"Unemployable"

I have long since warned against being overly optimistic about onshoring. On both sides of the political divide people favor bringing manufacturing and industry back home. And yet, as I have noted, we simply do not have the home grown talent to do the jobs. You can only import so many engineers from Taiwan.

Now, Steven Malanga has written a comprehensive policy analysis of the problem. It is long, detailed and comprehensive. It offers the best view of the problem. He entitled it “Unemployable,” an excellent title. 

Malanga begins by pointing out that the thrust toward onshoring is bipartisan:

Despite their ideological differences, both presidents share a similar view on infrastructure and its capacity to create jobs in construction and related sectors. Trump proposed a $1 trillion infrastructure initiative to get Americans back to work as the Covid pandemic waned; Biden enacted a program allocating approximately $550 billion toward local infrastructure projects.

Lo and behold, the workers who could take all of the new jobs did not exist. 

When Biden’s infrastructure law passed, the construction industry was already grappling with some 500,000 vacant positions. The money pouring into government plans then triggered a competition for workers between privately funded and government-backed ventures, driving up wages and thus reducing how much work the infrastructure bill subsidizes.

And let us not forget, some of the jobs are highly technical. Do we have the technical talent to do these jobs? I suspect that we do not.

How bad is it?

And while America has about 1.4 million fewer industrial jobs than it did 20 years ago, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that manufacturers have roughly 750,000 unfilled positions. That number, one industry group calculated, could surpass 2 million by the end of the decade.

And then there is the cultural component. The hoary old work ethic no longer pertains to young people. They were brought up on therapy and believe that they should do what they want to do, not what they have to do. Too many young people are drugged out, and many of them have done hard time:

Ever more adults are unemployable because of worsening social dysfunction, changing youth attitudes toward work, and university and public school failures to prepare students for labor-market realities. Drug legalization has made it harder to find laborers who can pass drug tests—essential to work in industries like construction and transport—leading to worker shortages for key jobs, including truck drivers. A crime spike, meantime, will likely create a new generation of convicts, among the toughest people to employ when they reenter society. Soaring mental-health problems add to the ranks of the unemployable. And many firms hesitate to hire new college grads because they often lack basic skills, starting with knowing how to communicate and function within a group, and often have unrealistic expectations about pay and benefits.

Of course, people have incentives not to work. They can be sustained on government programs, thus they learn how to take vacations but never develop the work ethic that would make them valued employees:

Unfortunately, the longer individuals are jobless, the more likely they will stay that way. In a mid-2022 survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nearly a quarter of unemployed respondents said that government aid had led them not to look for work. Even though most pandemic restrictions were disappearing by mid-2022, two-thirds of those who had lost their jobs during Covid said that they were only somewhat active or not very active in seeking new work. 

And then there is the current crime wave. Our political leaders declared that it was righteous to commit crimes in the name of George Floyd and that such crimes should not be punished. We have heard politicians explaining that crime has gone down. The reason is, prosecutors no longer count crimes as crimes. They treat felonies as misdemeanors.

And, of course, the covid lockdowns contributed to the problem.

Pandemic America also witnessed a sharp elevation in crime rates, especially after the riots that erupted following George Floyd’s May 2020 death in Minneapolis and the subsequent nationwide movement to defund the police. Though millions remained at home during the lockdowns, reducing residential burglaries, America’s homicide rate rose 34 percent from 2019 through 2022, motor thefts went up 22 percent, and burglaries at commercial establishments increased 11 percent. Shoplifting rocketed upward in America’s biggest cities—up 64 percent in New York and 61 percent in Los Angeles from mid-2019 to mid-2023.

And also, more ex-felons means fewer employable people:

 Ex-felons are hard to employ. A recent Rand study estimated that half of all unemployed men in their thirties have past criminal arrests, and by 35, some 46 percent have been convicted of a crime. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest that only about one-third of federal convicts find employment within four years after release. Even among those finding work, earnings are well below median income levels. Ex-offenders also tend to switch jobs frequently, struggling to stay employed. Progressives often blame this on businesses’ reluctance to hire former criminals. Many states and cities have subsequently banned companies from asking job seekers whether they’ve ever been convicted. But that strategy has backfired, research shows. In areas where businesses can’t inquire about criminal records, they’ve become broadly reluctant to hire young minority applicants lacking college degrees; the firms fear the unknown.

The war on men and boys has born something like fruit. It has rendered more men and boys dysfunctional:

Between 40 percent and 70 percent of male prisoners suffer from antisocial personality disorder, defined in a Nature article as “a life-long condition involving habitual irresponsible and delinquent behavior.” Among the chief characteristics: “failure to conform to law, failure to sustain consistent employment, manipulation of others for personal gain, deception of others, and failure to develop stable interpersonal relationships.” Further, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that nearly six in ten state and local prisoners had been diagnosed as drug abusers or drug “dependent.”

And, our nation has gotten into the business of producing mental illness. It has not yet found ways to cure the mess it created:

Severe personality disorders and widespread mental-health challenges are also shrinking the larger pool of employable individuals, a phenomenon particularly conspicuous among younger adults. In 2020, mental-health issues rendered 29 percent of federal disability beneficiaries—about 2.4 million people—incapable of employment. Among them, 1.4 million struggled with depression or psychotic disorders. Most of those recipients had been enrolled in disability programs before the pandemic. One notable trait among SSDI recipients with mental-health-related disabilities is their relatively younger age, compared with other disabled beneficiaries. They tend to remain on the benefit rolls for long periods, contributing to their growing representation among disabled workers.

And naturally, as I have occasionally noted, young people today lack the requisite soft social skills to succeed on the job.

A rise in workplace anxiety among young Americans corresponds with employer complaints about them. In roundtable discussions organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in mid-2023, many business executives “identified a lack of soft skills among younger workers” as a reason for the workers’ employment woes. In a recent survey of American hiring executives, many said that young applicants often struggled to make eye contact, showed up for interviews dressed inappropriately, had weak communications skills, and responded poorly to feedback. About 20 percent reported that they’d had a recent college graduate show up for an interview with a parent.

And then there is the problem of covid learning loss, a problem that teachers unions and Democratic politicians have largely failed to address. 

Unsurprisingly, the schools have covered up the learning loss by lowering standards, thus producing cohorts of young people who have high self-esteem and low skills. Only they do not know that they do not know anything:

Alarmingly, many school districts have responded by lowering standards, which can mislead parents into thinking that their children haven’t fallen behind. One recent study documented a wide gap between what test scores show about falling performance and what parents think. 

And this is before we consider the damage done by DEI requirements, imposed by the government.