created a system that once again privatizes rewards for the companies (not having to pay to train an employee), but "publicizes" risk (the student/community pays for the training.)
That, and we don't want to pay people a decent wage after they've done their training. Why should companies pay them barely more than minimum wage? The same thing is now playing out at the University/4 year degree level.
The article said (in the very first line) "no experience necessary". They still can't get autoglass installers.
US unemployment is at 4.6%
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
US growth is about 2%
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locati...
That's really pretty good. Most developed countries would be happy with that.
In this day and age it's whether you can afford health care, child care, and education - all of which are essential for a healthy society.
Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Iceland, Poland, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Spain, the UAE, and Israel (although there are more depending on your definition of a developed country).
I didn't include this either. Just curious.
That's why you have to include other data, such as the Labor Participation Rate. The LPR which shows how many of the working-age people actually seem to be doing so:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
So what do you see when both graphs are together:
Both graphs together: http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/201...
It seems safe to assume a large part of the drop isn't because satisfied people are finding jobs, but because fewer people are trying.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/labor-force-par...
Machinist wanted (with decent level of understanding multiple machines, reading blueprints etc.) - 5 years experience - $25/hour in the Denver/Boulder area. e.g. http://boulder.craigslist.org/trd/5902683986.html (and you have to supply some of your own tools) ... this is not a cheap area to live in BTW. $50-60K is barely middle class for this area.
We've been praising the guy who hires 10 plumbers and then automates his back office (he is scaling), while looking down on the plumbers who do the actual work. Then we wonder why it's tough to find plumbers...
And for a list of requirements that takes up a full page, and frankly sometimes even requires skills that you would earn with a bachelors in mechanical engineering. All for $10/hour. And they wonder why no one has taken them up on their offer. And this is also in a major Southern city, with an ever increasing cost of living.
It used to mean "the amount of people currently capable of working, who are not employed in work."
The new definition is "the amount of people who want a job, but can't find one".
Basically the difference between structural unemployment and transitive unemployment. America used to track transitive unemployment, but through a series of reforms have narrowed in on measuring structural unemployment.
Originally if you were not employed you would be unemployed. Slowly this was altered so that if you were not employed and hadn't found a job in a month you were unemployed (because you were looking and not finding, and therefore there was no job for you). Slowly that got moved out. I don't have the most recent numbers committed to memory, but an not employed person is not considered unemployed unless they've been looking and have not found for a large amount of time.
This article hits on that theme. The argument/opinion it expresses is that the jobs ARE there - that structural unemployment is low - but that workers aren't finding good work ("transitive unemployment is high").
There's been huge moves in the labor market as middle skilled jobs are disappearing. The only move for the labor pool is down to low-skilled labor jobs, work that masses of the labor pool are not only overqualified for, but will be compensated significantly less for and which represent much less socioeconomic mobility.
Until the 70s, the US really had no competition. To compete, you need a stable (legal) system - No one would invest money in a country where it's not far-fetched that someone will overthrow the government, nationalizes your company and throws you in jail.
Oh, and because of geo-politics, one couldn't invest in USSR friendly countries (both from the US side and the other side)
So no one would invest in the USSR, Africa, the Middle East, China or India, Europe and Japan were in shambles. So who built up industry? The US.
After the 60s, different countries started stabilizing. First Japan, then China, now most of the world is actually quite stable, so now the average US worker has to compete against all of India, China, Bangladesh, etc.
You have more supply and the same demand (the world).
And the problem is nothing can really be done about it.
"Free land" from genocided native Americans. No equivalently armed and organized opposition from Virginia to California.
"Free labor" from slavery.
Poverty wages during the gilded age; easy-to-access industrial fuels like lumber and coal, and later oil. Again, all available on stolen land.
Early 20th century, Europe was beating itself up so often America became a superpower by pure virtue of being the only power not bombed to shit by 1945.
Through mid 20th century, America artificially suppressed the domestic cost of living at home through economic imperialism by, among other things, overthrowing other regimes - including democracies - that threatened America's economic dominance and control of natural resources, like Guatemala for food and Iran for oil (although the U.K. started it).
So this is the first time the US has ever had to compete on anything close to an even footing.