That’s the (devastating) unemployment rate for young people:
Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.
“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”
There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.
“If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession,” Angrisani noted.
…Angrisani said he believes that Obama’s economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team — dominated by academics and veterans of big business — has ever started and grown a business.
But they went to Ivy League schools, and are smarter than us, so things will work out. Perhaps they just haven’t raised the minimum wage high enough.
Wage controls have created barriers to entry, as they always do.
I can tell you from personal experience that the middle-aged spinster segment of society isn’t getting hired either.
As a P/T small business owner, I offer $10 per hour CASH, and I can’t find teenagers or young people to work. I run a small concession business and I’ve just about given up on it for lack of willing workers. I’ve actually had some agree to work, work a few hours, go to take a bathroom / port-a-pottie break, and never return. Not even for their pay.
There is also the You-owe-Me Attitude among workers that I’ve never understood.
I never thought an employer owed me squat, except on payday. But I’ve hired a number of HS and College kids who show up and bring an attitude with them. Because we work Street Fairs and Festival type events, many ASSUME that even at $10 an hour, that I’m going to pay for their food / drinks. Many times I do have sandwich stuff and chips, and I always provide drinks and water. But I never ever tell anyone we’ll feed them, many won’t work when they find that out.
Go figure.
I hear the same crazy stuff from other owners and certainly hear crazy employee stories from everyone I know who work F/T jobs. My wife spent 30 years in private industry and 4 years ago went to work in state government. She tells some doozies. Especially about those who have NEVER worked anywhere but in government jobs.
My younger son is a GM in a pizza chain. He can’t find folks to work. Or the other insane thought is that new employees think should start in “inside” better paying jobs. Or, because driver “A” owns a small economical car, and driver “B” owns some big gas guzzler, the company should pay driver “B” more, or more per delivery.
I should start a blog where people send in crazy employee stories.
As a “young professional”, I can vouch for this phenomenon. I left my IT career of 7 years to pursue an advanced degree in a different field, and now that I’m back at “entry level” in my new career field, I’m finding that my best prospects for jobs are back in IT, and not in my new field.
If I was willing to move, my prospects in my new field wouldn’t be much better, but they would at least be greater. The current housing and loan market isn’t entirely conducive to pulling up my roots and buying a new house in a different area of the country, either, especially not with a fresh debt load from school.
Another wrinkle for the “jobless recovery” is that many businesses have scaled-back full time employees to part-time. If they need more hours, they don’t need to hire more bodies. Cisco is a good example of that now.
A new generation of Republicans in the making thanks to Obama. Whod have thunk it?!?
The “70% of new jobs come from small businesses” claim is a myth. Click my name for the research. Basically, small businesses create lots of jobs but also destroy lots of jobs (since they are more likely to go bust than larger businesses). On net, small businesses aren’t better at creating jobs than large ones.
That said, there are a number of ARRA tax breaks targeted at small businesses:
* Reduced estimated tax payment requirements
* Deferral of income from cancellation of debt
* S corporation built-in gains tax relief
* Net operating loss carryback
* Work Opportunity credits
* Extended depreciation tax breaks
* Expanded energy-related tax breaks
Basically, small businesses create lots of jobs but also destroy lots of jobs (since they are more likely to go bust than larger businesses). On net, small businesses aren’t better at creating jobs than large ones.
I’d love to be the guy who founded a truly ginormous enterprise that sprung whole, fully-formed from birth, the size of any multi-national you care to name; who got to claim a fat paycheck on Day One, and who didn’t have to worry about anything in the news impacting his company (“What do you mean those new-fangled ‘automocar’ contraptions will threaten my steel stove factory? Balderdash!”). Ahh, easy living.
You know, as opposed to being one of the guys who founded each and every one of them as small companies, most of which went through “structured reorganizations” (ie, “went bust but came back from it after shedding small mountains of debt and pushing the founders out of the top-floor windows”), bled, sweated, and sometimes even died for the company, to make it into the globe-spanning goliath it is today.
“Everything is easy for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.” – S. Den Beste
So Jim says a paper by three guys reads that papers by others aren’t correct and then these nuggets come from THEIR paper.
(3) Large plants and firms account for most newly-created and newly-destroyed manufacturing jobs. (4) Survival rates for new and existing manufacturing jobs increase sharply with employer size. (5) Smaller manufacturing firms and plants exhibit sharply higher gross rates of job creation but not higher net rates.
Even if they aren’t around in 3-10 years those sharply higher gross rates of job creation look pretty good right now. Unless you’re a statist/unionist who wants everyone to be in a high paying union job that the government will have to sell our children’s future to fund the wages to work on government projects and pay premiums for their government health care. Shoot, why not have a government store too? 16 tons and what do you get…
There are those who are disdainful of small businesses because such businesses are exempt from a large number of laws and regulations. They also are less likely to be unionized.
While small businesses as a whole do have a high failure rate, for each failed business, there are plenty of new ones to take their place. And, of course, that failure rate applies more to new businesses, not established small businesses.
Wage controls have a lot to do with the current situation, as does the retraction in consumer spending.
Even if they aren’t around in 3-10 years those sharply higher gross rates of job creation look pretty good right now.
Pshaw! Those jobs merely put food on the table for 3-10 years — they do not advance the Progressives’ utopian goals!
They need to slow down on passing this health care bill. No one should have to suffer without adequate health care. They should take their time and get this right. Stop looking for political gain and help the public for a change. It shouldn’t be this difficult.