75-20-A5
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Some Thoughts on Unemployment
TranscriptUnemployment is still well over 8% nationally. Meanwhile the classified sections of the newspapers are brimming with help wanted ads. I'll be right back. Although the jobless rate dropped a tiny bit in September to 8.3% from 8.4%, that's not very comforting if you're one of the thousands out looking for a job. One of the ironies of our current economic situation is that while so many people are out of jobs, the classified ad pages of the newspapers are often carrying record numbers of help wanted ads. There are two explanations: First, many of these jobs are for technical skills hard to find, that don't match the skills of most of the job seekers. On the other side of the scale, they're below the skill level of the more highly qualified job seekers. Now you've heard me criticize government and bureaucracy often enough to know that I'm skeptical about its ability to solve many problems, but I think the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau statistics could help solve that first problem, matching the skilled worker to job. It could put its computers to work gathering the information on needed job skills from the classified ads in many markets, categorizing it and sending it out, perhaps every few days, to the various state employment departments around the country. Thus say a skilled machine tool pattern maker in a New England state who didn't know that a good job was going begging in Illinois because he didn't see the newspapers from there might learn about it from his local employment office. But what about the skilled worker or technician or executive who loses his job as a result of recession cutbacks? He or she is reluctant to take a lower paying, lower skilled job, not because they're too proud but because they're afraid that if they do they'll never have the time to continue looking for the permanent replacement to their higher paying job. What if the state employment departments agreed to help such people by placing them in the lower skilled jobs for the time being, while also having the worker's job agent continue to look for the better paying job for him. That would get income flowing into the workers family again, keeping him off welfare and also filling an employer's needs, at least temporarily. Despite the 8% or so overall unemployment figures, it's much higher for teenagers, many of whom are looking for their first jobs. They're especially hard hit when times are tough. Their unemployment rate in September was 19.3%. You may remember back in the late 30s the Civilian Conservation Corps. This program took young men, sent them out into the country where they cleared trails and campgrounds for national parks and forests and other conservation work that might otherwise have not been done or at least delayed till better times. In California in recent years we began a pilot program called the Ecology Corps. Though it was small in size, it succeeded in doing the same sort of thing. The young people in it had helpful outdoors work and got satisfaction from it. Maybe we should begin a national discussion about a similar program throughout the country, on a short-range basis it could relieve the teenage unemployment problem, accomplish useful things on public lands, paying the participants something and cost the taxpayers less than welfare or unemployment. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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