And because he won’t hire “flag burners” and “hipsters”, speakes to his own biases towards the people he hires. He weeds outs people that aren’t just like him. His supervisors should fire him for incompetence. And yes, I have had years (more than you) in hiring personnel.
In the interest of tranquility, I was subtle/silent on that point.
I don’t see where Randy said he wouldn’t hire “flag burning/hipsters”. I doubt he gets many applications from persons that come close to fitting any part of that description. I’m sure most of them would feel that working for the railroad would be beneath them.
Jeff
We have some hipsters that work for us (skinny jeans, vaping and all). Guess what? They are fine railroaders. It’s almost like railroaders come from all walks of life or something.
People that think ‘work’ is beneath them, don’t last very long and rarely make it out of the probationary period.
A problem is his biased attitude.
"The so called hipsters and millenials somehow feel entitled, how can we compete with other nations if more and more young Americans are somhow above the crafts and tech and science? How would Joe’s method work if everyone only wanted degrees in gender studies and social justice? Few want to get thier hands dirty unless its from burning an American flag. "
Actually, I think there’s a missing factor in that split. I have no idea what the percentages would be, but I would suggest that there are three factors - agricultural, industrial, and service, with service seeing the biggest jump.
The problem we face today is that too many people are out of work in this country. The scale used to calculate the unemployment number is not adequately representative for an economic downturn that lasts as long as this one has. So the unemployment index being used is painting a false picture of the actual number of people who need jobs and can’t find them. The index is vastly understating the problem, which is basically a weak economy that is not growing fast enough to create enough jobs.
Another part of the reason for job scarcity is jobs leaving this country and moving to foreign manufacturing plants. A lot of people believe that this is the only reason jobs are scarce in this country. These people tend to obsess about the effect of NAFTA and they also tend to bash corporations as being too greedy by wanting to move their manufacturing out of this country. They also want the government to add export tariffs in order to put a stop to this exporting of jobs. Taken all together, this is a belief system for a lot of people.
But one thing the adherents of this belief system never consider is that the lack of jobs is due to a slow economy being caused by high taxes, excessive regulations, and uncertainties of the direction of government policies such as national healthcare. All of these things create uncertainties and perceived risk for investment. So the economy slows down and does not grow fast enough to create sufficient jobs.
In my opinion, the loss of jobs from moving production offshore is a very small component of the U.S. job shortage. The far greater cause of the problem is government policy putting a drag on economic growth.
I should be fired for having a safe, productive, ethnically diverse workforce that has come together as an affective team?
My best inspector is from El Salvador, obviously I don’t hire people just like myself.
Perhaps you also have a bias?
My bias leans towards people that will obey the rules and work, period.
Are you hiring both white collar and blue collar workers? I hire both for our business and find that my experience is closer to Randy’s than to yours. Right off the bat, having to pass a drug test thins the applicants in a hurry. Then we require a clean driver’s license and have the audacity to ask them to come to work at the same time every day and work until 5:00. Maybe it’s different where you are. Our unemployment rate hovers around 3%.
I may be a bit off the mark but it appears that many of the supporters of the Blond Bombshell want their old jobs back and resent the idea that they may have to retrain or otherwise acquire new skills to get the jobs that are currently available.
I’m the DOT compliance director for 250 drivers plus about 50 Owner Operators for my boss. That means in an average month 30 of my drivers are drug tested. Plus about 3 more in the office or shop. We put all people in the company in the pool. Last week we had a new crop of 10 drivers start 6 failed the Pre-Employment drug test. Anyone want to guess their drug of choice. For my boss and insurance company it does not matter how long ago you smoked it you test positive you are not eligable to be hired. People think that they can use a certain drug and get away with it in Saftey Sensitive Industry like Trucking or Railroading. Sorry but these regulations are written in blood for a freaking reason and the Marijunia one especially from Chase MD. Yes some of the safety warning devices had been tampered with. However he was also baked higher than a batch of weed brownies while running those engines. He knew what he was doing and still did it high.
Which blonde bombshell? We had two to pick from.
The US market will not be as fast growing as other markets. Its not the same market. We are an established economy that has saturated a lot of the big ticket items and so the market is for replacments, not new sales.
Pretty much anybody that wants a car in the US has a car. The US auto market is replacement. People buying a newer model or replacing a broken car. On the other hand in China and India there are millions of people who want a car who have never owned a car. They are a completely new market. The new sales will always be higher than the replacement market.
The big hope is the infrastructure improvements, even that is replacement not new construction. We aren’t building a new interstate highway system we are fixing what’s there. We aren’t building “new” bridges, we will be replacing the old ones already there.
We pretty much have excess production capacity. We can make more than we can use of most basic commodities: steel, cement, food, etc. Since we have excess capacity, the chances of getting industries to build more capacity is slim. That’s why I don’t think cutting taxes will spur growth. Cutting corporate taxes may keep existing jobs here, but won’t create new ones. Cutting corporate taxes will reduce costs, which may reduce prices, but that won’t necessarily increase production or consumption if the pipeline is saturated.
What creates jobs is increased consumption. The more that is consumed, the more that has to be produced. It takes more people to increase production (fewer today than it did 50 years ago though). Will policies increase the ability of the end user to consume? Increasing the ability of the ACME Corp to produce widgets only results in ACME making more widgets if you simultaneously increase the ability or need for widget consumers to b
Dave,
I agree that the 35% tariff will hurt the railroads in this country directly by reducing traffic of imported products. It will also hurt the consumers by raising the price on those products. Consumers will respond by reducing their demand and consumption of those products, and the reduced demand and consumption will also hurt the railroads. I believe that loss of product demand will hurt the railroads far more than the direct loss of traffic of imported products.
The economic theory used to support tariffs is that they will end low cost imports; and then that will spur the expansion of U.S. industry to compensate for the loss of the imports. So, the expansion of U.S. industry will provide new jobs paying prevailing wages which will return the prosperity previously lost in the outsourcing trend.
This of course amounts to an economic perpetual motion machine because it assumes that consumers will go right on consuming and happily paying the new price increase on their products in order to pay the higher wages for all the jobs brought back to the country. This is like expecting water to run uphill. Of course it won’t work. It will make all consumers poorer, and it will not create new jobs unless the cost of manufacturing is equal to that of the foreign manufacturers where the low cost products were imported from. If that were possible, the whole problem would not have developed in the first place.
In the largest perspective, the whole point of the tariff is to revive the U.S. economy. I think it will have precisely the opposite effect
Another matter: how many of the factories that were idled because of low cost imports are ready to be started up again? How much new construction would be necessary before our manufacturers would have product ready for the market?
Just look at the facility across from the camera at Rochelle to have your answer, just a wall is still standing.
I think that’s a valid point Johnny. Much of our manufacturing base has disappeared. We’d be in somewhat of a bind if the worst should happen and require post haste manufacturing of critical defense equipment in a rush such as happened in World War II.
75 years ago, the automobile/light truck manufacturing plants were put to use manufacturing military equipment. Could the plants that we have now be retooled as quickly as those were if it became necessary?–could the robots be quickly reprogrammed for such work?
Where are the steel mills to supply raw materials, not to mention the supply channels required to provide raw materials to the steel mills. Heavy industry barely exists in the US anymore. In the pre WWII US there was excess production capacity available from the effects of the Depression, and that production capacity could be repurposed relatively easily.
Today’s production capacity is cost controlled to insure there is no excess capacity, beyond that most capacity that does exist is for light duty type products.
If there were a WWII type War we would be sucking wind. If there is a War, it will be nothing like WWII.