Help Wanted signs are back. The economy is improving.

[Hamlette]

I went shopping today and saw 3 Help Wanted signs. Yes, they were in the windows of retail stores probably staffing up for Christmas and one was for part time work but its been years since I've seen any help wanted signs.

I work in the unemployment office, we're all afraid to say it out loud but our case load is going down fast! My friends are reporting they kids are finding jobs in and out of college. Not dream jobs but jobs.

I know there is still way too much unemployment and I'm worried about underemployment - part time, not at highest skill level etc. - but it is improving.

[hedgehog]

1. What part of the country?

[davidn3600]

2. Minimum wage retail jobs won't help the economy much though

The problem with the job market is the massive loss of middle salary jobs. The jobs $30k-$60k.

We've seen an increase in jobs at the very top and the very bottom. But job growth in the middle is flat, even still losing in some places. And until those salaries come back, everything else in the economy is going to have very slow growth.

[Hamlette]

3. I agree with everything you said but, it also means they expect customers.

[BlueStreak]

4. The problem we will quickly face is that we really can't get to 5% with the current work force

The past decade or two, we have been obsessed with testing children and destroying public schools. It shows in the students. An alarming number of them cannot do simple arithmetic like figuring tax. They can't reason through simple problems like which product is a better value. They cannot speak in complete sentences without "like", "you know" or other verbal ticks that annoy the hell out of potential customers.

It is not all the fault of our educational direction. We can certainly point to the technologies we have given the children to amuse themselves in lieu of proper parenting. Many of them are real demons with video games and most can crank out 90 barely intelligible texts in an hour, even if they cannot read a book and give any kind of a summary of what they have read.

What I am saying is that things have changed a lot since the last time we had "full employment", Even in the worst of the 2008-2010 recession, I always had call center jobs I could not fill. These were not horrible cold call jobs with a heavy commission component. These were basic customer service and order-taking jobs. We couldn't pay a king's ransom, but we were able to pay around $15/hour plus some bonuses and a good package of benefits including solid health insurance. Yet only about 1 applicant in 30 had the most basic skills I described above.

And when we would settle on an applicant, we found that we had to do all sorts of remedial training, explaining what was actually proper conduct in a business environment. "No, I'm sorry, you cannot plug your iPod in all day long and leave the customer calls unanswered." "No I'm sorry, texting is for emergencies and during your breaks. We are paying you to help us conduct business."

I don't mean to come off as a curmudgeon. I don't feel like we were asking anything very demanding -- nothing that wouldn't have been taken for granted a decade earlier. There comes a point where it just isn't worth the aggravation to try to grow the business when this is the available work force.

I believe it is a serious issue that we will be facing. And Obama has pretty much bought into the same brain-dead "testing and privatizing" game plan that the Republicans pushed to get us to this place. The Republicans have a good excuse. They don't care whether the work force is any good or not. They are going to outsource to the low wage countries anyway. But Democrats that play that game should be ashamed of themselves.