Maybe this is part of the training for new miners to work underground,

Is this for real. Imagine all this for older workers that need some time in the sun. Where do those that need the help that are younger workers fit in. They are our future. It get crazier as we go along.
Cheers

There are a lot of order workers that cannot retire and sit in the sun for one reason or the other. Such as mills blowing up.
Cheers

According to the demographic trend of smaller generations behind the large baby boomer generation, we are going to need some of these older workers to stay working.

I agree, Retired 02. The way this b.s. is being spread nowadays it would seem that unless we have EVERYONE working until they drop our whole economy will implode trying to satiate all the demand there is for our ‘production’.

Hard to believe that 100 years ago a full
50% of the working age population had to be engaged in agriculture, trying to feed themselves and the other 50% that did other work. Or the very real possibility of famine might ensue.

Today, that’s less than 3%, and still declining. And we’re producing more food for more people than ever before. And there’s been similar gains in productivity in virtually EVERY other field of human activity.

How many are on the floor of a modern sawmill compared to only a few decades ago? How many does it take in the bush to get the trees onto the logging truck nowadays? About a tenth of what it once did for the same volume of logs?

Seen the inside of a new car plant lately? Compare that with how many people it used to take to assemble a ’56 Chevy.

Yet we’re told there’s this great ‘shortage’ of workers, and unless the older ones hang in there til they’re almost ready to drop, and beyond, and they and everyone else works longer and harder, great shortages of product are a real possibility.

Oh, I know, that’s not quite the way it’s being put, is it? But that’s still what’s being implied. And it’s NONSENSE.

With all these enormous advances in productivity one would expect that the prices of everything would be a small fraction of what they were when all these industries were much more labour intensive. But are they?

So there we have it again. We can’t PAY ‘for’ what we’ve done ‘from’ what we’ve done. Even though that’s the ONLY ‘money’ that’s been distributed to us to do it. We can only pay for it from what we’re DOING, or are GOING TO HAVE TO DO. But how, then, do we ever pay for THAT? Even if we work everyone til they croak, it still won’t be possible.

Well written, Socred.
Of course, the problem will only go away when corporations and their shareholders decide that they don’t need to increase profits each and every quarter. In other words, the whole system will have to implode first. The governments do not know what to do, one hand has people going to Ireland looking for help, the other decides we need to retain and retrain ‘older’ workers, have any of them had a good look at the demographics of the existing unemployed people in this province?
metalman.

I doubt very much that they have, metalman. Or, if they have, they’ve seen something they don’t want to talk about.

And if all these “badly needed skills” are going to continue to really be “badly needed” we should be doing what Retired 02 suggested. And pay more attention to getting more younger workers trained to fill them.

I rather suspect that many of these “badly needed skills” are ones in which there’s a very short term shortage, and not much of a long term future. And that’s one reason why we’re so loath to invest more in training younger workers, who will only then be told shortly after they’re trained and employed that their newly acquired skills are no longer needed, and they’d better go get re-trained for something else (that won’t have any better future long term either.)

Whether we want to face it or not, and our politicians certainly don’t, labour displacement through technology is an ongoing and increasing fact of life. This is not to say that ALL jobs will disappear, but it certainly is to say that the notion there can be “full employment” in a modern industrial society in the way we’ve traditionally envisioned it, and many still do, is a myth.

We do not face any real shortages in meeting all our consumptive needs, and more, with only a fraction of the employable workforce actually working.

In fact, the problem in many industries isn’t that there’s too little productivity, it’s that there’s way too much. That in spite of which we still can’t SELL everything that’s being produced, and trying to make still MORE of it, (to get the per unit cost down), only exacerbates the problem. Because it’s the cost of ALL the units that has to be liquidated through sales, and we’re still making MORE than we can ever sell enough of to recover all the costs.

I saw a statistical graph in a trade magazine a few years back that showed, on average, in a period of economic boom, we were only using 86% of existing plant capacity. In more normal economic times this averages around 75%. So you might say that we’re meeting 100% of our needs to ‘consume’ with only 75% of the capacity we have to actually ‘produce’ being operated. And what do we do? We build more capacity to produce. Why? Because we’re needing more production to fill some shortage of product? No, because we need ‘jobs’! We can’t conceive of a way to distribute incomes, to enable us to buy what we’ve already made, unless we work at making MORE than we actually need, or oftentimes even desire.

There are many young people, strong and fully capable, who will not do the jobs a lot of us older fellows will. They don’t want to work that hard. There are lots of hard working young people, don’t get me wrong but I’ve seen young strong looking fellows come to a jobsite and give up after two hours when there was a small woman doing the same job. Its all in attitude!

They want to get paid the big wages and not have to put out for them.