Nursing industry desperate to find new hires

An AP story reports labor shortages in nursing.

Follow the link to read the story (there's a copyright on the story

Jobs are there, but skilled workers aren't

by Barrie Barber | The Saginaw News
Friday February 08, 2008, 8:49 PM

Tens of thousands of jobs go wanting in Michigan because workers don't have the skills for nursing, healthcare and advanced manufacturing positions, a state labor and economic leader says.

A job retraining initiative dubbed No Worker Left Behind aims to end that for unemployed or underemployed workers, said Keith W. Cooley, director of the state Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

In an interview with The Saginaw News Editorial Board, Cooley said Friday the agency has asked for $40 million to retrain up to 100,000 workers and $10 million more to train 3,000 nursing students and 500 nursing faculty members during the next three years.

"We have got to invest in our workers," he said. "We cannot allow them to be left in the lurch."

The state has earmarked about $37 million in federal job retraining funds to the No Worker Left Behind initiative, but Cooley said the agency wants to add state dollars to do more.

The agency director was in Saginaw to mark the opening of the department's Unemployment Insurance Agency's Remote Initial Claims Center, a 150-employee site at 999 S. Washington. The call center, which handles unemployment insurance claims, relocated this fall from the Saginaw Centre, 310 Johnson. Saginaw Future Inc. handed the agency a recognition award for keeping the jobs in the city.

Since 2000, Michigan has lost more than 400,000 jobs, mostly in manufacturing, to foreign competition, outsourcing and technological automation on the assembly line.

The state had the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 7.6 percent in December; the Saginaw-Saginaw Township metro area marked a 7.4 percent jobless rate for the same period.

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm has called on lawmakers to fund the new job growth strategies. Along with jobs, Granholm in her State of the State address last month said education, affordable health care and safe cities are keys to attracting employers.

Saginaw Future President and Chief Executive Officer JoAnn T. Crary said the Saginaw Valley has unfilled high-skilled jobs in health care and computer-aided manufacturing, and in skilled trades such as chemical operators and welders.

"As far as this region goes, we can always use more training dollars," she said.

The No Worker Left Behind initiative would pay up to $5,000 a year for two years to cover college tuition or technical training in high-growth regional jobs or entrepreneurial skills. Workers must take a Michigan Works skills assessment test, earn a family income of less than $40,000 a year, have graduated from high school at least two years ago, are not full-time college students or remain unemployed or have received a termination or layoff notice.

Like the governor, Cooley said the alternative energy industry expansion is critical. Hemlock Semiconductor Corp.'s search for its next expansion site beyond a $1 billion plan in the works in Thomas Township is "on our radar screen," he said.

"We don't want to lose that," said Cooley, a former chief executive officer of Focus Hope in Detroit and a one-time General Motors Corp. engineer.

HSC manufactures one-third of the world's supply of polycrystalline silicon, a super pure rock-like material used in electronics and solar cells. It expects to double production in Thomas Township by 2010.

To give employers a bigger incentive, the state could loosen its grip in some areas outside of job safety regulations and retraining, said Veronica Horn, executive vice president at the Saginaw County Chamber of Commerce.

"What we need in this state is a lighter regulatory burden on companies ... all the way around," she said.

Cooley said the Great Lakes State's effort to attract and retain employers would gain more traction if it had "one-stop shopping" to handle the multitude of issues employers confront with state permits.

The state has made progress: The agency has dropped the time it takes to process permits to an average of 183 days from 430, he said.

"That's a big change, but we don't think it's enough," he said. "I'd like to see it go down to 30 days."

Needed, employable talent

New York Sees 3% Drop in Manufacturing Jobs According to State Industrial Directory's 12-Month Report

Job Growth Continues: Small Business Hiring Up 3%

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U.S. labor market slows down, says survey

Don't Forget - GIA Career Fair NYC Is This Week

Industrial Directory's 12-Month Report Shows Delaware Manufacturing Jobs Down Half Percent

Manufacturing Lost 18,000 Jobs In June

Published by Ron Pereira Filed under Manufacturing

If you are American and want a feel good story this ain’t the one… so please come back tomorrow and I will try to do better. Anyhow, I saw this article the other day and didn’t have time to comment on it until tonight.

