Recently in Jobs Category

It is said the truly smart will learn from the harsh lessons of others' failures. I can say that one member of the WP clan is that smart, that being the youngest of the WP sisters. (As she says, she made her own mistakes while growing up that our parents never found out about.)

It would be great if the political class presently ruling the US was as smart as my youngest sister. Unfortunately they are not.

They see the economic meltdown occurring in the Euro-zone, yet refuse to learn the lessons countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain are teaching us, the primary one being that eventually you will run out of other people's money to fund all the wonderful social programs that have been used to bribe the electorate.

Italy is the latest to teeter on the brink of insolvency, and should it go over the edge it is quite likely it will pull the rest of the Euro-zone with it. Greece's default damaged the European economy yet it has only a fraction of the GDP of Italy. Should Italy default Europe will take an additional $2 trillion hit it cannot afford. Is it any wonder Germany is considering abandoning the Euro and going back to the mark? Can anyone deny that this problem has been driving the British public to demand a referendum about whether or not to remain in the EU? At least those two countries see the problem and realize they'll have to bankrupt themselves in a doomed effort to prop up economic policies from Brussels.

But too many of our own politicians at the state and federal level, regardless of party, seem oblivious to the fact that unless we make some drastic changes in how our federal government taxes and spends we will be headed down the same path. Labor leaders ignore the fact that neither businesses or taxpayers are a bottomless source of funds, shortchanging their own members by making promises no one can keep.

Should the US fail to put its financial/economic house in order, and right quick, it will pull the world economy down with it into a depression unlike any we've seen before.

I saw this by way of Instapundit. It reveals some harsh truths the #OWS folks won't admit to, but something We The 53% understand completely.

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that. For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime, and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? and will they?"

So if the OWS folks get their way and kill off Wall Street and the corporations, what they'll get in return is an economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a minor market correction in comparison. But what do you expect from economically illiterate and spoiled children who feel entitled to what the rest of us earned?

One would think that if the Obama Administration was serious about jobs that it would at least make sure that it didn't do anything to make it more difficult for those Americans who are fortunate enough to still have jobs to actually get to work.

Just before 3 this afternoon I received a phone call from my missus, informing me she was stuck in traffic on her way to work. As she described it, there were dozens of police cars blocking traffic as a series of limousines, vans, and large SUVs made their way along US Route 3 and Interstate 93 in Tilton, New Hampshire. Traffic was blocked for quite some time, making it impossible for anyone to get where they were going. As it is the missus made it to work late.

It wasn't until later that she found out the cause for the massive traffic tie-up: Vice President Joe Biden.

It appears he was here in the Granite State for two purposes - file papers on behalf of President Obama for the upcoming New Hampshire Primary, and promote the President's dead-on-arrival jobs bill Biden claims will prevent a rise in violent crime. Never mind that his little trip caused a number of still-working Americans here in New Hampshire to be late getting to work or getting home from work.

One does not promote jobs growth by preventing those who still have them from getting to them.

I've seen this both at Instapundit and on a friend's Facebook page. It's too good to pass up, so I knew I'd have to link it.

While the so-called 99% are protesting for free stuff, we, the 53% who actually pay for that 'free' stuff, are voicing our own opinions about it. One shot from the site:


Yup, I'd say that covers it.

This theme - Higher Education Bubble - is appearing more often, maybe because it has a heavy dose of truth buried within it.

As so many of us have written again and again, we've all been sold the idea that in order to get a good job that we had to go to college to get a degree. It's almost become gospel. The only problem with that idea is that it is dead wrong.

While some kind of education after high school is a good idea, it needn't be in the form of college. It could be trade school, including apprenticeships (something that has fallen out of favor over the past century or so), or military service, or going out and doing.

We've seen the effects of this wrongheaded thinking, where students come out of college with their sheepskin, a large amount of student loan debt, and no prospects for a job. It's not that college in and off itself is a bad idea, it's what the courses of study the students pursue that are a bad idea. As I mentioned in a section of yesterday's post, one of the protesters at the Occupy Wall Street tantrum was concerned because she was going to be thousands of dollars in debt once she completed her Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree, but had few prospects in the way of finding a job. What kind of job did she think her degree would help her find? You don't need a BFA to work at McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts or any of the other 'menial' jobs she's likely to have. The same is true of those whose degrees end in the word "Studies", or degrees in Philosophy or Sanskrit or Medieval European Husbandry and so on. Unless all those students plan on careers in academia, most of those degrees are useless in the real world. (One of BeezleBub's friends from the farm had a degree in philosophy from Trinity in Dublin. The only problem was that none of the philosophy companies were hiring, so he ended up with a job as a farm hand.)

Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with studying those subjects. But they should be secondary majors or post-grad courses of study. After all, I am a firm believer that all science and technology without the humanities is a bad idea.

What America needs more than folks with college degrees is people who know how to do things with their hands, be it in the trades (construction workers, plumbers, electricians, masons, steelworkers, mechanics, HVAC technicians, etc.) or in factory work (machinists, assemblers, inspectors, etc.). How many times have we seen reports of companies wanting to hire workers, but too many of them are inexperienced, unqualified, or don't have the right training to do the job? Some have gone so far as to hire qualified workers they don't need at the moment because they know they'll need them soon and they want to make sure they'll have them when they need them.

We've got to stop buying into idea that the only way to get ahead is to have a college education. For some job openings, the need for a college degree is overblown, as illustrated by this example. Since when does a receptionist require a college degree?

Hey, maybe that woman with the BFA can apply for the job! I'm sure her expensive college education will qualify her to answer the phones.

I'm beginning to wonder how many times Obama and his advisers will have to hear this message before they come to understand it, if at all: the American Jobs Act won't induce employers to hire new workers.

I've discussed the issue of tax incentives as a goad of hiring a number of times with some of my more liberal friends or acquaintances, few of whom don't seem to understand the reason why businesses hire more workers. They can't seem to grasp the concept that no amount of tax cuts will induce any business owner to hire an employee they don't need. Adding an worker who adds nothing to the bottom line, meaning one who does not create more income for the business than it costs to employ them, makes no sense and causes the business to lose money even with the tax cut incentive.

Message to Obama et al: Businesses hire workers when they can't meet the demand for goods or services with the employees they already have. Period.

So endith the lesson.

Gee, this is a shocker.

FairPoint Communications is laying off 400 workers across its service areas, with 190 of them in New Hampshire. The company cites decreasing revenues and a decline in customers as its reason for the layoffs.

This is not a surprise to anyone paying even a little attention to the telecommunications industry.

FairPoint's purchase of Verizon's landline operations in northern New England was a disaster from the beginning. The number of landline customers had been declining for some time and Verizon saw an opportunity to divest itself of an operation in a declining market. FairPoint was stupid enough to buy it despite protests from many that it was paying too much for assets that would continue to decline in value. Once FairPoint took over operations from Verizon the problems multiplied, with a loss of 10% of its landline customers in less than 6 months. The continuing hemorrhage of customers and problems with its operations finally forced it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and its delisting on the New York Stock Exchange.

Even after reorganization its customer base continued to decline as competitors like cable companies and cell providers undercut it in price and services. Ironically one of its biggest competitors is Verizon, whose wireless operations were winning over an increasing share of customers.

FairPont isn't the first company to see its landline operations become a money losing operation. And in yet another bit of irony, Verizon has seen its own landline services suffering, prompting it to demand concessions from its union employees. This led to a strike by both the CWA and IBEW against Verizon last month. The unions figured since Verizon was making billions in profits that they were somehow entitled to a share. But it was their wireless and business operations making the profits, neither of which are unionized. The landline operations were shrinking and losing money, and Verizon wasn't about to use profits from other operations to fund higher pay and benefits for their landline workers.

Is it any wonder FairPoint is shedding excess employees as its fortunes decline?

The August jobless numbers came out yesterday and for once the results were not unexpected (at least not to anyone not in the Obama Administration).

Job growth for the month of August was zero. Nada. Zip. A Goose Egg. Nil. Bupkus.

The stock market reacted negatively, again not unexpectedly, dropping over 200 points and wiping out the week's gains.

Obama and his 'advisers' wonder why the job numbers are bad when anyone with a lick of sense could tell them that everything they've been doing has discouraged job growth, just the opposite of what they claim they want.

