Jobs and Skills: the Current Mismatch

For at least 18 months, I have been arguing that the United States economy is going through a transition period that is more than just a cyclical slowdown and recovery. My argument has been that the economy is going through a period of restructuring that will take an extended amount of time to work out all the changes that are necessary.

As a consequence, “blunt-edge” efforts to stimulate jobs by means of the fiscal policy of the federal government will not achieve a great deal of success.

The reason for this in many cases is that the fiscal stimulus of the past 50 years has caused companies to keep aging physical capital in use and has resulted in these companies hiring people to perform jobs related to “legacy” technology.

The evidence I have provided for this is the increasing amount of unused capacity in the manufacturing realm and the growth in the number of employable Americans that are under-employed. To be under-employed, one is either unemployed, not fully employed and looking for full-time work, or discouraged and not seeking a job.

I have argued that this is not unlike the 1930s when the United States economy was going through a transition period in which jobs and employment were shifting from rural and agricultural areas to cities and industrial areas. The restructuring that took place accelerated during World War II and did not really calm down until the 1950s and 1960s.

Two reports came out toward the end of last week that support my claim of an economy that is in the process of restructuring. The first was an article by Motoko Rich that appeared in the New York Times on Friday July 2, with the title “Jobs Go Begging as Gap is Exposed in Worker Skills.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/business/economy/02manufacturing.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=motoko%20rich&st=cse) Rich writes that “Plenty of people are applying for the jobs. The problem, the companies say, is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.” The subheading to the article reads that “Shifts in Manufacturing are Leaving Many as Unemployable.”

The second report came from the Labor Department on Friday, July 3. Although the unemployment rate declined in May to 9.5 % from 9.7% in April, this was because the labor force shrank as more people left the labor force than were added to payrolls: the labor force shrunk by 0.3% while the number of individuals employed dropped by only 0.2% (due to the loss in jobs connected with the collection of Census data).

The official statistics report that the “underemployment” rate has been in the 17% range for the past year or so. I estimate that, currently, about one out of every four or five individuals that are in the employable age group are under-employed. The reason is that there is a tremendous mis-match between what employers need to be competitive in the future and the pool of skills and experience that are available in the labor market. Products are being made differently now than they were several years ago and this trend will continue. The current downturn has provided additional justification for manufacturers to make the changes that they need to make.

Why do they need this added justification?

Well, over the past 50 years, every time there was a recession (and even in periods when there was not a recession), the federal government provided fiscal stimulus to get people “back-to-work.” Back-to-work, however, meant putting people back into jobs that they were in before the workers were laid off. This is what the government wanted to happen.

However, putting people back to work in “legacy” jobs did not contribute to modernization and improved productivity. It did increase employment and reduce unemployment which is what the federal government wanted to achieve.

Now, businesses can use the excuse of the extreme downturn in the economy to justify the changes in who is hired to meet the reality of changes in training, skill levels, and experience that have occurred. And, this transition will not be completed overnight.

We see the same thing in the use of physical capital in the United States. Since the 1960s, the capacity utilization of manufacturers has declined steadily. As with the increase in the underemployed, the employment of the physical capital in the United States has fallen over time.

In January 1965, American manufacturers were working at 89.4% of capacity. The next peak in manufacturing usage (capacity utilization is very cyclical) came in February 1973 at 88.8% of capacity. The following peaks were: December 1978 at 86.6% of capacity; January 1989 at 85.2% of capacity; December 1997 at 84.7% of capacity; and April 2007 at 81.7% of capacity.

Note that the troughs of the cycles in capacity utilization also fell since the 1960s. In December 1982, manufacturers in the United States worked at 70.9% of capacity and in June 2009, they worked at 68.2%. Currently, manufacturers are working at 74.1% of capacity.

In essence, businesses in the United States have been utilizing less and less human and physical capital over the past 50 years relative to the amounts of these productive factors that have been available. And, the policy makers just don’t seem to get it.

From Rich, in the article cited above, “Christina D. Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the skills shortages reported by employers stem largely from a long-term structural shift in manufacturing, which should not be confused with the recent downturn. ‘I do think that manufacturing can come back to what it was before the recession,’ she said.” So, manufacturing will return to the new, lower level of capacity utilization that was achieved at its previous peak level, roughly 82% of capacity. And, this is good?

My guess is that capacity utilization will hit, maybe, 80% at the next peak. We are still talking about 20% of the manufacturing capital of the United States being underemployed, right in line with the 20% to 25% of employable labor in the United States being underemployed.

The fiscal stimulus proposed by “fundamentalist” Keynesian economists will not do the job. Additional, “blunt-edge” governmental expenditures may alleviate some of the current worker distress, but at the cost of postponing the adjustments that need to be made to restructure the economy, the restructuring that is now going on.

The problem with the “fundamentalist” Keynesian view is that it is constructed from a short term perspective. The basic attitude is that which is attributed to Keynes: “In the long run we are all dead.” This approach leads to a focus on only “current” problems. What is not explicitly stated is that we will deal with the longer-term problems when they become current problems.

The difficulty with this: the longer-term problems may require a different “medicine” than did the short-run problems.

Well, one could argue that the longer-term problems have become current. The short-term solution of forcing many companies to continue to employ people in “legacy” jobs and to continue to use “legacy” plant and equipment has resulted in higher and higher rates of worker under-employment and lower and lower rates of manufacturing capacity utilization.

Just more of the same does not seem to be an adequate answer.