You know them: They're recruiters, they're human resources consultants, they're "jobs experts" who in good times justify their existence by chattering incessantly about a "tight skilled labor market" that's independent of the economy, that has everything to do with demographic changes in the U.S., the Generation Y baby bust, yada yada yada.

You know the jive.

"I'm hearing across the board, across industries, companies
indicating they can't exploit market opportunity because they can't
find people with the right skills," said Jeff Summer, an executive at
Deloitte Consulting said in a CNN Money article from Jan. 5, 2007. He said
that there's virtually no long-term unemployment for skilled workers. "It's down to the nub already," he said. "Supply and demand is completely out of whack."

Looks like it's getting back in whack real quick.

"Younger employees know there's a shortage of skilled workers," writes career consultant Marilyn Moats Kennedy on her website. "And they're not about to be exploited (work long hours, be loyal as a dog) as Boomers were."

Bet she didn't write that in the last six months.

"The future U.S. workforce is facing not only a worker shortage but also a skills shortage," wrote Tom Casey, an "expert in the development of organizational transformation strategies" on his company's blog, on March 21, 2008. I don't know what has happened to Tom since then, because when you search the blog for his name, the following message is all that appears, from a Julie Coogler:

"Oh Tom! I am so sad….I will certainly miss you….I don’t know who I will go
to anymore! More and more of my colleagues and family are now gone from
TCG and I am just a helpless sheep waiting for the slaughter! I guess the best thing to do is to hold our heads up and know that
we have our health and families and other opportunities will unfold!"

We'll know we're on the rebound from this recession when we start hearing once again about the perils of the "tight labor market" that's independent of the economy.

Tomorrow at Davos Richard Edelman is sharing the 2009 results of his Edelman Public Relation's Trust Barometer. Today he previews the results on his blog, writing that "trust in business has collapsed in the United States, with American attitudes toward the private sector now comparable to France and Germany, which are historically the lowest among all nations surveyed."

I don't normally take much stock in polls done by PR firms, but this one seems pretty well connected to reality, does it not?

John Updike is one of the men who gave me permission to like golf and still call myself an intelligent person.

"I think I have been asked to write about golf as a hobby," he once wrote. "But of course, golf is not a hobby. Hobbies take place
in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a
profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up
foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the
landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's
eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass,
the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves."