Where are the workers for the Green New Deal jobs going to come from?

[Recursion]

People predictably kvetch about the price tag, but we can always tax or print the money. A bigger problem is the fact that we're at 3.7% unemployment. Where are the people who we want to do these Green New Deal jobs going to come from?

[BeyondGeography]

1. Underemployed, gigsters, people who have given up on finding a job

People who might want another job.

Any other questions?

[Recursion]

2. Who's going to do their jobs?

There's about 700,000 part timers who want to work full time (U6 - U3). That gets you at best 700,000 full time GND workers, though you still have to find 700,000 people to work part time after that so the actual number of people problem doesn't go away. And how many GND jobs are going to be where those part timers currently live? If they were willing to move for a job they would have done that already (if you can fog a mirror you can get $20/hour at a construction site right now).

[BeyondGeography]

6. There are 6.4 million workers in clean energy-related jobs

Up until now, much of the focus among researchers and policymakers has been on counting the number of workers currently employed in the clean economy. As just one example, the Department of Energy has counted 6.4 million workers engaged in closely related activities in its latest “U.S. Energy and Employment” report in 2017.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/01/25/the-green-new-deal-promises-jobs-but-workers-need-to-be-ready-to-fill-them/

57 million in the gig economy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2018/08/31/57-million-u-s-workers-are-part-of-the-gig-economy/#37d282517118

We’re not talking about a 700k labor pool. If GND jobs offer more security Americans will migrate to them. People in this country are far more willing to pick up and move than in other western nations.

[Recursion]

11. How many of them want to be in the formal job economy?

All the Uber drivers I know personally do it because they were sick of having their hours set by somebody else.

And where will these jobs be? People can easily go get jobs in North Dakota right now (the state will pay you to move there) but they aren't, because somehow we have managed to raise the least mobile generation in US history. Are there going to be Green New Deal projects in both West Buttmunch, IA, and East Buttmunch, IA, and the ten thousand other dead towns where there isn't currently any work?

[Recursion]

12. And the clean energy sector has a *current* worker shortage (nt)

[sharedvalues]

3. Immigration makes America great

Lower-skilled immigrants will slide into low-paid retail and service industry jobs while Americans will take the higher paid Green New Deal jobs. Then, the children of immigrants will take better jobs than their parents while new hardworking ambitious immigrants arrive to do low skilled jobs.

That’s how it has worked in America for decades and that’s where we should be headed again.

We are unique because we are the main multiracial and multicultural democracy. So we are the ONLY large nation that can pull off the above. And it makes our economy uniquely strong.

[Kurt V.]

4. the labor force grows every year.

[Recursion]

5. Not as fast as businesses are hiring, though

Hell, there are four stalled construction sites within a mile of my old office in Virginia because they can't find people to work there, and that's starting at $25.

[Recursion]

19. IBEW is short 1000 electricians in a single sector in southside Virginia

That's not even the overheated Arlington/Alexandria/Falls Church area; that's around Richmond. There just aren't people.

We have $4.5 trillion in infrastructure work that needs to be done and the problem isn't the money, it's getting people to take the jobs. There isn't a shortage of jobs in this country. The problem is the people who don't have jobs aren't in the places where work needs to be done.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. We'll have a recession before the GND is ever passed. It can serve as stimulus.

[Recursion]

10. I mean, that seems like the only option (nt)

[procon]

8. Seems like a made up problem.

Any business can find workers if they are offering competitive wages, benefits and good working conditions. Throw in training or apprenticeship programs and business will draw workers from other businesses or incentivise unemployed workers to rejoin the workforce.

[Recursion]

9. It would be awesome if that were true

http://www.vindy.com/news/2018/oct/06/local-manufacturing-companies-struggling-fill-open/

But it's not. There's a whole lot of people out there who can't keep their shit together long enough to pass a single drug test (or even buy fake urine). These factories in Youngstown (Youngstown, FFS) ended up raising wages enough to pull people from neighboring towns, which solved the factories' problems, but did absolutely nothing to help the people in Youngstown who can't keep their shit together long enough to get a factory job in Youngstown.

If you can fog a mirror you can make $25 doing entry-level construction work in northern Virginia, and they can't fill their positions. We need to find the will to admit that our labor shortage is a real thing.

[rurallib]

13. The Great Trump Depression

[delisen]

14. Immigration of course

with immigration also serving somewhat as a brake that slows down automation.

The facts of the underlying immigration issue are still not being addressed. We need immigrant labor

[SlogginThroughIt]

15. yeah yer right we shouldn't do it. /sarcasm

What an odd question.

[Recursion]

16. I mean we're overbuilding as it is, that's one example of a thing we "shouldn't" do

If construction sites have to actually stall out like they are, that's an example of a thing we shouldn't do.

Green energy, like a lot of the tech sector, currently has a worker shortage. That suggests we should be thinking about how to best use that labor force, not how to "create more jobs".

We don't have a job shortage in the country. "More jobs" isn't solving a problem we have.

