SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
When states suffer a widespread loss of jobs, the damage extends to the next generation, where college attendance drops among the poorest students, says new research from Duke University. As a result, states marked by shuttered factories or dormant mines also show a widening gap in college attendance between rich and poor, the authors write.
In states that suffered a 7 percent job loss, college attendance by the poorest youth subsequently dropped by 20 percent, even when financial aid increased. The pattern also persisted across a wide range of states, despite variations in public college tuition rates.
Source: Duke University
Excellent. Maybe now we can get over this idea that our precious little progeny are too good for blue collar work and fill some of the six million jobs that nobody can be found to do.
[Editor's note: On my checking of the '6 million jobs' statement, I came across this article from September last year.]
[J]ob openings at 5.9 million in July set a new all-time record. Yet despite all the anxiety we hear about disappearing factory jobs, the number of unfilled manufacturing jobs in July was at the highest level in recent years. So why are they still open?
Factory work has evolved over the past 15 years or so as companies have invested in advanced machinery requiring new skill sets. Many workers who were laid off in recent decades – as technology, globalization and recession wiped out lower-skilled jobs – don't have the skills to do today's jobs.
[...] Gary Miller [...] started at Ohio-based Kyocera Precision Tools Inc. in 1989, it employed 550 production workers. Since then it has shed half of its workers; yet it now produces twice as much [...] Mr. Miller, who is now the company's director of training, struggles to find technicians with the electrical and mechanical skills needed to operate and maintain the complex machines. One electrical maintenance job went unfilled for over a year as he searched for someone with an associate's or bachelor's diploma in manufacturing engineering.
[...] The study found it takes an average of 94 days to recruit for highly-skilled roles such as scientist or engineer, and 70 days for skilled production workers.
Source: Value Walk
Additionally, there are apparently plenty of jobs in food service. Starting in March of 2010 and continuing through April of 2017, there have been 86 consecutive month of payroll gains for America's waiters and bartenders. Since 2014, 800,000 "food service and drinking places" jobs have been created, over the same period the number of manufacturing jobs created has been just 105,000.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:19PM (11 children)
"Searching for a diploma" is not the same thing as "searching for skills." If you're too lazy and/or incompetent to interview people for skills, you deserve to fail. The second you demand a particular degree, you've shot yourself right in the foot.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:51PM (9 children)
On the other side, what regulatory risks a company faces if it hires a person with excellent skills but no formal qualification (aka degree)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:07PM (1 child)
Yes, regulation and the legal system often create significant barriers to getting things done. On the other hand, not having the skills you need in house because you have erected, or accepted, an artificial barrier to actually getting the job done properly isn't going to endear you with the tort-waving crowd either.
And there's that whole "testing for skills" thing. If "sheet of paper" replaces "test for skills", you may be legally covered, but you aren't actually covered. That just means you're okay with random amounts of malperformance. "Sheet of paper" plus "test for skills" tends to be the same, in the end, as "test for skills", with of course the downside that the field is vastly reduced and tends to lead to statements like "I looked for a year for X and couldn't find X." Also hollow laughter among those who have the skills and not the paper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 18 2017, @05:00PM
Perhaps that should be "I looked for a year for Y and couldn't find an X with Y."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:06PM (6 children)
Actually, fewer risks than you might expect. Let's consider electrical work. A lot of electrical work REQUIRES that an electrician be "responsible" for it. So, you hire an electrician ("an", as in "one") who then "supervises" a cadre of people, each of whom has greater and lesser training, experience, intelligence, etc. That electrician need not be present, to claim that he is "supervising" the workers. That electrician may be responsible for multiple buildings, at multiple remote sites. I think those remote sites all have to be in the same state, but I'm not even certain of that.
The company that I work for SHOULD HAVE at least four real electricians working in this town. (Main plant only works one shift, so one electrician covers that plant. Second plant works three shifts, we need three qualified electricians.) In reality, it has ONE real electrician. All the rest of us chumps are doing his work for him, at lower wages than he gets.
That is just one example of stepping around regulations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:33PM (5 children)
It varies immensely by state and muni building codes and regulation, which is frankly a problem for a nation wide workforce.
In the state I live in, maint work is unregulated by the state. Install work MUST be supervised by a master electrician and all work has to be done by apprentice/journeyman/master with the (typical?) millwright and homeowner exemptions. The millwright exemption is abused (perhaps) such than an electrician has to run power lines to a furnace but a HVAC guy under the millwright exemption can connect the furnace as along as a licensed electrician installed all the wiring and boxes and stuff.
Adding to the fun some insurance companies and some rental agreements require maint work to be done by a licensed electrician even if the law doesn't require it.
This is before muni games. In the city I live in some dumbass got electrocuted in a pool half a century ago so our complete muni building code is follow the NEC and the state laws with the exception that only master electricians can do hands on work on pools, hot tubs, saunas, and similar. Its literally two paragraphs on half a sheet of paper, but I "know" some cities have small book sized building codes full of BS.
Part of the problem is reciprocal licensing is really weird. You pass a state apprenticeship program in any of 50 states and you're licensed here but if you got in via the contractor's test (which is not easy or cheap) you have to retake the test to get our state license even if you took the same test in another state to get their license, weird huh? And we don't internationally reciprocate at all, thats what the contractors test is for. In all fairness if you learned how to wire stuff in the UK you probably need retraining in the USA, all this "ring-main" WTF.