The gist of this sad story is:
U.S. employers added 132,000 jobs in June according to a report July 6 that pointed to solid growth in the world’s biggest economy. However manufacturing lost 18,000 jobs.

Whenever I hear statements like this I immediately go on a hunt for the data since many times reporters over react to plain old common cause variation.

So tonight after some digging around on the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics website I accessed the actual data and created the graph to the left. I took the last few years manufacturing employment data.

In this case, my fellow Americans, the trend is not our friend.

On the BLS website you can also create your own graphs so I took the last 10 years worth of manufacturing employment data to see what I could learn.

Yikes!

It seems that little recession was a real bugger after all. And on the bright side of things the last few years don’t seem quite as bad when you put it into this perspective. Scary (and dangerous) how we can rationalize things with pictures.

Morale of the story is simple. American manufacturing companies need to wake up and get on board with lean manufacturing and six sigma or our kids will one day ask, “Grandpa, what were those factory things like back in the day?”

Interpreting The Employment Data

Jeff Miller submits: Today's payroll employment report showed solid job gains as well as upward revisions to prior months.

Econocator has a very nice summary of viewpoints, well worth the look. It does not include the (predictable) Doug Kass viewpoint, described on CNBC's Kudlow show, that these were all government, health and restaurant jobs, actually calling into question cyclical economic strength.
Before the report was released, Barry Ritholtz did a preview (both on RealMoney and The Big Picture) where he raised some interesting questions about how to reconcile the reported job gains, low unemployment, and little wage pressure.

Take a look at Barry's good questions.

Here is the response that I posted on RealMoney (subscription required, and worth it for active traders):

As usual, Barry raises some good questions related to this month's non-farm payroll report. He is especially interested in the apparent discrepancies between the payroll report and the unemployment rate. We'll see a parade of (non-vacationing) economists today along with weekend commentary parsing the data. Much of the interest is in what the implications are for future Fed policy.

When I want to predict institutional policy, I always look for information about its members.

How FOMC members look at employment is more interesting to me than how outside economists or pundits see it.

With that in mind, I see one factor that might help answer Barry's question. Barry "sets the bar" for required job growth at a monthly gain of 150K jobs -- needed just to keep up with population growth and inflation. That 150K growth rate has been a traditional rule of thumb.

The Fed members no longer share that view. Because boomers are taking early retirement, the labor force growth dynamics have changed. The estimates of necessary growth include 110K (Fed staff via Bies in November), 130K (Bernanke one year ago), and 100K (Moskow last August). This suggests that this year's job gains, averaging over 145K for the first half, indicate solid growth.

The decision to take early retirement is also not a binary one. I'm at an age where I have many friends who have retired from one job, yet still do some work. They often do not show up in a payroll job, but would say they are employed if asked in a survey. If they do not work, they drop out of the labor force. If compensation gets high enough, they re-enter. The same is true of young people choosing between education and work. This kind of flexibility in labor force participation relieves some of the wage pressure.

Fed members, both individually and collectively, seem pretty satisfied with how their policy has worked so far. There is no reason to expect an imminent change.

Later in the day, Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal had a nice analysis, citing several sources on labor force participation. This is quite consistent with our argument.

Conclusion
There is a huge error band in payroll employment numbers. Barry's questions are good ones. The birth/death model adds jobs based upon the experience from the last few years. This could change. We will not see the "benchmark revisions" until October.

Having acknowledged this, the other economic indicators that relate to payrolls, described in our own preview, suggest that the economy and employment growth are still quite strong.

Anyone trying to find weakness in this report should be addressing the strength in the ISM manufacturing and service indicators, the yield curve, the Baltic Dry Freight indicator, Dr. Copper, the weekly jobless claims, and other economic measures formerly cited when they supported their viewpoints.

As usual, at "A Dash" we try to look for the best evidence. In particular, we try to understand how the Fed Open Market Committee looks at the data. There is a very good reason for this.

They set the policy!

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Tight Labor Market Forces up Wages for Summer Jobs (Mannitoba)

Job Opportunities in China

For New York, Big Job Growth Is in Home Care

By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: May 25, 2007
New York City’s economy has been booming, with unemployment dropping to historic lows and Wall Street getting most of the credit. But the typical new worker in the city is not a pinstriped investment banker or a corporate lawyer. She is a home health aide like Vivienne P. Smith.

