A Bit of Job Creation

     Greetings, All -- The TV Talking Heads are burning air in efforts to outdo one another with points and counter-points on who can best accelerate job creation.  There is not a person in our great nation who does not hope that available jobs grow in number day-by-day, week-by-week.  Billy Hawkfinder is included in that count.

     We have all heard reports of job openings with no qualified takers in sight.  That may be true to an extent, but it is tough for us to believe some of the stories.  We know and know of many solidly qualified citizens who have maintained their skills while looking for matching positions for months with no luck.

     A piece in The New York Times, Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class, published on January 21st this year, however, proves that such problems do exist.  It underscored a gross shortage of qualified workers and manufacturing facilities to take on Apple's forecasted huge projects in the U.S.  Authors Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher related the essence of a dinner conversation between the President and Apple Boss Steven Jobs that took place in February 2011.

     "'Why can't that work come home?', the President asked."  The answer referred to the huge surge capacity available in China in terms of engineers, production workers and facilities.  Also, the concentration of supplier factories there was stated to be unmatched anywhere in the U.S.  We are speaking here of great numbers of available trained people.

      Companies sometimes must turn down important opportunitites for lack of capacity. In our experience, a major military supplier was asked by a key general officer to take on an immediate task of designing and building an intercontinental missile.  The executive to whom he spoke was forced to turn down a multi-billion dollar busines opportunity because he could not guarantee to assign 125 appropriately qualified engineers to the program by the following Monday morning.  Sounds strange, but it is true.

     Today, there are high expectations for job creation in the biofuels and renewable chemicals field.  In Jim Lane's Biofuels Digest, a recent article projects that as many as 2.4 to 8.15 million man-years of labor could be required to replace "10 percent of gasoline consumption with ethanol [ethyl alcohol] made from agricultural waste."  These jobs in construction, operations, waste collection and transportation, it is projected, could be created between today and 2030, a rudimentary average of 300,000 employees during the period.

     We all know that domestic oil and gas production and transportation also offers significant employment as fracking and offshore operations grow from their present levels.  Indeed, in the laboratories and factories of our nation, floods of new products requiring trained and motivated  people are in development and production.  We join you in the hope that employment grows at an increasing rate and, of great importance, that our education and training capacities will quickly rise to the challenge.

     Best wishes, Billy Hawkfinder