Herman Cain: It's Your Fault if You're Unemployed

[charlou]

...and for every available job in the US there are 4.7 unemployed. It's fine and dandy to say you need to apply for jobs, but if all available jobs were filled, you'd still have 11 million people out of work.

So? A five percent unemployment rate is desirable for an economy because it keeps the competition in the labor market robust and encourages workers to strive to keep their jobs. When employment nears 100 percent, workers tend to slack off and service suffers, to the detriment of the employer's ability to sell products and make a profit.

So for the economy to work, a significant percentage of the population MUST be stamped down to the bottom of the pile. What a wonderfully fair system.

That 5% (and I'm sure it is bigger) stamps themselves down to the bottom of the pile through such clever moves as dropping out of school or having a criminal record or simply being lazy and useless.

Oh no no no! This is completely leaving aside those that may be considered "lazy and useless" by arrogant fuckers who think some people deserve to be poor. - Seth is talking specifically about those who are trying their best to find work, and who therefore provide the "desirable competition" in the labour market.

Zing.

[Warren Dew]

...and for every available job in the US there are 4.7 unemployed. It's fine and dandy to say you need to apply for jobs, but if all available jobs were filled, you'd still have 11 million people out of work.

Source, please?

It's not that I doubt your veracity, it's that many times these statistics only look at newspaper "help wanted" ads and such. Most of the available jobs in the U.S. - the jobs at the top end and the bottom end - are not advertised that way. Upper end jobs use networking and professional recruiters; lower end jobs use networking or put a "help wanted - apply inside" sign in their window. Neither of these gets captured in the statistics.

[Warren Dew]

It's probably nearer 10% and they are born into such a shit environment you are going to have to be exceptional to climb out of it. You need to learn not to be lazy and useless from your parents and if you don't its extremely hard to learn that later.

However where I differ from the right wing nutters ( i despise the underclass as much as any libertarian I live with a lot of them) is I don't want these people rioting, starving on the streets , spreading the disease and generally making the environment unpleasant. So you give them relatively low levels of welfare to keep quiet

I'd be okay with welfare if (a) it wasn't set up to discourage people from working, and (b) it didn't encourage unemployable people to have yet another generation of children.

I don't despise them, either. In many ways, they are trapped by a system that is designed to keep them as captive votes and prevent them from working their way out.

[Tyrannical]

It's probably nearer 10% and they are born into such a shit environment you are going to have to be exceptional to climb out of it. You need to learn not to be lazy and useless from your parents and if you don't its extremely hard to learn that later.

However where I differ from the right wing nutters ( i despise the underclass as much as any libertarian I live with a lot of them) is I don't want these people rioting, starving on the streets , spreading the disease and generally making the environment unpleasant. So you give them relatively low levels of welfare to keep quiet

I'd be okay with welfare if (a) it wasn't set up to discourage people from working, and (b) it didn't encourage unemployable people to have yet another generation of children.

I don't despise them, either. In many ways, they are trapped by a system that is designed to keep them as captive votes and prevent them from working their way out.

I don't have a problem with the working poor receiving welfare, but working and poor should practically be an oxymoron. When a business does not provide a living wage, welfare is basically a corporate subsidy where the government pays part of the employee's wages in the form of assistance. What needs to happen is an environment where natural wage pressures cause wages to rise.
One of these ways is through tariffs, where cheap foreign labor is offset by the tax. Though prices would rise on goods, it may not be as dramatic as you think since shipping costs, production, and quality will all be positively affected. When tariffs are used to only offset the price of labor or lax environmental laws, the competitive spirit is still kept as it closer measures the true cost. There is little need for tariffs between first world nations as compliance and labor costs are similar.

[MrJonno]

I'd be okay with welfare if (a) it wasn't set up to discourage people from working, and (b) it didn't encourage unemployable people to have yet another generation of children.

Some people a few % of the population are so brain damaged from their upbringing (it happened in the first couple of years of life) that they are unemployable without massive amounts of money which would will still fail in most cases. Forget being literate or turning up on time a lot of the people around me really can barely talk. they grunt with the occassional swear word in between.

Your choices really are let them starve , riot or put them in prison getting them to work really is an utopian idea. Putting them anywhere near a job would reduce that companies productivity.


I will go for a radical suggestion , anyway who never wants to work a day in their lives can get £50 /$75 per week with an additional £10 if they agree to be sterilised , live in a government paid council estate/project with absolutely no obligation to ever work. The rest of us can get on with having a far higher quality of life by actually doing something with it. Some people may not think that is very ethical but its a lot more practical then pretending there will ever be jobs for everyone

[MattShizzle]

Enforcing immigration law wouldn't work. Not only are most US citizens not WILLING to work at the jobs illegal immigrants do, let alone for the wages they do it for (unless you want $10 a head lettuce you couldn't afford US wages) - most US citizens aren't anywhere close to being in good enough shape to be ABLE to do those jobs.

That is a myth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/fa ... .html?_r=1

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard.

