Thread: The growing US jobs challenge. Is Barack Obama up to the challenge?

Here are some great discussions on the obstacles we face today and what we must do to get our economy moving forward again.

"Assuming current trends, the United States will not have enough workers with the right education and training to fill the jobs likely to emerge. By 2020, there will be up to 1.5 million too few college graduates to meet demand—and 5.9 million more Americans without high school diplomas than employers can use."

The United States faces a daunting challenge in creating jobs: at current rates, it will take until 2016 to replace the 7 million of them lost during the 2008–09 recession. To regain full employment—finding work for the unemployed and accommodating the 15 million Americans expected to enter the labor force this decade—the US economy must create 21 million jobs by 2020.

A new study sheds new light on how companies use labor, where new jobs are likely to come from, and what conditions are needed to ensure that they can be created in a sustainable way. In addition to original research and scenario analysis, the report draws on a survey of 2,000 business leaders, as well as interviews with more than 100 business executives, public-sector leaders, educators, and other experts on US labor markets.

Among the most important findings:

• The United States has suffered from increasingly lengthy “jobless recoveries” following recessions during the last two decades. From 1945 to the 1980s, it took roughly six months after GDP rebounded for employment to recover. But after the 1990–91 and 2001 recessions, it took 15 and 39 months, respectively. At the recent rate of net job creation, more than 60 months will be needed to replace the jobs lost in the 2008–09 recession.

• Six economic sectors will account for as many as 85 percent of all new jobs in this decade: health care, business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing, and retailing. The first three will have a disproportionate influence on the total number of jobs generated. Business services, for example, could create as many as 5.7 million of them or as few as 2.4 million.

• Assuming current trends, the United States will not have enough workers with the right education and training to fill the jobs likely to emerge. By 2020, there will be up to 1.5 million too few college graduates to meet demand—and 5.9 million more Americans without high school diplomas than employers can use.

• At all levels of postsecondary education, Americans are not getting the “job ready” skills that employers say they require. In our survey, 40 percent of the executives whose companies plan to hire next year said they’ve had unfilled openings for six months or longer because they cannot find qualified applicants. The skill gap goes beyond the well-known shortages in technical fields; there are growing shortages of welders, nutritionists, nuclear technicians, and nursing aides, employers say.

• Technology is changing the nature of work in ways that create challenges for US employment levels but also open up opportunities. Broadband communications and advanced IT systems make it possible to disaggregate jobs into tasks that can be reassigned to other workers in a given location or elsewhere. Also, this approach makes it easier to “onshore” service jobs to low-cost US locations or even to workers in their own homes.

The United States will not return to full employment by following a business-as-usual course; a strong economic recovery will be a prerequisite but is unlikely to be sufficient. To meet the jobs challenge, business and government leaders—and workers, too—must attack the obstacles to employment and have the courage to consider new approaches.

Our analysis identified four areas where progress must be made: ensuring that Americans have the necessary education and skills for the jobs created; seeing to it that global investment generates jobs in the United States; encouraging innovation, the creation of new companies, and the scaling up of new industries in the United States; and clearing the way to growth by making compliance with regulations less onerous.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Ec...challenge_2816

The only way you're going to get Americans back to work is massive government spending and government investment through infrastructure and new technology. Republicans won't do that, so there will be no future recovery.

Nope I disagree entirely,,get Obama out of the way this coming election and watch the Corporations crank...It's the horrible inefficiency in this country that's killing us and that's what our Government is all about. Just try dealing with the Government on any level, hell I did it with the Ins dept for thirty years, they hire the worse people on this Gods earth and it takes twenty of them to do the same bad job....Those are the facts not my opinion, just speak to anybody that is forced to work with them...
Not only are they incompetent, slow, and poorly managed..but they are usually WRONG on most things.

One of the very first things I learned about dealing with the Government was....AVOID THEM!

Only blotting progressive ideology out of our gov't will allow for job growth. Even then, we will have to address the trade deficit with Asia.


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Originally Posted by flounder

Nope I disagree entirely,,get Obama out of the way this coming election and watch the Corporations crank...It's the horrible inefficiency in this country that's killing us and that's what our Government is all about. Just try dealing with the Government on any level, hell I did it with the Ins dept for thirty years, they hire the worse people on this Gods earth and it takes twenty of them to do the same bad job....Those are the facts not my opinion, just speak to anybody that is forced to work with them...
Not only are they incompetent, slow, and poorly managed..but they are usually WRONG on most things.

One of the very first things I learned about dealing with the Government was....AVOID THEM!

you are correct, flounder!

The Obama administration has over 5,000 new oppressive federal regulations in the pipeline. They are simply "chomping at the bit” to enforce these new regulations on our small businesses. It is no wonder these employers are no longer hiring?

"Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean — power over people, power to the State."

-- Margaret Thatcher

Socialism is great if you are willing to accept a much reduced standard of living and an oppressive central government who is always telling you what to do and how to live your life to the benefit of the state!