Ms. Smith, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, cooks for and dresses elderly patients in their Brooklyn homes. Though she is a member of a large labor union, she earns just $7.50 an hour and receives no health insurance or other benefits.

In many ways, home-care aides are the garment workers of the modern New York economy. The working conditions may be better, but the low pay, skimpy benefits and weak prospects for upward mobility tend to draw mostly immigrant women with few marketable skills.
Jobs like Ms. Smith’s, poor-paying positions in health care and social services, have accounted for most of the growth in employment in the city in the last 15 years. Indeed, without the rapid health care growth, the number of jobs in the city would have declined since 1990, according to figures compiled by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The health care and social assistance sector, which includes not only hospitals, nursing homes and doctor’s offices, but also day care centers and food banks, accounts for a growing share of jobs across the country — about 13 percent of all American jobs in 2005. But that is still a far smaller share than in some parts of New York City. In Brooklyn and the Bronx, the sector now supplies about one-third of all private-sector jobs and wages, more than double the contribution of any other industry, the bureau’s data show.

“In terms of wages, the driving force in the New York City economy has been Wall Street,” said Michael Dolfman, the regional commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “But in terms of employment, the driving force in the city economy has been the health care and social assistance sector.”

The number of jobs in financial services has shrunk in the last 15 years, even as average pay has soared in that industry.

The relative growth of health care employment in New York and other big American cities is a result of the decline of manufacturing and the aging of the population, said Mark V. Pauly, a health-care economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, personal preferences and financial considerations have fostered a shift toward caring for the frail and elderly at home instead of in institutions, Mr. Pauly said.

Many of the patients of the home-care aides now working in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are retired from the factories that formed the streetscapes of those boroughs half a century ago. With many of those shuttered plants having been transformed into high-priced housing, health services are playing larger roles in the local economy.

That growing dependence on a single sector worries some economists, particularly because its fortunes are largely tied to government programs like Medicare.

“I look at that and I think it’s expanding a sweatshop form of work with very low wages, very few benefits,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization financed in part by unions, referring to the rising employment in home care.
For most of those jobs, wages are low and rising slowly. In Brooklyn’s growing health-care sector, home-care employment more than quadrupled to 12,160 jobs between 1990 and 2005, the last full year for which data was available. On average, those jobs pay $27,413 a year.

Ms. Smith, 55, said she would not be able to survive on her meager pay if she were not living with relatives. She started out working full weeks and even some overtime. But lately, her employer, Partners in Care, a subsidiary of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, has assigned her just one four-hour shift per day, she said. That amounts to just $30 a day, before taxes and the cost of her two-bus commute across Brooklyn.

“Sometimes, my pay just goes to buying something to eat and paying my fare,” said Ms. Smith, who added that she was no better off financially than when she was working in factories in Jamaica. “When you’re small and you’re talking about going abroad, the thought of it gets you excited. Then, when you come and see for yourself, you say, ‘Oh dear, it’s just the same.’ ”

Kevin Finnegan, a lawyer for the home-care division of 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, the health care workers’ union, said home health aides were paid less in New York City than in most other parts of the country.

“I believe that is a direct result of this huge immigrant population that is willing to work for lower wages,” he said. “For the same reason, the garment industry was here.”

Mr. Finnegan, who helped the union organize the home-care aides working for Partners in Care, said that in some places upstate, home-care aides had been able to demand as much as $12 an hour. “You leave New York City and the rates go up,” he said.

But Mr. Finnegan said some relief was on the way for many of the 43,000 home-care workers who are represented by the union. The contract with Partners in Care calls for raises to as much as $10 an hour this year, he said.

Karlyne A. Mills is dubious. A veteran home-care aide who immigrated from Haiti, Ms. Mills, who has worked at the job for 13 years, is still earning $8.30 an hour almost a year after she was supposed to get a raise to $9, she said. She receives about $300 before taxes for working three 12-hour shifts a week caring for a Brooklyn woman who needs to be bathed, fed and lifted in and out of her wheelchair.

“It’s getting a little frustrating waiting because we’re working hard,” said Ms. Mills, who lives in her mother’s home in East New York. “From the time that I became a home health aide, I always wondered why this job is so important and why our pay is so low.”

