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Subscribe to RSSAs the war in Afghanistan winds down, the impact on the nation’s employment picture goes beyond veterans returning home who are looking for work.
There are thousands of civilian jobs related to the war effort, and cutbacks in defense spending have already led to reductions in these defense-related jobs, including direct government positions or those with defense contractors. The loss of these jobs isn’t good news for the still-dim employment picture.
“It will create a greater supply of workers and create more pain overall for the U.S. work force,” said Gautam Godhwani, CEO of jobs website SimplyHired.com.
For May, the number of openings for defense-related jobs across the Web, including job boards and company jobs sites, declined by 4.2 percent compared to the previous month, according to SimplyHired.com research. And unless Congress acts to curb some of the projected defense cutbacks, he added, things will only get worse next year.
Indeed, Boeing officials recently warned that any further cutbacks to defense spending could devastate the defense industry and lead to thousands of jobs lost.
The decline in defense and aerospace employment has already begun. Last year, contractors shed nearly 35,000 jobs, and through May nearly 11,000 more have already disappeared, according to a report from Challenger Gray & Christmas released this week.
There has also been a significant downsizing of civilian workers at the Department of Defense, which saw its work force drop to 790,000 from more than 800,00 in fiscal year 2011, stated a report from the department's comptroller.
And the number is expected to drop further. A story in FederalTimes.com from December reported that in the next decade the Department of Defense’s civilian work force will plummet by 20 percent to 630,000, “the smallest since the Defense Department's creation in 1947.”
The combination of the war winding down, vets returning to the work force, cutbacks in defense-related industries and the inevitable reductions by their suppliers, Godhwani said, all add up to a recipe for fewer job opportunities.
But, he maintained, some states and occupations will benefit from the influx of more civilian workers with defense-related skills.
For example, in cities such as Detroit and Las Vegas, the number of workers for each job opening is about five to one, compared to Washington, D.C., and Boston where there are one or two individuals for every job, Godhwani said.
Also, he added, workers with specialized skills in defense-related industries, including technology and engineering, could be hired by employers who are having difficulty filling jobs.
Among defense-related occupations, all of the top 10 have been declining since 2009 and are expected to decrease even further through 2015, according to a 2011 Secretary of Defense report titled “Defense-Related Employment of Skilled Labor.” These occupations include business and financial, record-keeping clerks, construction trades, maintenance and computer specialists.
Even if some of these workers are able to fill a talent gap in the civilian work force, overall it’s going to be tough to add more jobless individuals to the long lines of the nation's under- and unemployed.
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This article could have been a lot shorter.
"War is great for business."
War is great for business. And business employs people.
The Great Depression lasted 10 years. Wasn't until WWII and the massive build up of military equipment that people began to be employed.
Flip side, Germany was in a Great Depression after WWI. Terrible financial ruin, and the people were starving. The people didn't get out of that until the government began waging war.
Wasn't until the French Revolution that the people in France who were starving because of an indifferent government [the King] began to see changes.
History is replete with examples.
All for making money by business, which businesses need to employ people to make the money.
Germany wouldn't of been quite so starving or crushed if they hadn't been forced to pay devastating reparations to the allies. World War 1 essentially laid the groundwork for World War II.
There's a lot of history that isn't told in films, or even in books, about Germany in the early 1900s and what led to WWI, and further, what led to the rise of the Nazi political party in the early 1930s.
The funny here is reparations. Note; President Harry Truman gave out around $2 billion in gold[yep physical gold and @ $35.00 an ounce, do the math to figure out how pounds of gold that is] to "Allied" countries AFTER WWII.
That led to an accounting of how much gold America really had at Ft. Knox and at the Federal Reserve in NY by President Eisenhower.
But the premise here is that "war" is good for businesses that sell weapons of war. It's also good for workers who make the weapons of war.
When someone comes up with a better idea than war, in which businesses make money and thus employ people, then there won't be a need for war. Sadly, since humans have gathered into communities, then cities, then countries, they have waged war against each other.
Not to worry. When Willard becomes president he will start another war.
