The new job growth in America is dominated by high skill and low skill jobs, seeing a disappearance of mid-level jobs
Analysts and the central bankers at the Federal Reserve are worried that the US economy is now mainly dominated by high skill and low skill jobs, with many of the middle skill jobs being now gone. This leads to an economic divisiveness and to some degree to political divisiveness as well. Basically, there is a record number of job vacancies and an even bigger number of unemployed people who cannot fill the positions because they are either underpaid or they do not qualify for them.
Besides this discrepancy between jobs, there is also the issue of stagnant wages, with 62% of employees receiving no salary increase in 2018. According to economists wages grew 0.1% in January, below the expected 0.3% monthly gain in hourly earnings. Even though this was partly impacted by the partial government shutdown, it seems wages have been stagnating since the job market bounced back from the last recession.
The fact that there are many job openings means employers should be competing in offering better wages and benefits in order to fill empty jobs, but the reverse seems to be happening, employers want to fill positions with low wages and will only accept high-skilled personnel. However, skills can be attained, but they are just not offering training or enough incentives to motivate their prospective employees. It seems a lot of employers are willing to let jobs unfilled than offer higher wages to fill them.
Meanwhile, some employers, especially small business owners, have a different point of view, they say they are having a hard time filling in empty positions because employees would rather go to another firm for just an extra benefit, instead of focusing on job stability.
Source: theguardian.com