This is part of the problem with blue collar work, if you're a licensed electrician in one state, it may be difficult to move without reviewing permission from Big Brother. Shades of feudalism, the serf can only leave the land with permission of the local lord.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:59PM
Well, you should like this bit of trivia. Starting with the maintenance supervisor, on down, there is not a single licensed electrician in our plant. We have a guy who claims to be an engineer who does "automation", but he has never made any claim whatsoever as being an electrician. So, not me, not my bosses, none of my coworkers, none of my subordinates is licensed even at the apprentice level. But, we routinely install and service electrical gear and machinery. True, we only work with 480 volt. But, 480 volt is more than enough to start fires, electrocute people, and/or to disrupt service to local neighbors if/when we screw up badly.
The one semi-meaningful nod to regulations is, we are forbidden to touch the service entrance - that is padlocked so that no one gets into it. But, the least trained person we have is free to scatter his tools inside of service panels around the plant. Go figure, huh? I mention scattering tools, because we had a worker to drop an allen wrench inside of a disconnect box, which sent him to the hospital. Overdosing on iron plasma just isn't real good for a human being . . .
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)
Oh, another incident. We had a disconnect box to burn out about 3 months after installation. Replace it, and about 5 or 6 months later, it burns out again. I tell MY boss, there's something wrong here, we shouldn't just replace the damned box again. "No, no, sometimes you just have bad luck. We got two bad boxes in a row. Stuff happens!" So, about 2 or 3 months later, that box burns up AGAIN!!
Says I, "Are we going to investigate why these boxes keep burning up? Or, are we just going to put another box in it's place?" Two days of nonsense meetings, they decide to pull the wire out of the conduit, and inspect that. Finally. What did they discover? Not one, but two of the conductors had been abraided when it was pulled. Wires shouldn't be moving around inside the conduit, but I guess vibrations conducted up the conduit can cause them to move some. Anyway, every now and then, those wires moved around enough to arc to the conduit, and burn out the disconnect.
That's the kind of electrical work you can expect where regulations aren't very stringent, and seldom enforced.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:01PM (1 child)
Thanks for those anecdotes. I'm many things- very hands-on tech, BSEE, done automation, do lots of wiring. I've seen brilliant work done by non-certified people. I've seen horrible work done by licensed, certified, "professionals", "experts", etc. (_all_ trades). As you know all too well, caring about your work, being a craftsman, etc., are very different from being good at taking courses, passing exams, getting certs, etc. I've done some machining work and learned about deburring, etc. People think I'm weird, odd, wasting time, etc., because I insist on deburring the ends of conduit (metal and PVC), remove casting flash / edges from fittings and boxes, etc. Turns out it's in the NEC. Those poor chaps expect people to care about doing a good job. Many times I've found chaffed and cut wires in conduit- and I'm not a full-time electrician!
And yes, wire can move quite a bit in conduit. As you know, the current creates a magnetic field, which results in forces and movement in the conductors. But it's OK if there are no sharp edges left behind...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 19 2017, @12:21PM
The ratio of copper to steel thermal expansion is like one or two millionth per degree F which doesn't sound like much but you multiply that out and take a 200 foot run from winter time cold to being overloaded in the summer (lets say a swing of 200F from -40F in the winter to a hot summer day in the sun and overloaded a bit, depends on your climate LOL) that copper will end up about an inch longer. Hundreds times Hundreds times Tens suddenly you're talking about a pretty good chunk of millionths. Obviously you don't have to move a whole inch to make a big enough hole to short something out.
You can also destroy cat5 ethernet cable that way. I suppose with power over ethernet people will be setting cat-5 on fire soon enough, if not already.
I suppose it happens although I've never seen a licensed journeyman or higher union tradesman screw something up, it must be pretty rare. I've seen screwups involving them, I remember a data center / carrier hotel installation where a customer initially wanted 3-phase for some kind of power supply so they contracted with the electrican to wire it, then they decided they'll purchase a smaller storage system with 220-V residential-like power supply instead to save money or something, and the dude who hooked it up was like "huh, funny power connector... " and assumed he was getting 4-wire 220 like your home dryer or oven, two hots a neutral and a ground, after all from one wire to the other two was hot on his neon bulb "hot or not" meter so he's identified two hots and a neutral on his first guess, and there was a good ground because the two hots were hot WRT ground (although he didn't check the neutral LOL). I guess they needed a new power supply after that debacle. They tried to blame the electrician who luckily had a signed contract to install 3-phase. One would think the guy installing the hardware would have something fancier than a neon bulb indicator, like a voltmeter maybe, but ...
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:02PM
As an aside, a quality megger would have detected the worn insulation very quickly. It is a very simple, quick, and reliable check to do, and the tools themselves are not astronomically expensive. You would do well to familiarize yourself with them. Or yeah, have your bosses get a damn electrician in there...
As for the "vibration of the conduit", wires themselves can actually "motorize" and vibrate within runs of conduit due to inrush current or a short circuit. I've never seen it, but an experienced electrical instructor I had saw it once with a commercial air conditioning unit that was tripping a pretty massive breaker out on overload. Said you could hear the wires rattling inside the pipes. Sure enough, it is a documented phenomena.
Look at about 2:15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dckmSgp1nw [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:37PM
Yup, and additionally, the idiot could have hired somebody with the aptitude and trained them in the time that position's been left vacant. Hell, he could have trained an auto mechanic to do the job, auto guys work with large complex integrated systems on a daily basis and have to know it all inside and out.
Manufacturing Engineering as a degree is rare. Everywhere I've worked always had engineers of multiple disciplines working manufacturing engineering, from the mechanical guys who design fixtures to the computer guys who write the code, to the electrical guys who design the boards. Some engineers are multidisciplinary.
In fact the only engineer I've met that's even close to that, with a degree in Industrial Engineering, didn't do anything except run his own auto garage.