But Ms. Mills, 43, said she stayed with the work because she enjoyed helping people. For the first six years, she earned just $6 an hour, she said. For most of her career, she has gone without health insurance coverage for her daughter, now a sophomore in college, or her son, a high school senior, she said.

Having to take her children to a hospital as charity cases whenever they needed to see a doctor was “very horrible,” Ms. Mills said. She would like a job that provides health insurance for her whole family, but at the moment, she said, she would settle for that raise to $10 an hour.

Jay Conolly, director of human resources for Partners in Care, said the pay raises hinged on the release by the State Legislature of an additional $100 million in funding that was recently approved. Mr. Conolly said his company wanted to keep its workers happy because “we are in a growth mode, and the demand for home care has never been stronger.”

That growth should continue for years, said Mr. Pauly of the Wharton School, unless the government sharply curtails spending on health care.

“People who want to get control of health care spending should be careful what they wish for,” Mr. Pauly said. “Spending less on health care would actually be harmful to the local economy because it’s a good source of jobs.”

Job market looks good for college grads

By Tim Barker
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/03/2007
To understand the strength of the labor market facing this year's crop of graduating college students, just scroll through the advertisements posted on university job boards.At any given time, the site run by the placement office at Southern Illinois University's Edwardsville campus has more than 650.

"Prior to this year, we would have been happy with 300," said Jean Paterson, the office's director.

It's a good time to be among the thousands of area college students being set loose into the real world. As always, some degrees will get more attention than others.

But in general, the nation's employers are planning to do a lot of hiring — nearly 20 percent more than last year, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

While there are no figures available for the St. Louis area, placement offices here say on-campus recruitment has been brisk.

"It seems like hiring is pretty good right now," said Mark Smith, director of the career center at Washington University.Many of the degrees with the highest demand — information sciences, computer science and marketing, for example — go hand-in-hand with the region's growth.

Professional and business services, which includes a variety of white-collar professions are among the top jobs-producing sectors locally.There probably isn't a single field of study that will guarantee a job. But a degree in accounting is the best one to be armed with, according to the colleges and employers association.That's not a surprise to James Castellano, chairman of RubinBrown LLP, a St. Louis accounting firm.

"If someone is interested in business, I can't think of a better start than accounting," said Castellano, whose firm plans to hire as many as 20 graduates this year to cope with turnover and growth of the practice.Top students will choose from a variety of offers. Signing bonuses will be common.

Just ask Washington University senior Andrew Mascarenhas, 21, who accepted an offer late last year from Ernst & Young LLP in St. Louis. It came with a cash bonus.The future accountant isn't offering any specifics. But he says the money has come in handy while decorating his apartment.

"On a college student's budget, a bonus is a significant infusion of cash," Mascarenhas said. "We've been spending it on furniture and that sort of thing."Of course, not everyone wants to be an accountant.

Elvedin Arnautovic, 29, is graduating with a degree in marketing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He's had several interviews, but so far the offers have been in sales — something he'd prefer to avoid. With a full-time job as an interpreter at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, the Bosnian native wasn't able to take an internship during his junior year. It's a mistake he wishes he could fix.

"No one asks me about my GPA," Arnautovic said. "They want to know about my experience. What have you done? What can you show us?

"Those internships — while providing valuable experience for the students — are an increasingly important key to hiring top graduates, particularly for companies in the more competitive fields.

Clark Davis, chief administrative officer for Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum Inc. in St. Louis, said his company is looking to hire as many as two dozen workers, half of them college graduates. The company also will add a dozen interns this summer, giving the architectural firm an early look at next year's talent pool.

"There is a competition for talent among design and construction companies that we haven't seen for a long time," said Davis, who serves as a mentor to students through the Regional Business Council's Higher Education Collaboration. "It's pretty fair to say that most of us are in a pretty serious hiring mode.

"There are signs, however, that change could be coming.

John Challenger, a Chicago-based workplace expert with Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said hiring has been expanding since summer of 2003. But trouble in the residential housing market and other areas may be hard to shake off.

"I do think the economy is slowing," Challenger said. "That will affect the job market for several years."But that's not likely to hurt this year's graduates — many of them have only themselves to blame for not yet finding work.

"There are those that just wait and wait," said Paterson of Southern Illinois University.For proof of this, look again to the placement office's job board. Traditionally, the busiest day of the year for traffic is the day after graduation.

