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Help Wanted • Housing Finance • Changing Times

Help Wanted: Some insight on finding qualified applicants.
Housing Finance: Class actions against ARM lenders may slow housing recovery.
Changing Times: Daylight savings starting March 11 will affect automated clocks.

Help Wanted
As more auto industry jobs are cut ...
Thousands of other openings go unfilled and businesses across the U.S. struggle to find the skilled workers that they need.

Dozens of occupations have shortages: Tool and die makers. Boiler operators. Marine mechanics. Electricians. All types of health-care workers. Accountants. Engineers. Database designers. Large-animal veterinarians. Project managers for everything under the sun.

The situation is sure to worsen as baby boomers retire, taking away key skills.
In many cases, the pipeline is empty. When industries such as oil and nuclear energy contracted during the 1990s, younger workers left the fields in droves. Now there’s a dearth of 35- to 50-year-olds to fill retirees’ shoes, and even newly minted engineering graduates command starting salaries of nearly $50,000.

Many young folks shun blue-collar jobs, even well-paid ones in manufacturing or trades: Machinists, robotics repairers, mechanics, welders, plumbers, carpenters.
A lot of unfilled jobs require uncommon combinations of abilities, such as communications and people skills as well as technical knowledge.
Money isn’t enough to lure talent from one firm to another. Employees increasingly put more stock in location and work/life balance.

So far, the squeeze hasn’t hit the economy as a whole very hard, in part because productivity growth has continued at a fairly brisk pace.
But the pain may worsen as real wages continue to creep higher.
And labor woes ARE stifling growth at individual companies.

Employers must be creative and aggressive. Reach out to students and open their eyes to overlooked opportunities. Summer apprenticeships and work-study programs are becoming lifesavers for some manufacturers.
Band with others in your industry to support training programs.
Broaden your searches. Consider hires trained in other fields but with a mind-set similar to what you need. And help them make the leap.
Keep older workers on the job longer with phased-in retirements.
Make the job environment more attractive. Rural areas particularly need to think creatively about fostering a community for young employees. One utility company hires in groups of six to eight grads at a time.
And redesign the work, when possible. A shortage of bricklayers is spurring architects, for example, to draft plans using other materials.

Housing Finance
Mortgage lenders are girding for a wave of class-action lawsuits from borrowers claiming they were deceived about loan terms. The beef: Lenders concealed how high and fast interest rates could rise on some adjustable rate mortgages, leaving borrowers in shock later on.
Most suits will focus on subprime borrowers ... mostly low-incomers or people with shaky finances who pay higher interest rates on loans. Chevy Chase Bank of Md. and First Horizon Home Loan Corp. of Tenn. face closely watched lawsuits filed by borrowers in foreclosure.
The main targets will be the biggest lenders. Class-action lawyers tend to go after targets with the deepest pockets to tap for damages.

Problems with subprime mortgages may temper economic growth a bit in the next year or two as they prompt lenders to tighten up requirements for borrowing. Fewer potential buyers could mean a longer convalescence for the housing market, keeping it largely flat well into 2008. This may actually be positive if it keeps the economy from overheating.
Subprime woes won’t trigger a financial crisis, however. Most banks are in far better shape to handle an uptick in foreclosures than they were during the last major real estate slump in 1988–1991. Also, the vibrant secondary mortgage market has spread out loan risks, cutting the odds that a single lender’s failure would be contagious.

Changing Times
Did Y2K throw your IT for a loop? Daylight saving time might.
This year’s clock change comes on March 11, three weeks early. Most software is programmed to advance the hour on the first Sunday in April, the rule for starting daylight saving time since 1986. In 2005, Congress voted to move up the date as of this year.
Time-sensitive functions are most vulnerable to glitches. They include time clocks, scheduling software, auction deadlines, and security programs, such as those that track entries and exits.

Most software vendors are likely to send out automatic updates, or patches, that you can run when prompted on the computer screen. If they don’t arrive, check vendors’ Web sites for ones to download.
Old software is trickier because it may no longer be serviced. For example, Microsoft is sending automatic updates of newer versions of Windows XP. But in Windows NT, time changes must be made manually.