Republicans will pay a lot of wages to young men and women if they are willing to go to battle when repubs start wars and you can bet they want more right now, but when the fighting is over will the repubs help them find good paying work in the USA, No! They and their rich masters sit on top of piles of money in their castles and would rather build a factory in Vietnam or India or China or Mexico and pay very low wages and give no benefits and avoid environmental and safety regulations in those countries, make their products at a small fraction / percent of cost it would be in America as we once did 30 plus years ago, then they send their marketers and financiers/credit card guys al over the country and world to get people to buy their products generated by slave labor that pollutes and injures without regulations in those countries. What would the great business Americans of last century say - Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Carnegie, Kaiser, Edison, Getty say about the non-patriotic repub business leaders? They would say they have put this country into the reverse direction that we worked to get to....Repubs you want respect again, put these returning soldiers and sailors to work immediately at national conservation project, emergency response and recovery teams, and back to school on full old GI Bill package our parents got after WWII - you must do this or you are showing you will only pay them a lot of taxpayer money when they are fighting wars - you spend money for defense and violence, but not in peacetime when theywill be glad to work and attend college but you keep them broke, homeless, right after they risked their lives for defending your butts. Repubs are the supreme USERS and ABUSERS until they ever return to the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower!!
BigBear...
Who's buying that stuff coming out of the factories in Mexico, China, Vietnam, India or anywhere else? YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE.
I can honestly say that right now, everything I'M wearing was made in America from products sourced in America... even my old Hamilton watch is American made.
It's YOUR choice where you spend YOUR money and WHAT product YOU BUY.
Very true, but the 99% is not going to buy products because it's "made in america". That slogan stopped meaning something back in the 70s.
The 99% are going to buy based upon price. Virtually all the products consumers in the US buy and use are from another country. That's because if the products were made in the US, no one could buy them because the price would be to high.
Steve Allen...
That's the fallacy too many believe.
Granted, I could buy jeans in the big box stores for $49 or so, I get them on line for less.
I could buy Nikes "sport shoes" (sneakers to us older guys!!) for $75? but I get them on line for the same.
Shirts and everything else the same.
Diane Sawyer of ABC actually outfitted a college dorm room with virtually IDENTICAL products, ALL American made, for LESS than the products in the "college" source book. And it proved to be better quality at that.
So, yes it can be done. Not necessarily easily, but it CAN be done.
This article might as well be written by the PR people of the military-industrial corporations. Cuts in defense spending should be channelled to production benefits to education, health and advancement of the American people.
Nothing to do but start another war.
It's for our own good.
Attack Iran! We need the jobs!!
Here's the trillions of dollars of taxes question:
What would take the place of "war" that could employ hundreds of thousands of people, including engineers, scientists, and the so called "college grads" who can't find a job, that pays enough [note there are plenty of jobs, just not jobs that pay well].
Steve, the answer to your question, honestly, is there is no jobs program the government can create to solve unemployment because the government isn't smart enough to know where capital should be invested. There is no difference between war and digging holes and filling them in, economically, since both activities are unproductive; they do not efficiently utilize capital nor create a return over investment.
One only has to see what happens when government stimulus programs end to understand this is true. When the government stops subsidizing an industry, the jobs it creates generally go away because the money invested did nothing to grow the economy. Nothing enduring was created. No demand persists once the "free money" dries up.
The market, if allowed to function freely, will find efficient uses for capital that create enduring economic growth that leads to higher employment, higher standards of living, and prosperity.
When thousands upon thousands of troops returned following the end of WWII, and government spending for war ceased, Keynesian economists called for massive stimulus in order to avert a "certain" recession resulting from the reduction in government spending. In fact, the opposite occurred. The money previously spent by government was left in the hands of private citizens and the free market, and it quickly found its way to truly useful purposes that created wealth and jobs on an unprecedented scale.
Claiming that government spending is needed to maintain or boost employment is a fallacy.
gjdavis60...
While we DID have exponential growth after WWII, that had more to do with the fact that America had for all intents and purposes the only functioning economy in the world. But your basic concept and belief are correct. It is NOT government spending that we need.
The industrial base of Europe and Asia had been virtually destroyed by war. We were the only economy that had functioning industries and the ability to BUILD product. So we did build. We rebuilt Europe and Japan.
Then we fell back into war.... Korea. but that didn't stop the greatest expansion this country ever saw. We were still involved rebuilding Europe and Japan.
We actually built them too well..... they became our competitors.
Then the unthinkable happened.... the technology we built for them they started using to out produce us. And when they started producing, they started buying consumer products from their own factories and not ours. Then they under-priced American labor and started selling their product here in competition with American produced CONSUMER product. It was then that the Corporations, trying to survive and grow, started closing American manufacturing facilities and making product overseas to bring back here. But, while people were still working, fewer and fewer were.