"That's when Mom and Dad start asking what they're going to be doing next," Paterson said.

tbarker@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8350

ompanies plan to grab 20 percent more college graduates this year than last.

Here's a look at which bachelor's degrees are in the highest demand:
1. Accounting
2. Business administration/management
3. Computer science
4. Electrical engineering
5. Mechanical engineering
6. Information sciences and systems
7. Marketing/marketing management
8. Computer engineering
9. Civil engineering
10. Economics/finance

Source: Job Outlook 2007, National Association of Colleges and Employers

April, 2007

While suffering with sciatica for most of the past 3 weeks, I have been out of my office but still speaking with clients, reading emails and news, responding to requests and such.

It has slowed me down (I couldn't walk much for more than a week), yet throughout, I couldn't help but notice the very clear message of labor shortages for skilled workers.

Teachers, accountants, computer professionals and many more are finding that firms are clamoring to hire people with their experience. March unemployment added 180000 new jobs (I view unemployment numbers as trend lines , rather than concrete data; even so, we are now trending strongly).

I have been pretty active in some online discussions on www.ere.net between corporate and third party recruiters and am finding hr professionals discussing the possibility of using sign on bonuses to attract talent in several surprising industries (building services and construction).

I spoke a with a search professional from a major consulting firm who told me of the struggle to find Partner and Director level professionals for one of their practices; another , with a different firm shares more and more orders as their firm explodes with new business; a third just keeps sending out 50 new positions a day at a minimum.

That's 50 completely different positions per day, not 50 repeat positions.

H-1b applications for 2007 were filled within a day of being made available--65000 people will be absorbed into the US economy and we are still pleading for more.

Labor shortages and, in particular, skilled labor shortages offer the biggest threat (after terrorism, of course) to the US economy. In the future, shortages will force mergers and cause far more more havoc than the sub-prime scares that we are currently experiencing in the stock market.

Jeff Altman
The Big Game Hunter
Concepts in Staffing
thebiggamehunter@cisny.com

© 2007 all rights reserved.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, is Managing Director with Concepts in Staffing, a New York search firm, He has successfully assisted many corporations identify management leaders and staff in many disciplines since 1971. He is a certified leader of the ManKind Project, a not for profit organization that assists men with life issues, and a practicing psychotherapist.

To receive a daily digest of positions emailed to you, search for openings that The Big Game Hunter is working on, to use Jeff’s free job lead search engine, Job Search Universe, to subscribe to Jeff’s free job hunting ezine, “Head Hunt Your Next Job, or his staffing ezine, “Natural Selection”, or to learn about his VIP program, go to http://www.jeffaltman.com. Job Search Universe is also available at www.jobsearchuniverse.com To add your firm’s career page to “The Universe” email the url to jobsearchuniverse@gmail.com.

If you would like Jeff and his firm to assist you with hiring staff, or if you would like help with a strategic job change, send an email to him at thebiggamehunter@cisny.com (If you’re looking for a new position, include your resume).

If you have a question that you would like me to answer pertaining to job hunting or hiring, email it to him at:
thebiggamehunter@gmail.com

Midwest hit hardest by mass layoffs

By Kristin McAllister
Staff Writer
Thursday, March 22, 2007

The Midwest took the greatest hit for mass layoff actions for the month of February, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued Thursday.

Mass layoffs entail 50 or more workers beginning in a given month, regardless of the duration of the layoff. They are seasonally adjusted and measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month.

From a state level, Pennsylvania had the largest over-the-year increase in the number of initial claims — 7,919 — mostly due to layoffs in transportation equipment manufacturing.
Next were the states of Michigan (4,219), Wisconsin (3,514), Ohio (1,403) and Illinois (1,299).
The largest over-the-year decreases in claims occurred in Minnesota (-1,685) and Kentucky (-1,320).

Among the four census regions, the highest number of initial claims in February due to mass layoffs was in the Midwest — 26,603.

Transportation equipment manufacturing and specialty trade contractors industries together accounted for 37 percent of all mass layoff initial claims in the Midwest.

The West had the second largest number of initial claims among the regions — 23,971 — followed by the Northeast, (18,272), and the South, (17,850).

The number of initial claimants in mass layoffs increased over the year in all four regions.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-9338 or kmcallister@DaytonDailyNews.com.