The short answer is no. The long answer is that the claim that there is a shortage of labor in the U.S. is a subterfuge. To begin with, the exact number of unemployed in this country is not known. Also, the definition of skilled labor has changed in recent years as to credentials and wage expectations.

How many?

Unemployment statistics are heavily "cooked" to forestall embarrassment of government. Four years ago, a hotel in Seattle posted openings for 110 jobs. There were over 2,000 applicants. This pattern is more common than uncommon. A Wall-Mart, whereabouts too sensitive to publish, offers 325 jobs and there are 18,000 applicants. Can you imagine people so desperate for a job that they would work for Wall-Mart? We submit to ourselves and to other countries that our unemployment rate is now under 5%. This has confused the poor Canadians into thinking that they are somehow lagging the U.S. in employment. They aren’t. U.S. unemployment figures exclude virtually everyone that is not receiving a weekly unemployment check. You know who you are.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the government keeper of the books, has systematically painted a rosier picture of employment in the U.S. since the Reagan administration.

The boss is the boss

Under estimation of unemployment is serious enough by itself, but add evolving hiring practices and you get a brew that is, intentional or not, approaching sinister.

At one time, U.S. corporations hired new college grads on the basis of potential. A degree, any degree showed aptitude for learning and growth into the job. The same applied to high school grads, even more broadly. This practice was predicated on the investment by companies in the people that they hired. They were expected to learn and grow to contribute more and more to the company. Those that didn’t perform were let go or shuffled to the sidelines. This was manifest in the assumption, by hiring authority in companies, that people who changed jobs too often were not performers and needed to change jobs to get ahead.

In about 1980, this attitude by employers began to change. Whereas revenue growth was the primary focus of corporations in the first half of the twentieth century, cost cutting became the primary goal of corporations in the latter quarter. Hiring good people and training them became an "unnecessary expense". Why pay to train when you can entice anyway the key employees or best minds of another corporation, or nation? This, like so much of current corporate mind set, is a suicidal gambit.

Someone clue in the boss

Sure, you can benefit from the training that has been paid for by another company. You will save $7,000 for a person with a CISCO IT certification. Never mind that you will have spent $7,000 recruiting and hiring this person, for an MBA to even think that saving a 20th of an employee’s burden rate for one year is even significant says a lot about the state of our business schools. This practice is seriously stupid and is the root of an issue that has more serious implications.

If no one ever invests in training, the pool of trained workers never grows. It is a simple as that. The "shortage" of skilled labor is the product of miscreant hiring practices and labor policies. The half baked theory is, that if you invest in training, the people you train will use that training to get a better job and leave. Of course before everyone adopted this stupidity, you could have counted on being able to find a replacement from the pool of people that had been trained by other companies. Not so anymore. The pool of people with state of the art skills is shrinking in what amounts to a self fulfilling prophecy.

Now we are stuck. No one will train because no one else will train. If you do train, other companies will bleed off your investment by hiring away the people you trained. Ok, well, you are only stuck if you are a moron. If you train someone, that someone becomes more valuable to your company. Your competitor thinks he is being clever by offering to pay this now more valuable person more than you are paying. Now your competitor has spent the same amount of money recruiting your employee that you have spent training your employee. Your competitor has, in effect, offered your employee a raise. In order to keep this person you have trained, you will have to give the person a raise. Now the person is more valuable, so should merit a raise. Your competitor seems to think so. On the face of it, neither you nor your competitor has any financial advantage in this. The answer to the shortage is to train people and treat them right.

Can't get 'em or don't want 'em?

The second part of the problem is what an employer wants to pay for an hour of skilled labor. This is the heart of the subterfuge. There are plenty of highly experienced engineers in this country. Many of them are now selling real estate because hiring practices have become so skewed to cheap imported labor. The career of a software engineer is now averaging 10 years. You are not employable after age 35. Only 35% of all employed engineers now recommend engineering to their children as a profession. You might be surprised that the same number of doctors recommend being a doctor. Why, if there is a shortage, are wages and career longevity declining? The "invisible hand" of the market does not apply to labor? The answer is that if there is a shortage, it is only in areas of specific training and specialization. The claims of shortage are nothing but thinly veiled propaganda aimed at increasing legal and illegal immigration and justifying outsourcing.

American engineers want too much money. If you make too much money it appears that that disqualifies you as being skilled. An engineer in India will work of 1/4 of what an American will. Put it in perspective. Why work as an engineer when you only make as much as a Burger King manager? So, engineering is rapidly becoming classed as one of the jobs "Americans don't want". The unremitting truth is that Americans can't afford to work in jobs that do not pay a living wage. Well, they could work at them if they accept living in conditions that more resemble Tijuana than San Diego.