Occupy Detroit

[corktownyuppie]

I support the Wall Street movement 100%, but I'm confused by how this would work here. I mean, they shut down the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC. This city is too darn big and too darn empty... if folks camp out in Roosevelt Park, I could see myself driving right by on Michigan and thinking "oh wow... what are the hipsters doing this time?" without ever knowing the message.

Yeah. I'm in finance, and even I am pissed about the issues on Wall Street. But the populist us vs. the rich thing isn't really that relevant in Detroit. Hell, even the Big 3 execs are blaming Wall Street for running them into bankruptcy. So, you know, for what it's worth. I think this energy could be better spent teaching the 40% of people who can't read so that they can get jobs with all these new companies that are desperate to find qualified help.

Frustrated Entrepreneurs

Begal, founder of Begal Enterprises Inc., is among a half dozen entrepreneurs who said during interviews that they are having a hard time landing new employees in the Washington, D.C. area, which has an unemployment rate of 6.2 percent, the second- lowest for a large U.S. metro area after Oklahoma City.
Some candidates lack the “right set of skills”; others fail to meet the “most basic of qualifications,” such as proper spelling on their applications, the business owners said. So even though the pool of potential employees “has gotten deeper,” the “top talent searches remain as challenging as they were before the recent market conditions,” said Julie Rakes, a spokeswoman for bank and credit-card issuer Capital One Financial Corp. [[COF) in McLean, Virginia.

Long-Term Challenge

Over time, his industry faces the challenge of not having enough skilled workers because vocational education has been “decimated” in many parts of the U.S. and young people aren’t interested in manufacturing jobs, Paul added.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker by sales, has lobbied Congress for years to boost the number of H-1B visas available to employ foreign workers in the U.S., even as the company cut jobs there.

The U.S. is “falling short” on education, creating a situation where “jobs move in search of the right people” rather than the other way around, the company’s General Counsel Brad Smith said in testimony to a Senate subcommittee on immigration last month.

“We will not bring unemployment down to the extent desired until we ‘skill up’ the population to attract the jobs that otherwise will be located elsewhere,” Smith said.

Microsoft had 4,551 openings as of May and has taken an average of 65 days to fill core U.S. technology positions with experienced candidates this year, he said.