Plenty more like that.

[Coito ergo sum]

Americans ARE willing to work at the jobs illegal immigrants do, and many of them do. In every industry, including industries like "lawn care maintenance" and "landscaping" and "trash collecting" and "cleaning services," -- traditionally viewed as the work of illegal immigrants - the vast majority of that work is done by US Citizens and the second largest group performing such services are legal immigrants.

Maybe its different in the US but the first threw jobs on that list are generally well paid and extremely hard to get into. Not quite sure what you mean by landscaping but don't they tend the some of money lawyers and doctors can earn. One of the common complains about trash(rubbish collecting) which I've seen in the US as well as in the US is that to get that sort of job you need to know the right people

In the US, the jobs that people say "Americans won't do," and that illegal aliens do, are yard work/landscaping jobs, cleaning offices/homes, and other such maintenance type work.

The myth that is fostered is that these types of jobs are only done by illegals. The reality is that the jobs people say illegals mostly do are mostly performed by Americans and legal immigrants. The only area where a majority, but not exclusively, immigrants do work would be in agriculture, but the vast majority of those workers are "legal" not "illegal" immigrants or legal non-immigrants.

[Coito ergo sum]

Enforcing immigration law wouldn't work. Not only are most US citizens not WILLING to work at the jobs illegal immigrants do, let alone for the wages they do it for (unless you want $10 a head lettuce you couldn't afford US wages) - most US citizens aren't anywhere close to being in good enough shape to be ABLE to do those jobs.

That is a myth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/fa ... .html?_r=1

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard.

Plenty more like that.

H-2 visa holders are legal, not illegal. That's the point I made. Your scurrilous allegation that people doing agricultural and other types of work are "illegal" is bigoted and false.

And, of course "some" folks won't do really hard work. But, more than 50 percent of farmworkers are citizens or legal residents of the United States http://www.migranthealth.org/index.php? ... &Itemid=30 (footnote 5 for citations to government statistics). I'll add that H-2 nonimmigrants are not "residents" of the US, and they are fully legal. The vast majority of non-citizen, and non-legal resident aliens working in the farm industry are, in fact, legal. Only a small percentage of farmworkers are illegal. So, in no sense of the word can it be said that "illegal aliens" do work Americans "won't" do.

So, again, keep your bigotry to yourself.

[Seth]

...and for every available job in the US there are 4.7 unemployed. It's fine and dandy to say you need to apply for jobs, but if all available jobs were filled, you'd still have 11 million people out of work.

So? A five percent unemployment rate is desirable for an economy because it keeps the competition in the labor market robust and encourages workers to strive to keep their jobs. When employment nears 100 percent, workers tend to slack off and service suffers, to the detriment of the employer's ability to sell products and make a profit.

So for the economy to work, a significant percentage of the population MUST be stamped down to the bottom of the pile. What a wonderfully fair system.

Who said life is fair?

Anyway, it's not a matter of "stamping" anyone down, people gravitate to the unemployment line naturally, all on their own. But their ability to find a job depends on the state of the economy, and the more vibrant the economy, the more people who can find jobs, as I pointed out earlier. There is no direct control of the economy by the government to keep a certain percentage of people unemployed, I merely point out that the economy functions most efficiently when there is about 5 percent unemployment. This provides a large enough pool of unemployed workers seeking jobs to keep wages (and therefore the prices of goods) from skyrocketing due to labor scarcity, but not so large that it's a drag on the economy to keep them from starving via government benefits.

More unemployment becomes a drag on the government, which raises taxes to pay unemployment and other welfare benefits, which causes a contraction in the economy due to higher production costs. Less unemployment drives consumer prices higher and cools the economy because scarce labor resources can command a higher price.

It's all about balance.

Oh, by the way, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website linked to the article you cited I did not find the graph in the article, but I didn't look very hard. However, I did find that the average national wage is about $23.00 per hour.

[JimC]

Tyrannical wrote:

No, I meant around 5% of the population falls into the lazy/stupid/criminal category. It is the current economic situation that is responsible for much of the hardship.
You can't have 100% employment because there are certain people no sane person would ever hire.

There is certainly a small group of people (less than 5% though, I think) who are very unlikely to get regular employment. For a good many, this is through no fault of their own. They may have a variety of physical and mental disabilities which rule them out of regular employment. Sure, you do have a small number of professional criminals, but many criminals will mix a certain amount of crime with part-time employment. The actual number who cynically and lazily refuse to work even though they could is a smaller sub-set still.

The fact is that in most countries there are a substantial number of people who want to work, and apply for jobs, but simply miss out because there are too many applicants for each job.

[Seth]

Tyrannical wrote:

No, I meant around 5% of the population falls into the lazy/stupid/criminal category. It is the current economic situation that is responsible for much of the hardship.
You can't have 100% employment because there are certain people no sane person would ever hire.

