The American Jobs Machine

This Wall Street Journal editorial solidly explains the healthy jobs outlook in the U.S. Other major industrial countries should envy our lot, rather than foolishly declare that all the new jobs are hamburger-flipping positions.

Looking around my workplace, it’s hard to believe what some people say about difficult employment situations in America. My firm is hiring left and right nowadays and those involved in forecasting manpower are still complaining about a shortage of good people. It seems that much of the morose attitudes about the economy are the result of an unrealistic comparison with the boom years of the late Nineties. Somehow the millions of jobs created out of speculative thin air that was the Dot-Com bubble is the standard by which all economies should be measured. I would venture to declare that today’s economy is more solid in its fundamentals than that period, from more credible profitability to significantly better productivity. I remember well before the downturn how my office was full of incompetent workers that were quickly hired that really shouldn’t have been there in the first place. A few years later, it was apparent that some bosses had learned their lesson, hiring temp workers first and then making the best of them full-time employees soon after. Although losing a job can be initially traumatic, it helps to identify it as an opportunity to do something better. In my line of work, changing jobs is often the fastest way to augment one’s income.