Human ingenuity is amazing when applied to labour shortages.
The Black Death, Brexit, the recent American Immigration Crackdown. All of these events reduced the supply of labour, resulting in increased wages and productivity.
Goes to show that arguments about needing migrants and refugees from poor countries to fill labour shortages in the West do not hold water.
It amazes me that the "labour shortage" argument is still in play. You'd think after years of importing tens of millions of people someone might have asked, "have we fixed the labour shortage yet?".
Theoretically speaking, labour shortage should affect economy in a way that wages rise to attract more people, right? Why aren't we seeing something like that?
It's incredible what shortages exist when you don't provide meaningful work, competitive wages or room for advancement. Time to import less demanding people.
I also agree with you. I feel that if there were a real shortage of labour (as opposed to our current shortage of cheap labour), a lot of bullshit jobs[1] would become a huge waste of resources.
A minor nitpick, it’s not so much a labour shortage as a wage shortage. Clearly the workers are there, shown clearly by them taking jobs when paid better.
Those labour shortages are happening throught Europe and the developed world though - both general shortages of labour and the specific shortages of, for example, medical staff. The argument I've sometimes seen made is that sure, the EU may have shortages of those staff, but they'll have an easier time dealing with it because they have freedom of movement to allow workers to move to where the jobs are. That makes no sense because no amount of shuffling around workers between countries can change the fact that there's not enough to go around across the entire region and the occupations in shortage are basically the same everywhere too.
There’s no “labour” shortage. There’s a “wage” shortage.
Companies aren’t really complaining about a labour shortage. They’re complaining that no one wants to work for their ridiculously low pay while the board and CEOs sail around in their yachts.
The western world hasnt had staff shortages, it has had pay shortages.
Inflaition is double digits and employers appear to prefer to lose money (bold move from the capitalists, lets see if it pays off) rather than take a slightly lower profit margin to keep workers.
As such workers have done a round of musical chairs, and the companies left with empty chairs are crying that millenials are so entitled that they dont want to scrub toilets for $1 a day anymore.
The Black Death, Brexit, the recent American Immigration Crackdown. All of these events reduced the supply of labour, resulting in increased wages and productivity.
Goes to show that arguments about needing migrants and refugees from poor countries to fill labour shortages in the West do not hold water.
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