Georgia Factory Desperately Seeking People to Fill Jobs

A similar seed was posted a few days ago and I brought up the on the job training scenario, too. That's how they used to do it.

Your point about pay is salient as well. Along those lines, as an example, I worked as a receptionist/project manager at a printing company where most of the machine workers were illegals hired out of some 'temp' agency. The supervisors and office managers were white, though.

There's another, more relevant reason in this whole mix that you also touched on and needs to be emphasized. People didn't enter those trade schools in the same numbers because 1) wages stagnated then declined, 2) and most important, all the manufacturing jobs - the good paying manufacturing jobs - were being exported for the last 12 years, 3) who is going to pay to gain skills that there's no market for?, 4) education costs rose exorbitantly and the return on that investment was virtually nil.

Many who do these more physical jobs aren't really interested in sitting in class anyway. This was one of the reasons, frankly, that high schools had those DO and EE classes. Kids could learn skills then get jobs during school hours which counted toward the grades (grading effectiveness at work).

The manufacturing sector shot itself in the foot when it took the opportunities to other countries, because what was left was minimum wage-paying retail and customer service jobs. So HS grads went to college to try and find better paying jobs doing something else.

Frankly, manufacturing has no one but itself to blame. If it wants employees who have skills, it needs to train them in-house to its specific needs. That system worked very well up til everyone had to go to a post-high school tech school.

If it wants employees who have skills, it needs to train them in-house to its specific needs.

Couldn't of said it better myself.

If he was REALLY in need to fill this position he would either hire and train for the job or promote from within and train them on what is unfamiliar to them and hire someone to take their old position.

The whole unemployment factor in this country has been a bull market for employers, if they exploited it. When Bush left office the job market was dumping an upward of 700,000 jobs a month, flooding the market with experienced workers. Once these people were out of jobs for a while they lowered their expectations on jobs for them, many taking jobs they were over-qualified for yet underpaid. Employers have had this massive pool of desperate possible employees but have done little. So if he's having problems filling the position, he hasn't been really trying.

Thank you, Woody.

I can't count all the times I went into an interview with the skills needed for admin work and the interviewer told me they had a 'different' process. In admin, it's all about the flow charts - where does the paper go? That's it. If you can spell, write a grammatically correct sentence, and prioritize the work, you have the skills. Period.

And every one of them used that caveat as the means to undercut the pay.

I've also lost count of all the jobs I walked into - with no training in 'company culture' and started meaningful production on the very first day.

Mr. Winslow wants everything handed to him. I'll bet he's interviewed some people who would work at 150% capacity to learn and produce in as short a period of time as they could possibly achieve. If he didn't hire them, he passed up some very good workers.

Training costs are most often tax deductible, too. I have to wonder what it cost these companies to train foreign workers when they set up shop overseas...

Jerry - good points. I have to wonder though, if employers could test applicants to identify those applicants with the innate abilities needed for some of those jobs. As for the metallurgy, I don't know what exactly my brother-in-law taught his son so that he could make those dies, but I do know the son didn't have any metallurgy training prior to learning how to make them.

What I'm not understanding about this is, when companies go overseas, the work force in many countries has very little education to begin with. Whether these are companies needing machinists, I'm not sure, nor do I have any numbers for that. But if they can train those work forces, why can't they train them here? Not trying to challenge, just trying to figure out why this is so hard to get done. :)

Since the verb relates to the subject, it IS "the work force...has", 'work force' being a singular subject. (he has, she has, it has, they have, we have, those have) The prepositional phrase "in many countries" modifies the subject. In England, sometimes, what we consider to be a singular subject is considered to be plural. It's a syntactical difference between the languages.

I was also posting in terms of machinists, since that was the example. While America ranks behind many other developed countries in terms of education achievement, that does not correlate to the idea that American workers are not as competent. The latter is the point I'm trying to make. Another point to make is, there was a report, I believe it was called the "SCANS report", issued in the 90s. Companies were the driving force behind many of the so-called changes in education requirements. Prior to that, we had something called the "whole language" approach to reading, which replaced phonics. Thirty years later, studies were conducted and "whole language" was found to be a 'bust' as an approach.

Penalizing willing workers is not the answer. Every company has its own way of doing things. Regardless of education or skill an incoming employee possesses, some companies train new hires in their specific methods; others expect employees to pick processes up while on the job.