What's the Main Impediment to Getting a Job in US?

Discussion in 'Economics' started by shortie, May 13, 2011.

Main Impediment for getting a Job in US?

  1. Cheap Labor abroad (China/India/etc)

    14 vote(s)
    36.8%
  2. Cheap Labor due to illegal immigration in US

    1 vote(s)
    2.6%
  3. High Unemployment benefits

    2 vote(s)
    5.3%
  4. Other

    21 vote(s)
    55.3%
  1. WS_MJH

    WS_MJH

    I hear you, and I wish I could provide some great insight. You'll never change human nature. You can possibly reduce your risk. You could take the temporary agency/independent contractor route and screen people that way, and hire when someone works out. You could only hire people who currently have a job, and hopefully they're not being pushed out the door, but don't expect loyalty from that person. Even if you can trust resume and references, I've found that's not really a solid predictor. It really is hard, which is why you have a tough job with hiring. If you do find someone good, keep them, lots of books on motivation and team building.

    I have to say that not dealing with employees or customers is one of the benefits of trading. I wouldn't pass-up my entrepreneur experience; it was a great learning experience. I just am very hesitant to ever do it again. I hope this helps a little, enjoy your weekend!
     
    #11     May 13, 2011
  2. zdreg

    zdreg

    hire an older person and lay him off you will be accused of age discrimination.
    hire a black person and lay him off you will be accused of race discrimination.
    hire a woman and lay her off you will be accused of gender discrimination.

    osha walks into your place you will be fined for a safety violation.
    why hire an American?
     
    #12     May 13, 2011
  3. What's the Main Impediment to Getting a Job in US?
    Not knowing the right people.
    It's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know.
     
    #13     May 13, 2011
  4. zdreg you hit the nail on the head. The chief impediment to jobs is regulations and taxes. Seriously, as a busines owner, why would you hire an american for any job that can be done over the internet, or where the factory can be moved overseas, when you can hire someone overseas who will charge less, work harder, won't sue you if you have to lay them off, won't require you to hire lawyers, administrators, and HR reps just to protect yourself from them, doesn't come with all the extra taxes and regulations, and, I would also add, hasn't had their ability to think critically and motivate themselves destroyed by American government schooling.

     
    #14     May 13, 2011
  5. I want to add-in the growing trend of contingent employment. When I was unemployed, most of the recruiters were calling for short-term (6 month or less positions.) If it takes 5 months of unemployment to land a job, then pay rate on a 6 month contract had better be double+ the fulltime rate, but it isn't.

    Also employers demonstrate a complete disinterest in training employees. I often didn't get past the recruiter; because, I had version 3.5 experience, but not 4.0. None of their employees had any experience 3 years ago, but now a 0.5 lag is unacceptable.

    I had probably a dozen recruiters contact me about the same employer outside of Tampa, FL. Once you got into a discussion with you, the employer required a bunch of highly specific and focused requirements. If they really wanted an employee, they would skip the recruiters, and look in their HR records for the exact group of people in the world who used that specific version of their in-house software. I really think that they were fishing for sponsorships.

    When I was looking for work near Dallas, I interviewed at a major bank, and I had a cordial group interview with an Indian, a Chinese, and two Russians. The Indian was the supervisor for that floor of the building. I talked with him afterwards, and he explained to me the salary caps on different career routes that were open to me and that the only reason that they interviewed me was that I had Russian language experience on my resume so they thought that I was Russian. Sure enough, the whole floor was Chinese and Russian. I am sure that they were all quite competent and good people, but my previous pay rate was twice what the floor supervisor's supervisor made. While he walked me to the door, we ran into an American who spent the elevator ride yelling at him that the delivery time table for some feature was not soon enough. Gives a different meaning to the phrase "jobs that American's won't do."
     
    #15     May 13, 2011
  6. Bad credit

    It's worse than a murder rap when it comes to getting hired.
     
    #16     May 13, 2011
  7. MGJ

    MGJ

    Where I live (408 / 650 / 831 / 510), it's alma-mater bias. If the hiring manager has a Ph.D from Stanford and yours is from Berkeley, GOODBYE! Same is true in the other direction: if HM is a Cal-Bear Ph.D and you are not, GTFO. And God forbid, if you come to an interview in this part of the USA wearing a Brass Rat, FY GTFO DIAF.

    So, do your research beforehand and don't waste your time on impossible missions.
     
    #17     May 13, 2011
  8. racial discrimination, and ethnic discrimination before that.

    150 years ago, the Irish men had to dig ditches and build railroads, the Irish women had to be housemaids.

    Years ago, the Jewish people had to setup their own hospitals because the other white people refused to hire them after they graduated from medical schools.

    Banks? No, they didn't want Jews. So the Jewish people set up their own banks, including Lehman Brothers. The rest is history on Wall Street.

    Today, an Asian can hardly get a job in the federal/state government.

    Every McDonald's I went to, blacks worked behind the counter. You go and figure out why.
     
    #18     May 13, 2011
  9. Other


    I won't post my comments because of karma and it's definitely not true for all, but there are some.
     