I expect the final job numbers will actually be worse, with a negative growth and an increase in the official unemployment rate to 9.2%. (Remember, the unofficial rate - approximately 19% - includes those who have run out of unemployment benefits or have given up looking for work altogether.)

That ought to help Obama get re-elected.

Listening to the plans President Obama has made to address the jobs problem, it is no surprise to anyone that he really doesn't have a plan, or at least not a new one.

If his $878 billion stimulus program had been used to actually address a number of problems within the country, those primarily being our crumbling infrastructure, rather than using it for political patronage, we might not have as much of an economic problem as we presently face. But far too many of us knew very little of that money would be used to stimulate anything but the growth of the federal government.

Will Obama's September 8^th speech try to make a case for spending even more money we don't have to pay for more political patronage? If history is any indication, then the answer is likely yes.

What the president really needs to do (but won't) is to rein in his renegade agency heads (NLRB or EPA, anyone?) who are making sure it's damn difficult for anyone to create jobs...except for government jobs.

What the president needs to do is to get the government out of the way of free enterprise to let it do what it does best - create jobs.

What the president needs to do is fire all his czars and advisers because, quite frankly, they have no idea what they're doing. Most of them are academics with little, if any, real world experience doing things like running businesses or meeting payrolls or dealing with an ever increasing avalanche of government regulations and paperwork that does nothing but cost time and money to deal with yet add little of benefit to anyone except bureaucrats.

What the president needs to do is realize that one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, was right when he said to America "Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem."

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American peoples' lives. After all, everyone in government is having a hard enough time running their own lives, let alone those of 300,000,000 other people in this country. Every government that has tried to do so has ultimately failed, resulting in widespread misery. Quite often those governments end with fatal results for members of those governments.

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one, is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American economy. History is littered with plenty of examples to show this is true. Unfortunately the president and many in Congress have ignored this truth, figuring that this time they'll get it right. (They won't.)

All I expect from the president during his speech is more of the same old crap he's taken from the FDR, LBJ, and Karl Marx playbooks, just put in new wrappings and hyped by the Lame Stream Media.

In other words, "There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along!"

I had an enjoyable discussion with one of my fellow employees this afternoon. It dealt with working, the differences between small and large companies, the advantages and disadvantages of both, and the recent dearth of qualified candidates for a number open positions within our company.

Without going into a lot of detail to protect the identity of my co-worker (and my job), let's just say we've been running into a couple of problems in regards to some candidates, the two biggest being that too many of them are well credentialed but not necessarily well educated, and lack of experience in the areas we really need. Apparently this is not a problem unique to our company.

While there are plenty of jobs open begging for people to fill them, there aren't enough people applying for them because they feel the jobs are beneath them ("I didn't spend all that money for a degree in Transgendered Native American Studies just to take a job working in a factory!"), or those applying for them have neither the experience or the capability of doing the job.

I caught a piece on Fox News this evening covering this particular issue. (No, I'm not going to link to it because I don't feel the need to do so.) A number of the companies they talked to said pretty much the same thing my co-worker and I had during our discussion. One manufacturer said they'll hire someone qualified even if they don't need them at the time because someone like that has been hard to come by.

As the WP Dad said about that report, "Is this because our incompetent education system hasn't been teaching our children what they need to know to make it in the world? What good is all that self-esteem they've been ramming down their throats the past 20 years if they can't get a job because they have neither the knowledge or ability to do it?"

Indeed.

This rant by a small business CEO tells it like it is, something the folks inside the Beltway no longer seem to understand. Do they really think "incentives" to hire will induce business to hire anyone? Businesses hire only when they need more people, not because the government provides some kind of lame incentive to do so.


If the government really wants to give businesses an incentive to hire, then maybe it should get the hell out of the way. Maybe government should stop sucking so much money out of the economy that there's less available to invest or to buy goods and services that create the demand for more jobs. Maybe rogue government agencies should be reined in before they do irreparable damage to the businesses that actually create the jobs.

Over the past year and a half I've listened to a large number of people disparaging the Tea party movement. Most of them have been card-carrying Democrats (or at least those with the belief they know how to spend my money better than I do). Others have been RINOs or part of the so-called "Establishment" Republicans.

The Tea party has been excoriated in the press, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other media organs of the Left leading the way. Washington politicians and other Beltway insiders have derided the Tea party as "hobbits", "terrorists", "Nazis", "racists", "jack-booted thugs", and a whole host of other derogatory labels.

