Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
Or whether people are willing to be retrained. Me ... I seem to retrain and switch careers about every 15 to 20 years.
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Or whether they can be, and whether it helps if they are.
When you decided to become a lawyer, how long did you train?
It's not quite so bad in things like construction, but most jobs in the field, like carpentry, plumbing, masonry and electrical work are skilled trades that require fairly extensive training which may take too much time. If there's a big push to recycle big houses into affordable smaller ones, chances are good the labor to do it will be largely imported, and it may be done by the time the locals are trained to do it themselves.
And construction is a cyclical business, dependent upon the economy, and most construction workers spend fairly long periods on the bench waiting for jobs to become available.
There's an economist in Germany (whose name I don't recall at the moment) getting attention. He's been studying the changes wrought by globalization, off shoring, and changes in technology that have made some positions obsolete, with corresponding unemployment. He's come to the conclusion that many of the displaced workers simply won't
get new jobs, and is exploring what can be done about them.
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Dennis