Better than expected labor report: 171,000 jobs added

[Constantine]

You tend to cherry pick the parts out of a news report that support your personal agenda and ignore the rest. You did this with the jobs report.

You can't, with one breath, say unemployment is down because people left the workforce, and then say unemployment is up when the reason it went up is because more people entered the workforce. You can't have your cake and eat it, too, Granny.

Romney is running around with that same logic. He cites Massachusetts unemployment when he was governor there, but refuses to note that unemployment went down there because tons of people fled the state. Job creation was 3rd from the bottom in a good national economy while he was governor. As it is, Obama's a better job creator than Romney. Those "12 million jobs" he says he'll create is a lie. In the next 4 years, the economy is poised to create 12 million more jobs regardless of who's in office.
Romney is just a fucking liar.

 

[Kulindahr]

I think you're right. Massachusetts is screaming for medical transcriptionists. Our healthcare system is happening faster than we have people who are trained and certified to handle medical records. These are data entry type jobs, and you can get a one year degree from Harvard to earn up to 40 dollars an hour.

Just one company I know in Oregon needs welders, electrical techs, "fitters" (don't know what that means), chem techs, and machinists, for a total of eighteen positions. Because they can't find those, their production is bottlenecked; if they filled those, they'd then need to hire forty-plus additional people.

Nationally, one trade association says there are three million unfilled technical/trade jobs, and that for each one filled two or three other jobs would be created. The result is that if people hadn't shifted from trade/technical school to college, there would be twelve to fourteen more people employed right now. That means that Obama's proposal to make an automatic path to residence for foreign students who acquire such needed skills should have been passed; for every foreigner staying here and taking one of those jobs (on the way to becoming an American), two or three Americans would have gotten a job.

Of course, the Republican opposed that. In total, I think they've blocked the creation of five to seven million jobs in the last three years.

 

[EastMed]

I agree with many of the views expressed here. Especially the importance of vocational/apprenticeship training as a route to a well-paid job. I understand the US has a national apprenticeship programme often in collaboration with community colleges. I don't know how effective it is or whether it is properly funded.
Germany has the best vocational/apprenticeship scheme in the world, sometimes called the 'dual system'. It requires close collaboration between government, employers and trade unions, and long term planning as part of overall industrial strategy.
More generally, a focus on lifelong education from pre-school to retirement is needed.
I particularly like the goals set out in a recent report from CAP here.

http://www.americanprogress.org/iss...21/11983/the-competition-that-really-matters/