Comment by cantastoria | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cantastoria | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see what the socioeconomic/educational attainment breakdown of the long-term unemployed looks like (Link anyone?).

I think the assumption is that most of people in this group are unskilled high-school drop outs but I wonder how many of them "have some college" or a degree and are just unwilling to "lower themselves" to working on an oil pipeline or any other kind of work associated with being blue collar. The assumption that people will take any job they can get, at least in my experience, is just plain wrong. For instance (I know this is just anecdotal) but I know quite a few people in NYC who attended elite schools that are perfectly happy to collect unemployment while they wait for a high prestige job opening (e.g. "I'm waiting for the New Yorker to have a job opening"). The thought that a government grant would get these people to go work in an oil field in South Dakota is absurd most of them are horrified at the thought of leaving Brooklyn. I was thinking of this article from Mike Rowe:

http://profoundlydisconnected.com/cnn-viewer-has-questions/

"Right now, in the manufacturing sector alone, 600,000 jobs are currently available."

If that is indeed the case there is something else going on.

Unfortunately, if you do take a job that's "beneath" what your qualifications would suggest, you'll sometimes wind up torpedoing your career prospects going forward.

I think a developer who was "consulting" or "freelancing" (read: unemployed) for the past six months would get more callbacks than one who'd been working at McDonald's, or needed to telecommute from North Dakota.

I suppose you can mitigate that effect by leaving it off your CV, but working a "crappy" job is still going to take away time and energy that could otherwise be spent improving your skills for your desired career.

This is the typical response (and there is evidence to back it up) but then are these people really deserving of long term unemployment benefits? If you've been unemployed for five years and I say to you "hey there are jobs in xyz" and your response is that taking that job will "ruin your long-term career prospects" (it's almost funny) maybe unemployment is no longer serving it's intended functions (as a stop-gap between jobs).

> maybe unemployment is no longer serving it's intended functions (as a stop-gap between jobs).

That's basically true. I'm of the opinion that we need a real basic/guaranteed income program, because what we have right now is a terrible hodgepodge of TANF + unemployment + SSDI (http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/) which only serve to paper over the fact that we have more people than there are jobs.

This problem will only get worse in the future as automation hollows out the middle of the labor market.

At what wage? That's what I say to those claiming that hundreds of thousands of jobs are unfilled in any sector, be it IT consulting firms clamoring for h1-bs or agriculture firms looking for cheap fruit pickers.

Ok but if your problem is that no one will look at your resume because you haven't worked in five years surely one of these jobs will solve that at the very least.

If immigrants can survive on (and desire) the income provided by the jobs which you deem to be 'low wage', why should Americans disdain and forgo the positions?

Put another way, you seem to suggest that because people cannot find jobs they want, they should be considered unemployable; Why is this true?

I think it generally helps to follow the money. The big money is in big business increasing the bottom line by lowering wages in the economy. They can do that by increasing the labor pool enough so that there is a critical mass of workers that will accept employment at a lower wage than the current market prevailing wage. That is why the minimum wage, for example was legislated in to action.

That is the commonly stated reason for the enactment of the minimum wage, the so-called 'baptist's reason' (in the bootleggers and baptists paradigm [1]). Historically the minimum wage has been used to discriminate against minorities and other targeted groups by making their wages higher than their value to an employer[2], this would be the so-called 'bootlegger's reason'.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists [2] http://www.amazon.com/State-Against-Blacks-Walter-Williams/d...

edit: if you follow the money on the bootleggers side, you will see that unions and companies with high capitalization support increasing minimum wages.

Companies with high capitalization? What do you mean by that?

Some corporations support raising the minimum wage only in the sense that it would bankrupt their competitors business models. (cf Costco vs Wal-Mart). Although as someone in support of a higher minimum wage I don't see that necessarily as a bad thing.

Unions are less than 7% of the private sector workforce and shrinking, their influence has been quashed, for the most part ever since Reagan dismantled PATCO in 81.

Economically, a minimum wage sets a price floor for labor. At higher levels it also can induce demand by increasing the velocity of money through the bottom rungs of the labor force. Especially since the poor spend a much higher % of their income than the wealthy do.

And with respect to your [2], I counter with [0]. Minimum wage actually has very little if any empirical affect on unemployment.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Funnel_Graph_of_Estimated_...

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