As the volume of hateful rhetoric aimed at the Tea party and its supporters has increased, it has made me and others realize that the groups making these accusations must be really getting nervous. As one commenter to this piece wrote, "If you're getting a lot of [flak], you must be over the target." And so it must be as the Tea party gains supporters throughout the country at a local, state, and national level because they're tired of being ignored by the Coastal elite and the Beltway intellectuals.

My most memorable run in with an unabashed Tea party hater took place at our business when one of our customers went on a rant about "those goddamn Tea partiers wanting to take everything away from us!" There was no way I could not respond, so I asked her where she'd gotten that idea. Apparently she'd read it in the paper, in this case the Boston Globe. (One must remember, the Globe is owned by the NYT and has the same editorial policies as its parent corporation.) I calmly informed her that if her opinion was based solely on what she'd read in the Globe, then she'd been misinformed and lied to. She saw the Tea party as a bunch of religious fundamentalists bent on depriving the poor, doing away with Social Security and Medicare, and undoing decades of civil rights advances. I had to remind her that many of the civil rights advances came from the GOP, not her sainted Democrats. I reminded her the KKK were primarily Southern Democrats, not Republicans. I reminded her it was the Democrats who started us down this path of unsustainable spending going all the way back to FDR. I reminded her that it was LBJ who decided his Great Society was the answer to all of our society's problems, that it had failed miserably, and that it was funded by stealing from the Social Security trust fund.. I reminder her it was the Democrat majorities in Congress going back to 2007 that multiplied the annual deficits to many times that of all of Dubya's deficits combined.

I gave her the URL for the Contract From America website which explains the Tea party platform, none of which deals with social issues she claims the Tea party is involved with. She wasn't interested. Instead she chose willful ignorance and adherence to libelous propaganda from those who do not have her best interests at heart.

Maybe she will care when the country is unable to pay its bills and all of the government support she is 'owed' ends because there's no money left to pay for it all. Maybe she will care when all "the rich" she's constantly complaining about are either driven into bankruptcy or flee with their wealth to friendly climes and no one is left to pay for everything she is owed.

But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE:It appears Senator John Kerry has decided to add fuel to the fire by expressing his opinion that the media should not give equal time to those "absolutely absurd notions" voiced by the Tea Party because their opinions "are not factual."

What a putz.

As much as we'd like to hear that manufacturing jobs are returning to the US, the truth is that not as many of them will be created here as have been lost. It's not that there isn't the need for manufacturing jobs so much as it's businesses learning to do more with less, be it with more efficiency processes or more automation.

As Perry Sainati, founder and president of Belden International, explains how manufacturing has been transformed in the U.S.

U.S. manufacturing these days is in the midst of a remarkable three-year recovery because for three years running manufacturing has not been about job growth.

It's been about automation. It's been about process improvement. It's been about productivity. And it's been about quality.

In fact, it's been about reinventing the very process by which durable and disposable goods get manufactured.

What's more, it's been about streamlining our factories to the point that they're now among the most efficient in the world.

Worker productivity on the U.S. is the highest in the world. That means for every man-hour put in we get more products built. It's to the point now here we can even outproduce low-cost nations while doing it at a lower per unit cost. That means that even with cheaper labor, countries like China are finding themselves at an increasing cost disadvantage because American factories require a lot less labor to produce the same goods. It doesn't matter if workers in a low-cost country are paid an eighth that of American workers if a single American worker can make the same amount of product as ten workers in the low-cost country. The cost per unit is lower in the US than in the low-cost country.

At the moment this scenario isn't true across the board, but it's getting there. As labor costs rise overseas, and transportation costs do likewise, it becomes increasingly more economical to build products here.

However, as Sainati noted, pundits and politicians "say the word 'manufacturing' and they see in their minds' eyes things they used to see when they were kids." But those days are long gone, and with them the old manufacturing stereotypes. The days of huge factories employing thousands upon thousands of men and women have been replaced with modern factories using lean manufacturing with better design, processes, and automation. As such, returning a manufacturing operation to the U.S. may cost a thousand workers in a low-cost country their jobs, but it won't create a thousand new manufacturing jobs in the U.S. It might only create 80, or 100, or 120 jobs. It's not a 1:1 ratio because of the high productivity of American workers.