    #19     May 13, 2011
  10. zdreg

    zdreg

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    Saturday May 14th 2011
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    Rules for fools
    The terrible threat of unlicensed interior designers
    May 12th 2011 | from the print edition


    IN 1941 Franklin Roosevelt added two new items to America’s ancestral freedoms of speech and worship: freedom from fear and freedom from want. Today’s politicians offer a far more generous menu: freedom from unlicensed hair-cutters, freedom from cowboy flower-arrangers and, most important of all, freedom from rogue interior designers. What is the point of enjoying freedom from fear or want, after all, if you cannot enjoy freedom from poorly co-ordinated colour schemes?

    In the 1950s, when organisation man ruled, fewer than 5% of American workers needed licences. Today, after three decades of deregulation, the figure is almost 30%. Add to that people who are preparing to obtain a licence or whose jobs involve some form of certification and the share is 38%. Other rich countries impose far fewer fetters than the land of the free. In Britain only 13% of workers need licences (though that has doubled in 12 years).

    Some occupations clearly need to be licensed. Nobody wants to unleash amateur doctors and dentists on the public, or untrained tattoo artists for that matter. But, as the Wall Street Journal has doggedly pointed out, America’s Licence Raj has extended its tentacles into occupations that pose no plausible threat to health or safety—occupations, moreover, that are governed by considerations of taste rather than anything that can be objectively measured by licensing authorities. The list of jobs that require licences in some states already sounds like something from Monty Python—florists, handymen, wrestlers, tour guides, frozen-dessert sellers, firework operatives, second-hand booksellers and, of course, interior designers—but it will become sillier still if ambitious cat-groomers and dog-walkers get their way.

    Related topics
    Florida
    United States
    Arts, entertainment and media
    Culture and lifestyle
    Design
    Getting a licence can be time-consuming. Want to become a barber in California? That will require studying the art of cutting and blow-drying for almost a year. Want to work in the wig trade in Texas? You will need to take 300 hours of classes and pass both written and practical exams. Alabama obliges manicurists to sit through 750 hours of instruction before taking a practical exam. Florida will not let you work as an interior designer unless you complete a four-year university degree and a two-year apprenticeship and pass a two-day examination.

    America’s Licence Raj crushes would-be entrepreneurs. Consider three people who come from very different states and occupations. Jestina Clayton is an African hair-braider with 23 years of experience. But the Utah Barber, Cosmetologist/Barber, Esthetician, Electrologist and Nail Technician Licensing Board told her that she cannot practise her craft unless she first obtains a licence—which means spending up to $18,000 on 2,000 hours of study, none of it devoted to African hair-braiding.

    Justin Brown is an abbot at a Benedictine abbey that supplements its meagre income by making and selling simple wooden coffins. But the Louisiana Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors has ordered him to “cease and desist”. Heaven knows what harm a corpse might suffer from an unlicensed coffin. Barbara Vanderkolk Gardner runs a flourishing interior-design business in New Jersey. But when she tried to expand into Florida, the state’s Board of Architecture and Interior Design ordered her to delete all references to “interior design” from her website and stop offering “interior design services” in the Sunshine State.

    The cost of all this pettifoggery is huge—unless, that is, you are a member of one of the cartels that pushes for pettifogging rules or an employee of one of the bureaucratic bodies charged with enforcing them. Morris Kleiner of the University of Minnesota calculates that licensing boosts the income of licensees by about 15%. In other words, it has about the same impact on wages as membership of a trade union does. (Trade unionists who are also protected by licences enjoy a 24% boost to their hourly wages.) Mr Kleiner also argues that licensing slows job-creation: by comparing occupations that are regulated in some states but not in others he found that job growth between 1990 and 2000 was 20% higher in unregulated occupations than in regulated ones.

    The Institute for Justice, a free-market pressure group, argues that this is only the beginning of the Raj’s sins. The patchwork of regulations makes it hard for people to move from state to state. The burden of regulations falls most heavily on ethnic minorities (who are less likely to have educational qualifications) and on women (who might want to return to work after raising their children). States that demand that funeral directors must also qualify as embalmers, for example, have 24% fewer female funeral directors than those that don’t.

    Uncle Sam will save you from bad feng shui

    You might imagine that Americans would be up in arms about all this. After all, the Licence Raj embodies the two things that Americans are supposed to be furious about: the rise of big government and the stalling of America’s job-creating machine. You would be wrong. Florida’s legislature recently debated a bill to remove licensing requirements from 20 occupations, including hair-braiding, interior design and teaching ballroom-dancing. For a while it looked as if the bill would sail through: Florida has been a centre of tea-party agitation and both chambers have Republican majorities. But the people who care most about this issue—the cartels of incumbents—lobbied the loudest. One predicted that unlicensed designers would use fabrics that might spread disease and cause 88,000 deaths a year. Another suggested, even more alarmingly, that clashing colour schemes might adversely affect “salivation”. In the early hours of May 7th the bill was defeated. If Republican majorities cannot pluck up the courage to challenge a cartel of interior designers when Florida’s unemployment rate is more than 10%, what hope has America? The Licence Raj may be here to stay

    economist may14,2011
     
    #20     May 13, 2011