That is the reason I continually say, BUY AMERICAN. THAT is what will put your neighbor next door or in the next state back to work. The government is a parasite (although a necessary one) that TAKES your money and gives you little if anything in return. The money your working neighbor spends makes it possible for YOU to go to work to make the product they buy.
For XDM9mm:
don't forget the political angle. that is, almost all the countries that make the products for american companies to sell, are dependent upon the American economy to buy those products they make, for their economy. That fact gives America big leverage in those countries government and political arenas.
There is another "angle" that no one talks about and investigative journalists aren't even considering;
1. socialistic programs that subsidize citizens living expenses require enormous amounts of money. The Euro Zone was created to expand the number of people paying taxes to support socialistic programs in Western European countries, by the inclusion of 27 countries and their population, into a big pool where all the people in all the countries pay.
note: is you want a historical perspective, read about the English Catholic Cardinal Wolsey and his development of the progressive tax system that is still used today.
2. If you use the historical perspective of the progressive tax system, where a very small number of people, become very wealthy by taxing a large number of people, and that social programs require large numbers of people being taxed, the move to a "global economy" and experiments like "The Euro Zone", is a move to be able to tax individual countries population as if they were one countries population [7 billion+ people], all of which is so a very small number of people, become enormously wealthy.
One must always remember that the progressive tax system is for the accumulation of wealth by a very small number of people, by taxing a very large number of people. Because the general population tends to revolt [again see history about revolts ie American revolution, French Revolution, etc ] when governments and/or a small number of people become wealthy at the expense of the general population, the small number of people [and/or politicians] sell to the general population that they get "benefits" so as to agree to the taxes. Organized unions is one such method. The union members are given better wages, better pensions, yet it's the union executives and a small number of people who become enormously wealthy, from both the union dues paid by the workers, and from the small number of people who tell the pension funds what stocks, bonds to buy, when to buy them, and what to sell, and when to sell them, who are the truly wealthy.
I would venture that if the defense contractors would gut the waste - we could still reduce defense spending by 50%- and not loose a single job. In turn, we could take the 50% savings and put it into our infrastructure.
But as long as bids are awarded to companies with inflated CEO and management salaries who snicker at the waste while schmoozing select politicians- only the REAL talent with the REAL skills in those same companies will find themselves unemployed when cuts come.
I've seen it.
Not to worry... we'll be at war again soon. That's how we stay in business.
Got that right. Better yet, run all the veterens through the VA intake medical process and put a large chunck on disability for all sorts of personal problems. Maybe-- for drinking and smoking- Better yet, chasing women and being a horndog. PTSD for all! $1800 tax free a month plus SSI.. We have a massive giveaway program at all levels anyway. We can employee just as many with this government lagrass through the health industry and tieriery employent taking care of vetern issues. ....Now the defense industry is crying. Whatever. I feel so much safer now that we spent a trillion on sadam and another couple trillion fighting the pedophile drug addicts in afghanstan. Anyway, there are no cuts and we are going bankrupt keeping this mercenary industry alive or massive inflation. 1 of the 2.
get out of the arab world, stop the massive payments to israel/egypt/etc, put the military on a major diet, and save some real money
the republicans will be delighted with the smaller government
When are people going to realize that defense if more than the military. The average military installation employs thousand of local residence and contribute millions of dollars annually to cities and counties across the country. Sacramento is a good example of how defense spending can was important, Sacramento lost three major military installations in the 1990's and they have not recovered since. Its cost them over 40,000 civilians jobs and probably a billion in revenue.
So? Its like any government spending. Other peoples money to run around with and have a party. When it runs out, we all go under or massive inflation and the people not invited to the party pay the most. Give it time! Not saying defense isnt important but 130 some countries with 800 billion spent per year with the largest military in the world of the next 18 militaries combined. Enough. It's a trough and thats about it. Who gives a rats behind. They can cut it in half and still be 50% too big.
Then it is high time the USA stopped being a fascist nation with a planned military economy isn't it? Reagan began the privitization of the Pentagon during the 1980s, and this is where it led- $700 billion/ year not counting the wars.
I'm not feeling completely sorry for the DoD contractors in this case. They got greedy and decided to focus the majority of their business in the defense sector rather than diversifying like their counterparts in other countries do. Now they are feeling the pain as a result. There have been too many mergers and acquisitions since the end of WW2, so much so that we've gone from approximately 70 major defense contractors to around 6-8.