It's likely it's going to remain that way and we best get used to it.

As I wrote in my previous post about Obama's Afghanistan speech, I don't believe he knows what he's doing. This is particularly true when it comes to economics. There's certainly been plenty of evidence that drives me to make this claim, but this one takes the cake: Obama believes technology leads to job losses. It's such an old saw that has been disproven again and again, but he's trying to sell it as the reason the American job market is in such dire straits.

"There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," he said. "You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate."

The president calls this a structural issue--we usually call it progress. And it isn't exactly a new phenomenon. It's been going on for centuries, and its pace has accelerated over the past 50 years. Businesses relentlessly look for ways to replace workers with machines. The machines get better and smarter. We go from spoons to shovels to excavators, not the other way around.

I get the feeling he'd like to see us go backwards, reducing productivity, increasing the costs of goods, and making even more American jobs disappear to other countries that haven't deluded themselves that technology costs jobs and that increased productivity is a bad thing.

I hate to say this, but what he put forward almost sounded like it came right out of Atlas Shrugged, with the government forcing producers to use less efficient production methods as a means to 'create' more jobs. Of course it won't work out that way and they'll end up with even fewer jobs as they price themselves right out of the market.

And so it goes with One-Term Wonder, a master of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

I find it interesting that President Obama spent time touting the need for a better trained workforce in order to compete for manufacturing jobs in the future.

That sounds just great. Great. Yeah. The future. Uh-huh.

But what about the present?

What good will all that training do if there are no jobs to be had? It seems he's putting the cart before the horse, expecting more job training to be the answer to our economic woes.

The problem with our economy is not the major lack of workers needed to fill vacant jobs. It's that there are no jobs to be had in the first place. To put it in simpler terms, it's not a supply problem, but a demand problem. There is an ample supply of workers to fill jobs. There's just no demand for them by business.

To what can we attribute this lack of demand? President Obama.

His economic policies have been a disaster. They appear to be based upon wishful thinking rather than sound economic principles. For one thing one does not shepherd an economic economy by sucking so much capital out of the economy that there's less of it for investing to create new jobs. One does not foster economic recovery by laying more intrusive and draconian regulations on the engine of economic recovery, namely businesses large and small. One does not 'fix' the economy by making investment risky by constantly changing the rules, making it impossible for anyone to figure out whether investing is worth the risk or not (with the answer increasingly becoming "no").

All job training will do at this point is make sure we have an increasingly well-trained workforce still looking for work where none exists.

Two bits of news aren't helping the economic situation here in New Hampshire.

First, state revenues for the month of April were below projections by about $30 million. That's certainly not going to help with the budget deficit, making this fiscal year's shortfall about $47 million for this fiscal year. That's on top of the existing $800 million deficit from the previous fiscal year. Needless to say, state legislators aren't happy.

"The governor had an opportunity to use responsible and realistic revenue figures like the House budget used, but instead he chose to use numbers that were nearly $300 million higher to hide his greater spending," said Republican State Committee Chairman Jack Kimball.

Over the past four years the governor and the then Democrat majority legislature went on a spending spree, increasing state spending by over 30% over that time, using inflated revenue projections to justify the high spending levels. When revenues fell well below the overly optimistic projections, the governor and legislature failed to address the expenditure problems, instead focusing on trying to increase fees and taxes at a time when most businesses and individuals were struggling to make ends meet. Even with the increases, the state revenues failed to meet projections.

At least the budget for the next two fiscal years are likely to be in balance as the GOP in both the House and Senate cut the proposed 2-year budget by over $700 million, basing it on far more conservative (and realistic) revenue projections.

The second bit of bad news concerns hiring, with over half the businesses in the state planning not to hire any new employees either this year or next year. That doesn't sound like an economic recovery to me.

A number of factors are driving this trend. One New Hampshire businessman explained why he's holding off.

At a meeting attended by about two dozen businessmen and women at the 1st District Congressman's Manchester District Office off Lowell Street, Gary Brown of Raymond-based www.WebPageDesignUSA.com and The Image Factory said he can't afford to hire any more staff and is fighting to keep his current 12 employees working.

