This is the usual employer whine. Can't get exactly the employee they want, right now, where they are, for what they want to pay, without investing in training or guaranteeing long term employment. World's smallest violin plays.
If that holds true for the average employee then it's inflation, not a wage increase.
In that case the losers are people paid in cash, which is most employees.
Another underutilized labor pool: parents. Specifically, mothers. Universal childcare couldn't come quickly enough.
Example: https://www.eastidahonews.com/2023/09/idahos-direct-care-wor...
> The committee heard follow-ups to a February report issued by the Office of Performance Evaluations that found Idaho’s direct care workforce is short about 3,000 workers compared to national staffing levels. That report identified low pay as an issue for the program primarily paid by Idaho Medicaid, whose rates “do not support sustainable competitive wages for direct care workers,” and create a “wage cap,” the report found. The typical nursing assistant in direct care made $14.16 per hour and could earn 39% more by leaving direct care, the report said.
There is no labor shortage, there is simply no longer surplus labor (due to covid deaths combined with structural demographics) enabling churn that kept wages low.
That falls under tapping underutilized labor pools. You're trying to take someone not working and convincing them to work.
There's about 8% slack in labor-force participation to late-nineties peaks [1]. But per the article, some of that is retirement. It's not a long-term solution to rely on paying retirees to come back into the workforce.
When an individual company (or state) faces a shortage of workers, it's often due to pay. Idaho should pay its nurses more. When an entire economy faces a shortage, it's something more structural.
Will we face a structural labor shortage causing unreasonably low unemployment rates and labor marketplace friction in the near term? Very possibly depending on 55+ workforce exit rates and immigration flow. Are we there yet? I don't believe the data shows that.
There are a number of mental hoops that one must jump through for this statement to make any sense. A lack of surplus labor is what exactly, if not a labor shortage? How is a high supply not the exact same thing as a labor surplus?
Okay? Then don't. Universal doesn't mean mandatory.
Are you suggesting we should reverse womens' rights in the workplace so you can keep a particular family model?
> If wages go up, good.
Wages don't go up infinitely. They go up, then you run out of workers, and raising wages further doesn't bring more labour to the table. At that point, you cut services and increase prices to temper demand.
wow, what a great problem to have. how common is it to encounter this issue? Amazon warehouse workers? Did they increase wages?
Ah yes, the market fundamentalist argument of "market forces don't actually affect you". Wonderful, amazing, very good-faith.
That requires more workers to care for the kids.
Following such a scheme, on average you free up more workers by sending kids to kindergarten.
[1]: https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2005-06-17-64/KAPITTEL_6#...
Unsurprisingly, none of the solutions involve lower share of income for execs and shareholders in favor of larger share for workers.
Tautologically at a certain wage you could convince the elderly and children to work but that’s not really useful compared to have a larger working age population.
Source for the labor existing without immigration? There are tens of millions of people retiring compared to turning eighteen. Increasing pay should increase labor force participation a bit. But it doesn't solve the fundamental demographic problem.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-living-at-home-a...
Plenty of people want to come to the US btw, if you look at all the people coming over the southern border illegally. We just need programs to help those people do it legally, distribute them across the country (instead of concentrated in border states) and help them get acclimated to american culture.
The comment argues labour shortages are a fiction used to drive down wages. Immigration solves a labour shortage by driving down (or stabilizing rising) wages.
If wages for other jobs increased a lot, servers could be enticed to leave the restaurant industry, and go elsewhere. No one really needs waiters. Customers can instead go to the counter and order themselves, and pick up their own food (this is usually called "counter service"). Eliminating all the servers in the US would free up a LOT of labor for more important tasks. This is just one example. People paid to pump gas at full-service gas stations is another (which has largely disappeared, except in two states, NJ and OR).
You're describing totally different modes of dining. That said, this is probably the direction we're heading: servers will make more. And dining out (actual dining out, not fast casual) will become more expensive.
That said, you have a point. We have a lot of make-work jobs. cough cough TSA. We also have a lot of jobs that look likely to go away to automation, e.g. long-distance trucking and certain warehouse roles. So maybe this balances out on its own without consumer prices rising too much.
