Jobs, Jobs Everywhere; Not a Day of Work

“Businessweek Magazine” ran an interesting article this week. It seems we have about three million job openings we cannot fill. That runs in the teeth of eight or nine point unemployment. How come? Because the skill sets of the laid off do not match what’s needed for other jobs.
I know that here in my part of Western Michigan—economically a suburb of the Detroit Auto Industry— the life goal of generations has been, out of school at sixteen, into an auto parts plant for thirty years, and then an affluent retirement after thirty years.
Several thousands of lucky ones got to go into a General Motors plant itself. Fabulous pay and benefits and, after thirty years, Florida. Many of these people got where they were without a day of schooling past tenth grade.
For the generation a decade or two behind me, it was a matter of getting a high school diploma and then going into the plant. But what were they really trained to do? At first just to run the equivalent of a punch press—or do spot welding on the assembly line.
A neighbor of mine just turned fifty; he works in a defense plant. He makes good money; he has years and years of seniority; he holds a job that would require at least an associates degree in much of the country.
What if defense cuts back? What if the current owner of his plant who’s in his eighties should die and the business be sold? My neighbor could no more duplicate his job and income anywhere else than he could fly.
A chap down the block made it to retirement. For years he was a high school educated “plant engineer”. No one else in the continental United States would hire him at the equivalent job level and salary! He spent more than a few moments in the past decades praying to make it to his pension.
Another friend of mine near here holds a job as a full-fledged company engineer. He’s a brilliant man, but he has no degree. His family needs to move in a few months—how will he replace his automotive industry brevet?
Just from where I sit in the state with the highest unemployment rate in the union, I can see why anybody who has a technical job that requires a degree or specialized training isn’t likely going to find it in this part of Michigan.
Another thing that strikes me about this area is the paucity of books in homes around here. I’m talking about expensive lake front homes (somebody’s doing something to earn that kind of money!) I’ve visited a few and found zero books or magazines—not even a family Bible in sight.
My neighbors next door—who have snowmobiles, winter and summer cars, land a hundred miles north of here with living quarters on it, oh yes, and own a computer and a humongous screen TV—have few to none when it comes to books. When their kids were in high school and needed to do a project, they came to us to borrow resource materials. I doubt if they ever owned a library card.
These are salt of the earth, taxpaying Americans. When I substitute teach, I have their kids in my classes. Are things improving at that generation level?
Let me tell you about today. Their assignment was to open a history text book, pick up a sheet full of questions (right out of the book, word for word) on the Cold War and answer them. I watched sheet after sheet, hurriedly done, come to my desk with errors that ran the gamut from egregious to ridiculous.
I started telling the kids that they had some wrong answers. Would they like some help in correcting them? One young man spoke for the entire four classes: “Naw,” he said, “the teacher will go over them tomorrow and we’ll have all the right answers.”
No curiosity. Not even a hint of desire to get it right. It will be spoon fed to us tomorrow; why should we trouble ourselves? This is true in math classes, chemistry, language arts, Spanish or any other subject you care to mention. AP classes (you get college credit for these) are the tiniest bit better.
What jobs—that don’t involve a punch press—are they going to be ready for? Not to fill any of the three million jobs “Businessweek” mentioned.
My wife took a photography course at a nearby community college this spring. She was surrounded by recent high school graduates who were totally lost in an environment where they had to fend for themselves. Many didn’t even start their assignments until they were weeks into the semester.
They were stunned when they learned that in college they would be forced to mix their own chemicals, set their own timers—basically do all the work necessary to develop photos themselves. In high school it had all been done for them.
“No Child Left Behind” seems to mean, dumb everyone down to the same non-functional level. That will get everyone through high school. Will it prepare them to do the jobs that are left after the auto plants go away?
As “BusinessWeek” put it on its cover, Three million jobs available—“why that isn’t necessarily good for the economy”.
Nope, it isn’t. We aren’t training; we aren’t retraining.