"I'm at tipping point, where if I hire any more folks, I will have to pay for national health care," Brown said.

"How an I going to survive? I'm not going to hire," he said.

This is yet another of the unintended consequences of ObamaCare affecting employment, not just here in New Hampshire, but across the nation.

Other businesses will make do with their present staffing levels, even if work does pick up, preferring to pay for overtime rather than benefits for new hires, or hiring temps on those occasions where they need the extra help.

Other factors influencing hiring include energy prices, something some businesses cannot easily pass on to their customers. So to keep their costs low they won't add staff, offsetting their higher energy costs.

Neither bodes well for the employment picture in New Hampshire. I have a feeling this is also true for many other states as well.

I first made mention of the NLRB's action against Boeing this past Sunday. Here's a little bit more, along with some words from Governor Nikki Haley on the matter.

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If we need even more proof President Obama is assuring his union supporters receive payment for services rendered, then all we need to do is look how one of his recess appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, one Lafe Solomon by name, has decided to do things the Chicago Way.

Solomon, a former SEIU labor leader, has decided Boeing Aircraft Company has denied his union brethren the chance to extort more money from the company, filing a complaint stating Boeing 'retaliated' against the International Association Of Machinists and Aerospace Workers by building its second 787 Dreamliner plant in right-to-work state South Carolina. He wants Boeing to abandon it's billion dollar plant just outside Charleston and move the operation to Washington State.

But we must ask the question, does the federal government, and more specifically, an as-of-yet unconfirmed and wholly union-owned member of the NLRB have the right to tell a private company where it can site its factories and build its products? Apparently this union stooge seems to think so. Never mind that federal law nor the Constitution gives the NLRB the power to do so.

It might be a different story if Boeing had closed down the existing Dreamliner plant in Washington State and moved it lock, stock, and barrel to South Carolina. But that's not the case. Instead, since the existing plant did not have the capacity to meet the demand, Boeing decided to build a second plant. And because the aircraft manufacturer had problems with union strikes and work slowdowns in the past, they decided to build the new plant someplace where such shenanigans were not likely take place. Hence, their decision to build the plant in South Carolina.

Is it any wonder why Boeing made that move?

But that didn't sit well with Solomon, so he decided he'd put a stop to it. But not one worker in Washington State has lost a job due to the South Carolina plant. Not one. In fact Boeing has hired around 2000 more workers to help meet its delivery schedules. So how can the NLRB claim the company has retaliated against the union?

What's worse is that President Obama has decided to remain mum on the subject, giving tacit approval to Solomon's actions.

Writes South Carolina governor Nikki Haley:

While silence in this case can be assumed to mean consent, President Obama's silence is not acceptable--not to me, and certainly not to the millions of South Carolinians who are rightly aghast at the thought of the greatest economic development success our state has seen in decades being ripped away by federal bureaucrats who appear to be little more than union puppets.

This is not just a South Carolina issue, and President Obama owes the people of our country a response. If they get away with this government-dictated economic larceny, the unions won't stop in our state.

Reading some of the comments to Governor Haley's WSJ opinion piece made by pro-union readers makes me wonder if they really understand the law and the Constitution. Unfortunately the answer appears to be no.

One kept making references to international agreements and UN resolutions as justification for forcing Boeing to knuckle under to the unions. Never mind that those agreements and resolution have no power under the Constitution. Never mind that those same agreements and resolutions do not require anyone to join a labor union even if they don't want to do so. Nothing in those agreements or resolutions forbid right-to-work laws, though that hasn't stopped one commenter from implying that they do.

Read the whole thing, particularly the comments as that's where the meat of the subject can be found.

With Detroit being such a deep blue economic and political basket case, is it any wonder black families are leaving it and a number of other cities in blue states in droves in search of work and a better life?

Not to me.

Just like their white brethren before them, they realize they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by remaining in cities and states that are hostile to business, either from liberal Democrat policies or job-killing union demands. They know they've been sold a bill of goods and want nothing more to do with the glad-handing politicians and those supporting them, so they're voting with their feet.

More power to them.

Let's hope they've learned the most important lesson from this debacle: Government (and the unions) aren't the answer. They're the problem.

For those of us who have been paying attention the past decade or so, none of this comes as a surprise to us: Factories are having trouble finding skilled workers to fill open positions.