There is certainly a small group of people (less than 5% though, I think) who are very unlikely to get regular employment. For a good many, this is through no fault of their own. They may have a variety of physical and mental disabilities which rule them out of regular employment. Sure, you do have a small number of professional criminals, but many criminals will mix a certain amount of crime with part-time employment. The actual number who cynically and lazily refuse to work even though they could is a smaller sub-set still.

The fact is that in most countries there are a substantial number of people who want to work, and apply for jobs, but simply miss out because there are too many applicants for each job.

That's usually because they are looking for unskilled labor positions, where the available supply of labor always exceeds the number of jobs available. The solution, of course, is to educate yourself and increase your marketable skill set so that you are competing for jobs where there is a much lower ratio of qualified employees to jobs, and you may need to relocate in order to find a job market where your skill set is in demand.

[Warren Dew]

I don't have a problem with the working poor receiving welfare, but working and poor should practically be an oxymoron. When a business does not provide a living wage, welfare is basically a corporate subsidy where the government pays part of the employee's wages in the form of assistance. What needs to happen is an environment where natural wage pressures cause wages to rise.

"Poor" in U.S. usage basically means "anything less than rich". Expecting business to pay everyone enough that they are rich is simply not realistic. Not enough goods get produced for that.

[Warren Dew]

The vast majority of non-citizen, and non-legal resident aliens working in the farm industry are, in fact, legal. Only a small percentage of farmworkers are illegal. So, in no sense of the word can it be said that "illegal aliens" do work Americans "won't" do.

A quick web surf suggests that about 25% of all farm workers are here illegally:

Nearly a quarter of all farm workers are here illegally, and according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 17 percent of those cleaning the nations' offices and 12 percent preparing food in the country don't have legal work papers.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=5250150

Granted NPR is not the most reliable source, but given their liberal leanings, those numbers are probably lower than the reality rather than higher. If your numbers for citizen and legal resident farm workers are correct - and I have no reason to believe otherwise - then the arithmetic says that there are more foreign farm workers here illegally than on legal H2A visas.

[PsychoSerenity]

...and for every available job in the US there are 4.7 unemployed. It's fine and dandy to say you need to apply for jobs, but if all available jobs were filled, you'd still have 11 million people out of work.

So? A five percent unemployment rate is desirable for an economy because it keeps the competition in the labor market robust and encourages workers to strive to keep their jobs. When employment nears 100 percent, workers tend to slack off and service suffers, to the detriment of the employer's ability to sell products and make a profit.

So for the economy to work, a significant percentage of the population MUST be stamped down to the bottom of the pile. What a wonderfully fair system.

Who said life is fair?

Obviously life naturally often isn't fair. But the whole point of living in a society and having politics is to try and create a system that reduces the unfairness rather than one that exacerbates it. America was founded on such idealistic concepts as "all men are created equal".

Anyway, it's not a matter of "stamping" anyone down, people gravitate to the unemployment line naturally, all on their own. But their ability to find a job depends on the state of the economy, and the more vibrant the economy, the more people who can find jobs, as I pointed out earlier. There is no direct control of the economy by the government to keep a certain percentage of people unemployed, I merely point out that the economy functions most efficiently when there is about 5 percent unemployment. This provides a large enough pool of unemployed workers seeking jobs to keep wages (and therefore the prices of goods) from skyrocketing due to labor scarcity, but not so large that it's a drag on the economy to keep them from starving via government benefits.

More unemployment becomes a drag on the government, which raises taxes to pay unemployment and other welfare benefits, which causes a contraction in the economy due to higher production costs. Less unemployment drives consumer prices higher and cools the economy because scarce labor resources can command a higher price.

It's all about balance.

You're right, it's a system that tends towards that specific balance. It's a small enough percentage of people that they can be ignored or even blamed, but they won't be able to cause much trouble. Yet it's a big enough percentage to create that competition in the labour force that you consider to be desirable.

And you are correct that the economy, with the system as it is, will function most efficiently with that competition. - Because it gives employers a powerful bargaining position and allows them to keep the expense of wages below the true value that the employees add to the business, thus generating profit for the business by exploiting employees' desperation.

As you say, when the state of the economy improves more people can find jobs - which means businesses can't keep the wages low, they get less or no profit and the economy slows. When it's bad, people are desperate for jobs, and the businesses can make more profit out of them - and it all comes to a rough equilibrium with about 5% of the population suffering and desperate for work.

It's one of the fundamental flaws of capitalism. It's not a fair system. And it means it's absurd to say that the the unemployed are responsible for being in that situation, because, at a time when you can't have unrestricted growth i.e. expansion onto a new continent, and you can't simply deplete earth's resources for profit, some people necessarily have to be unemployed for the system to function. - And that's before getting on to the fact that all this system does is lead to more wealth being accumulated by those who are already wealthy, and that wealth becoming more and more disconnected from anything that actually benefits society.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"Poor" in U.S. usage basically means "anything less than rich".

That is simply absurd. We have quite a few people who consider themselves "middle class". Try to keep a grip on reality.