Retired...
Part of that problem is caused by the Government themselves. They've gotten to the point of asking for such huge investments, that smaller companies couldn't generate the funds necessary alone, so they started to merge. Plus, now they need such specialized and integrated equipment, multiple companies can't collaborate on.
Also, for comparison, look to the fiasco Boeing encountered when they tried collaborative construction on the "Dreamliner". Parts didn't fit due to "misunderstandings" and errors in converting standard and metric measurements.
The Dreamliner issues are a good case of one of the golden rules of engineering: thoroughly define and agree to the interfaces and then lock them down (no changes unless absolutely necessary)! This applies to hardware and software (the latter being my subject matter area).
Once the wars are over we have always cut the shooting related expenses but this time the TPers in the GOP are cutting the basic military National Security needs of the US. The cuts being prepared are not thousands but more like millions for all the big contractors who build ships and planes to the parts vendors, truckers, services providers and the local communities where the workers live and spend their salary for food etc.
Wake up America Freedom is Not Free it costs money, lives, bllod, sweat and tears.
Bob... it's actually the Simpson Bolles recommended cuts that will occur. It's NOT any Tea Party people who suggested those.
Really? I thought government doesn't create jobs. Now it does?
What about the domestic cuts? Will they reduce jobs. There's equal domestic cuts that you don't even mention. What about the 500,000 police, teachers and firefighters who have already lost their jobs to finance the war machine?
The money for war comes from somewhere. It comes from cuts in education or taxes. Lately, no taxes, all cuts. The bombs are making our children stupid, literally. I guess that makes them better cannon fodder. After all if they can't get a job because they have bad education, they can always sign up to go die in.. wherever we are at war.
andreas...
If you want more for education, go to your local taxing authority and tell THEM to increase YOUR taxes.
If you want more police, go to your local taxing authority and tell THEM to increase YOUR taxes.
If you want more firefighters, go to your local taxing authority and tell THEM to increase YOUR taxes.
All of those functions are in reality LOCAL and or state responsibilities. The Federal government is actually only responsible for NATIONAL DEFENSE. Everything else has been thrown into the pot over the years, promises made and no one ever considered HOW to pay for those promises. But the ones who MADE those promises didn't care, it got THEM elected and they left the problem of funding to people after they left office and retired.
People think that going to war is going to stimulate the economy and create jobs. However, by going to war you are going to have to increase spending to fund that war. If the money that would be spent in funding the war was rather spent in investing in our infrastructure more jobs would be created because there would be alot less waste. Private business would do the work and make a profit while having to hire people to get the job done. Money for war is a waste because all you do is blow up things and get people killed while money spent in infrastructure benefits everyone.
Joe F.... we're STILL spending money WE DON'T HAVE! WHAT is so difficult about that to understand?
Let me put some more on the credit card that I already can't pay. Let's take a cash advance to pay the bill this month, plus a little more to live on and do the same thing NEXT month. Exactly how long would YOU be able to do that?
How much are you willing to leave, as debt, to your children or grandchildren? Haven't we run up the bills for them high enough already?
What I'm saying that some people are sugesting that going to war is a fix for the ecomony. If you go to war you are going to have to increase spending. So, if your going to increase spending it is better to spend it on something worth while. Spending does stimulate the economy cuts do not. Austerity makes it worse.
XDM - right on target with your comments. We can no longer support our current level of federal government spending. Our debt load is far too high. That means learning to live within our means, something we have not done for a very long time. It means making painful choices on where to spend the dollars we can afford. And it also means a slow growth economy, at best, for the next few decades as we are weaned off huge government budget deficits. It is not going to be pretty.
Peter17.. Oh so true..
Joe F..... What we have run into are all the promises made by politicians of the past coming home to roost.
The problem is, even with "cuts" the spending increases. All politicians continually do is reduce the EXTENT of the increase and then claim it's a "cut".
Any politician will make any promise to get elected or re-elected. He or she doesn't really care about anything else.
I DO agree that military spending needs to be cut, but then so do all other spending programs.
I CANNOT accept the continual kicking the can down the road. I'm NOT WILLING to put my children and grandchildren into involuntary servitude to the government because some politician couldn't resist making promises he or she would not have to make good on, but expect OTHERS to pay for.