[bigbrother05]

17. Tim Ryan thinks they all live in Ohio, if the jobs move into old factories

[Recursion]

18. Isn't that the problem? We don't need work done where unemployed people currently are

We're the least mobile population in US history, weirdly.

[Bonx]

20. I would like a Green Deal job. I'm too old to get on a roof

but i could help spread awareness and I know about gardening.

[Recursion]

22. Will either of those be jobs? (nt)

[Bonx]

29. My understanding is they will need people to install solar panels

[Hortensis]

21. :) Where are people for jobs colonizing Mars coming from?

That was always a political platform, not a real bill, which would be literally many thousands of printed-out pages created by dozens of committees working and consulting with hundreds of experts over some years, and costing many millions of dollars.

[Recursion]

23. Understood, but I'm worried at how people seem to think we "need more jobs"

That just seems crazy to me. We can't get the stuff we need built and fixed now built and fixed.

[Hortensis]

24. Well, I have no respect for this little group's dishonest portrayal of

what's hardly more than a slogan as a real thing, or even a rationally achievable idea. It's not, and that's why Mitch McConnell cynically introduced it as if it were a real bill -- to injure the credibility and image of the Democratic Party.

These are troubled times, so let's just recognize these little hostile radical groups for what they are -- as genuine and reliable a symptom of national anxiety as the rise of RW extremists, but both always inevitably part of the problem and never the solution.

Our jobs situation is an escalating tragedy. When millions of clerical jobs, just for instance, mostly held by women, disappeared it was a labor holocaust resulting in a cascade of many millions of under-reported economic tragedies across the nation. Many, especially younger white collar workers were able to retrain for decent incomes (in jobs that are again disappearing), but millions moved downscale to became stock and counter clerks, and a lot said goodbye to a second income and left the labor market altogether -- a devastating move for many that has lead to near destitution as things "didn't go well" and will have terrible effects on the retirement incomes of others.

That's just one major type of work. MANY more are coming as supercomputers and robotics take over. We've not been threatened with mass starvation because we're a very wealthy nation with support systems in place, such as food stamps, and above all because there was a lot of fat to cut from the average home. Well, it was by falling pay and loss of many of the second jobs that had let families see themselves as middle class, but now leaving many soon-to-be-gone jobs as the only income for those families.

So we should talk and worry here about the future of work, and incomes, because the Democratic Party owns this discussion. We are the only party with the ideological commitment and plans shelved and waiting to address this tsunami we're already riding. Ask Hillary and all the Democrats who lost office in 2016 what they were ready to run with then, and the many new, good-paying jobs and training for them that have been tragically delayed. Knowing what was coming fast, Hillary seriously considered running on a universal guaranteed income but said the numbers didn't line up for her first term. And they had so many other big, big plans that our nation also needed.

[Recursion]

25. Except this is the best economy of anyone's lifetime

I'm kind of sick of the gaslighting about this. This is the best time to be working in America, ever.

[Hortensis]

26. Real wages for half the nation continued their 30-year decline in 2018.

A two-person household with a total annual income below $16,910 is considered to be living in poverty, or something like $8-something. Many jobs don't pay that much and aren't full-time.

A quarter of America's children are fed through food stamps.

More than 60% of jobs don't pay enough to support what we think of as a middle class lifestyle. (Oh, boohoo, "middle class" does contain a lot of fat?) 80% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck.

Millions of suburban tract homes are now hiding people living impoverished within them, scrambling to keep utility and mortgage/rent payments from falling so far behind they trigger disaster.

Since there aren't and never will be any Justice Democrats' "Green New Deal" jobs, though, there's no need to wonder where the workers come from.

Let the Democrats produce tens of thousands of good-paying jobs through public works programs alone, though, and there will immediately be long, long lines of applicants.

[fescuerescue]

27. That's a problem that solves itself

Seriously.

IF the pay is good enough, you don't have to find workers. They find you.

The best employers of my life understood and benefited from that. The worst...did not.

Not surprisingly, the ones that understood that are still around and the worst are not.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

28. I have a BS degree in mathematics (minor in physics)

... and an IQ of 148 according to a CTMM exam that was overseen by a local Mensa chapter years ago.

No time in jail, no addiction to drugs, clean-cut appearance, etc.

I've never earned more than $20 an hour in the 50+ years of my life, mostly working in factories.

Money alone wouldn't compel me to move to Virginia for a construction job, though. I'm not moving several miles away from family members who will always be a part of my life. A job? An employer can cut you at the drop of a hat. They're private tyrannies, where money has more power than personal well-being.

Edit: I'd be willing to work in ways that help the environment rather than hurt it, though, and I'd be willing to do it for less money than I'm making now if I believed in it. There's all kinds of experiences that create happiness other than money. I'm just a "cog in the machine" that's creating future trash at my current job. (A cog that management utilizes sometimes for math problems that arise, such as the most recent one of calculating how much footage of waste a supplier sent us when only the total weight was measured. The problem solved, easy for me but impossible for them, I then resume my subordinate role to those vassals until I can clock out.)