Skilled workers might be hard to find

As joblessness falls, skilled workers might be hard to find

Are America’s employers at risk of running out of skilled people to hire?

The U.S. economy has become a seemingly perpetual job-generating machine, having steadily added workers for nearly eight years. Even with the unemployment rate now at 3.7 percent — its lowest point since 1969 — hiring hasn’t stalled. So far this year, job growth has averaged a robust 208,000 a month, up from a pace of 182,000 for all of 2017.

The trend has defied the predictions of most economists. Many have long warned that as hiring surged and unemployment fell, the pool of potential hires would shrink and trigger a bidding wire that would ignite wage gains.

It hasn’t happened. Many people are still being hired each month. And pay raises, though rising, remain modest

“Every single time that we predict job growth is going to start slowing and wage growth is going to start picking up in recent years, we haven’t gotten that right,” said Martha Gimbel, research director for the jobs listing site Indeed.

To try to explain why employers are still managing to hire skilled workers at a steady pace, Gimbel paraphrased a line from the 1971 movie “Willy Wonka &

the Chocolate Factory”:

“There’s no knowing where we’re going, but it shows no sign of slowing.”

In July, America’s employers posted a record 6.9 million job openings, which actually exceeded the number of unemployed people. The abundance of openings suggests that companies expect to keep hiring.

Even the Trump administration, for all its brash public confidence, acknowledges uncertainty about how much further unemployment can fall.

“It’s a tricky question, because I don’t think we know,” Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, told reporters Friday.

At some point, many employers will likely feel they’re running out of skilled workers to hire. Just not yet.

Here will be five signals that a labor shortage may finally be at hand: PAY RAISES SPIKE >> Average hourly wages have risen 2.8 percent in the past 12 months. That’s basically keeping pace with the inflation rate for consumer prices. But the theory is that as economy keeps expanding and employers find they need to pay more to attract employees, pay could jump, especially in some sectors of the economy that require heavily skilled workers.

Some companies are already taking action. Consider Amazon’s just-announced boost in its minimum hourly wage to $15 starting in November. Amazon’s rival retailers and warehouse operators, in particular, may feel pressure to raise pay, too.

For now, many employers appear to be raising pay only modestly while in some cases also offering short-term bonuses not included in the government’s gauge of hourly earnings.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A job applicant looks at job listings for the Riverside Hotel at a job fair hosted by Job News South Florida, in Sunrise, Fla. The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent in September 2018, the lowest level since December 1969 — signaling how the longest streak of hiring on record has put millions of Americans back to work.