Are YOU willing to look your progeny in the eyes and tell them;
"I've screwed you and your future because I don't have the balls to accept MY responsibility. Therefore YOU will be held accountable for MY need for instant gratification. YOU will need to bear the pain I was unwilling to accept."
First, much thanks to our brave men and women who serve our country, they deserve special treatment in terms of health care and job placement. Beyond that, we need to wind down this multi-trillion dollar cold war spending, focus on a lean and mean, high-tech counter-terrorism military. Let's divert some of these wasted contractor pocket-lining funds to an American Jobs Act, rebuild and fix our roads, bridges, schools, highways, power grid and internet access and put people to work. Who could possibly be against that? Oh wait ...
All politicians seem to be against that. Whenever the Pentagon suggests a base or weapon to obsolete, I see folks from both parties fighting it.
"But, he maintained, some states and occupations will benefit from the influx of more civilian workers with defense-related skills."
When I left the service in 92, I became unemployed for six months. Don't bet your life on it. With over 46,000 complaints from reserve and national guard members that found out their job was not waiting for them AFTER they returned form overseas deployment. Don't even BET that Active serving members leaving the military service will even get a job.
There's usually one VA representative per town, if that. And if many of those service members are from large cities, then the VA's office will be OVERWHELMED with the number of veterans needing to find a job, that just isn't there.
There are companies that go out of their way to hire veterans... and in fact in police and fire departments military vets get preferential treatment. If this isn't enough to get veterans employed then its pretty obvious they are either not qualified or unwilling to take a job they think might be beneath them.
well they sure do not have a need for excellent nurses. nope
What's cool is that for every few (minimum of 1 per every 9 as I remember) good paying defense job lost there will be several lesser paying jobs at risk that the good jobs support. This should open up some positions for the 800,000 new illegal / legal American immigrants at least!
"he has implimented. It's a done deal, he is gone in 2012."
This from the group that believes in magical omnipotent and omniscient beings... we'll see.... we'll see.
There are now 600,000 fewer government jobs than two years ago. It you include government contractors in that group, it makes the job growth in the private sector look that much better over the last 27 months. Reagan would have raised taxes as he did in 1982 and 1986 and as G H W Bush did again around 1990 to keep too-rapid changes in government employment from draining the economy. But the GOP won't allow that because "making sure Obama is a one term President is our top priority."
The "Economic Recovery Act of 1981" cut taxes over a three year period. The major 1986 revision of the tax code was designed to be revenue neutral.
I thought Obama does not want to raises taxes except for the squat we can get from a millionaires tax. Also he put in new tax cuts and credits.
Let's use some of the money saved by defense cuts to rehire teachers and to repair/update our infrastructure.
These fiscal-cliff draconian cuts in defense spending will affect the lives of many families and consequently America. These are mostly high-paying manufacturing jobs. Instead of 46 million on food stamps we can build it up to 48 million and have far less tax revenues coming into the treasury.
Good. Let them join the OWS club so that Gingrich can tell them to "take a bath and get a job". What job? All Republicans who say such things should be shot on the spot. Starting with that cretin from the US Chamber of Commerce who said that outsourcing is great for our economy. Someone should outsource that rat's nest to Mars.
This one's pretty clear...the impact of military budget cutting is disproportionate because all those jobs haven't been offshored yet.
The chain of supply can't be interdicted by a foreign provider for that very reason.
Also, the administration and support of that production must also be domestic- because much of the information involved needs to remain classified for obvious reasons.
Of course...if "corporate citizens" like the Koch Brothers hadn't been allowed to offshore in the name of liberalizing trade- the agenda of the WTO (which you should fear far more than the United Nations)- it wouldn't matter.
These jobs would represent a negligible loss against a grand landscape of prosperity.
What we buy would be made here- not in China.
How ironic that the Right supports offshoring and outsourcing traditionally American jobs- and thereby supports REAL socialism in China- all while calling someone who's tried to make more jobs domestic a socialist....go figure.
Military jobs are not permanent unless you want a permanent war. If so, time to draft the i-pad, i-phone generation for duty in a Third World country terrorizing the USA's historically favorite foes: brown-skinned peasants armed with Kalashnikov rifles who live at least 8 time zones away. Americans love little wars that aren't winnable that establish big US military outposts and last like a dumb sportsball game stuck in infinite overtime.
Maybe we can hire more people to repare
bridges and roads instead of making bombs
and wire tapping.