According the Dylan Ratigan show on MSNBC on October 8, 72% of all employers claim they cannot find qualified candidates to fill positions. This is the new mantra being furthered by businesses, Bill Clinton,<\/a> Narayana Kocherlakota<\/a>, a conservative regional Federal Reserve Bank President, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce,<\/a> and numerous business friendly economic analysts. According to these sources, a major contributing factor to high unemployment is a mismatch between the skills required for available job openings and skills of unemployed workers.\u00a0This is often referred to as \u201cstructural unemployment.\u201d<\/p>\n Do these arguments have any validity? A lot of progressive analysts say no, that much of the blame for high unemployment rests squarely with employers and their labor practices.<\/p>\n Andrew Sum,<\/a> Director of Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University has this to say:<\/p>\n If skill mismatches were a serious problem in U.S. labor markets, then one would expect to find that many job openings were remaining vacant for a fairly long period of time. However, data on the durations of existing job vacancies available from three states reveal that the overwhelming share of job vacancies is very short-term in duration. Between 80 and 90 percent of the job vacancies in these three states were open for two months or less, with the vast majority of them (70%) open for less than 30 days. There are very few job vacancies that were open for more than two months (15%).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a great post on\u00a0The Economic Populist,<\/a> Robert Oak, challenges the corporate explanation for high unemployment. He says the reality is that job losses are across the board, not just in certain sectors. In other words, there isn\u2019t really a \u201cstructural\u201d change to the labor market and the types of jobs. There just aren\u2019t any jobs.<\/p>\n He quotes Boston Federal Reserve President, Eric Rosengren<\/a>, who says the problem is one of demand, not lack of skills.<\/p>\n In rather stark contrast, the most recent recession is far less a reflection of dislocation in a few industries but rather reflects a general decline in almost all industries. . . . To me, this does not suggest that the driver is structural change in the economy increasing job mismatches \u2013 although no doubt some of that exists \u2013 but instead I see here a widespread decline in demand across most industries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, we have sky-high unemployment rates across the board in a country full of highly skilled and educated people looking for work.<\/p>\n Oak points out that information and manufacturing started \u201cto be decimated with the China trade agreement and advances in telecommunications. This is when the great offshore outsourcing of jobs started, in 2001.\u201d He includes the graph below showing that the official unemployment rate for college graduates is over double what it was at the beginning of the decade.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n According to Oak, 2.4 million jobs<\/a> were lost to China from 2001-2008 alone and the tech people in Silicon valley, whose numbers dropped by 50%, were pushed entirely out of the field, their jobs offshore outsourced. And, he notes, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates half a million jobs<\/a> will be lost to China in this year alone.<\/p>\n I’m including the following long quote from Oaks as he makes an important connection between outsourcing and current rates of unemployment. He points out that offshore outsourcing<\/a> companies are seeing double digit growth:<\/p>\n India’s big three software outsourcing firms are set to regain double-digit growth rates during the second quarter, as customers in the US and Europe revive technology spending for addressing new markets and start offshoring their IT and back office projects to halve their costs.<\/p>\n Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies and Wipro, which count Citibank, Dow Chemicals, JP Morgan and BP Plc among their top customers, are expected to grow their quarter to September revenues by around 20% compared to the same period last year, at least five analysts tracking the sector told ET.<\/p>\n “We are getting ‘large deals, but maybe not as large as we would like. We are getting discretionary and transformation deals. In some sense, it’s business as usual in the short term but we have to wait and watch over medium to long term,” said S ‘Kris’ Gopalakrishnan, chief executive of Infosys.<\/p>\n He added that Infosys has started adding customers in US and Europe. “We traditionally define large deals as $100 million-plus for outsourcing deals and $50 million-plus for transformational deals\u2014it’s lower than that at this point,” said Mr Gopalakrishnan.<\/p>\n