Some of this can probably be blamed on the higher education bubble, where for years kids were told the only way to get ahead was to get a college degree. Some can be attributed to us Baby Boomers making our kids lives far too easy and making them think that actually working for a living doing manual labor (even highly specialized and lucrative manual labor) is something other people do. And some blame can be laid upon laid off workers, looking to get training or work in areas other than the ones from which they were laid off.

You might think that it would be easier for manufacturers to find new employees. After all, the number of workers employed in factories is still more than 2 million lower than pre-recession levels due to layoffs or plant closings.

"The perception out there is that we're losing manufacturing jobs to China and India. So if they've already been displaced and they're going to go back to school, they're going for something not manufacturing-related," said Rob Clark, vice president of operations at Clark Metal Products, a company outside of Pittsburgh started by his grandfather and now run by his uncle.

The trades are also suffering, as evidenced in the first comment made to this post at Lucianne about the subject:

I know the guy in charge of the local VoTech school here. He says they are probably gonna close the Heating/AC class because nobody is interested in becoming a heating/ac technician, even though he says local companies have standing offers to hire graduates direct from school for $18-20 an hour.

To many young adults think life is an episode of MTV Cribs, where money just falls outta the sky for them...

That kind of money is darned good for starting right out of school with no experience. And of those who go to college, far too many are coming out with degrees with little practical application in the real world. (I don't know of too many companies looking for people with BA degrees in Native American Transgender Studies. And those with Philosophy degrees are purely out of luck because the big Philosophy companies just aren't hiring these days.)

Is it any wonder more companies have to move operations overseas? If they can't find employees here, they have to look elsewhere in order to stay in business.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

The budget battles have started ay both the state and federal level. In Washington, Congress is dealing with the soon-to-expire continuing resolution that has funded government operations up till now. The GOP representatives are trying to trim $100 billion from budget for the remainder of the fiscal year, and moving to trim the bloated budget proposed by President Obama for the coming fiscal year.

Here in New Hampshire the governor put forth a budget that will bring spending down to pre-2008 levels in FY2012, trims the state workforce by 1100 jobs (10%), though only 255 jobs actual will be lost (the balance are jobs unfilled due to a hiring freeze), lowers the amount of state aid to towns and cities, pushes back the retirement age for state employees, and delays funding for hospital expansions. The new proposed two-year budget is $800 million lower than the present biennial budget, which helps fill the $800 million deficit created by the formerly Democrat majority legislature over the past 4 years.

To read some of the comments about the slimmer budget, you'd think the governor and the legislature is proposing stealing bread from the mouths of the poor at the behest of the rich. Some are proposing a state income tax or sales tax to fill the budget gap despite plenty of history showing the tax monies raised would only be wasted and, in the end, leave the state even more vulnerable to economic downturns. (All one needs to do is look at the states with such taxes to see what an unmitigated financial disaster was created by dependence on those taxes.) Far too many of the economic ignoramuses seem to thing we have a revenue problem when the truth is we've had a spending problem. As one commenter put it, "This is less than a 10% reduction in state spending. I know families that have reduced their spending by 10%, and some by as much as 40%." If we can do it, so can the state.

Other states, like Wisconsin and Ohio are seeing pushback by their state employees despite the fact that both states are facing huge budget deficits and raising taxes any further would cause far more economic harm.

In Wisconsin, state employees protested at the state capitol building, decrying Governor Scott Walker's push to limit the public employees unions' grip on state payrolls in an effort to deal with an $8.3 billion budget shortfall. Listening to some of the protesters you'd think they believe they have the right to a job for life and that the state's taxpayers had better come up with the cash to pay their salaries and benefits, or else. They complain about measures the state has taken that private businesses have had to take in the recent past in order to survive, like increasing the the amount employees pay towards their health insurance. What makes them think they are somehow immune from the effects of a bad economy and state cash flow problems? As if that isn't bad enough, Wisconsin State Senate Democrats have fled the state and hidden themselves in Illinois in order to prevent any further legislative action from being taken on the matter.

Similar scenes are taking place in Ohio as well, where the state faces a similar $8 billion budget shortfall.

The question is, when will the state legislatures and employees start listening to the taxpayers, who have said "Enough! We can't afford any more!" The answer? Not any time soon.