19 ms·

In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers. You just don't want to meet the market price of the workers with that skill set. You coul

• honkdaddy 5y ago
  What would you call it if we had 5 positions at the widget factory, but only 4 prospective employees looking for work? Wouldn't that constitute a worker shortage, as no matter how high I make my wages as a widget foreman, there are still less workers than there are open positions? Or is that not something that could really happen outside of a textbook problem?
  • bulletsvshumans 5y ago
    Advertise a higher than expected wage, and you will see more people coming out of the woodwork.
  • Retric 5y ago
    Offer people enough money and they will move. Offer even more and they will train specifically to do the job. Jobs that require lots of training can have short term global shortages of skilled workers. But, that quickly self corrects as long as salaries increase.
    • sundaeofshock 5y ago
      That does not necessarily follow. It’s very difficult to put food on the table while going to school in hopes of landing a job in a new field. Pay living wages and provide paid, on-the-job training. That will get prospective employees through the door.
      • Retric 5y ago
        It does at a high enough salary. Some people are unable to pay for their own training but you don’t need everyone you simply need enough people. Start offering Doctor money and people will jump through insane hoops, but it scales down so even 20$ an hour will motivate some people to do a specialized training course on their own dime.
      • x0x0 5y ago
        If it's that important to employers, they'll pay them during the training period. This used to be standard practice. It's a modern development (80s on) that businesses demanded workers come pre trained.
  • cogman10 5y ago
    What are your requirements for the widget employees? Are you willing to train or educate? How effective has your advertisement for the job/wage been? On a microlevel, a worker shortage is a reflection of lack of wage and too strict requirements. You can't find a worker because your potential workers are happily doing a different jobs. You've not incentivized them enough to come work for you. You might say "But we are offering $15/hour!" and that's fine, but that's what a lot of other companies are now offering. You make balk at the idea of going up further as being "too much" but that just underscores the problem. Now if it truly is a labor shortage, SOMEONE is going to be left with not enough workers. That'll always be the person that wants "15 years of experience! We pay $30k/year!". Just do the extreme. Do you think you'd struggle to find someone if the offering was "$200k/year!"? Hell no, you'd have people moving to live in your widget city for that job.
  • djbebs 5y ago
    Thats not something that happens in real life, because you will run out of resources to pay the prospective workers with before the total supply of prospective workers is exhausted. Realistically, you can even hire people to manufacture additional workers, if you have the financial and time resources required.
  • rapind 5y ago
    Not really. You'd have to add some very contrived constraints, like: 1) There's no one currently employed elsewhere that can make widgets who you could poach for enough money. 2) Widget making is so specialized and / or time is so short that you can't train up another worker to fill the role. If #1 and #2 aren't possible because your margin can't cover it, then you have a failed business, not a labour shortage. So basically "labour shortage" in a market economy is a myth, usually circulated to suppress wages. Anyone who says "labour shortage" really means "not enough cheap labour".
  • ren_engineer 5y ago
    pay more money or any other incentive that would cause more people to be interested in the job. Why do you think FAANG has hundreds of applications for each job while startups struggle to hire?
    • ericd 5y ago
      Paying more is relatively easy to do when your company makes a few million per employee. The vast majority of companies aren’t blessed with pseudo-monopolies that allow them to do that.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    The other employees will catch wind of your million dollar per hour offers thrown out in an desperate attempt to find someone, demand that you pay them that much as well, and you'll be bankrupt by Friday. At that point you will have no open positions and everything is corrected for. Or, to avoid bankruptcy, you won't increase your offer and therefore will be removed from the market as a buyer for that position. A shortage occurs when an external force prevents price from rising. Medical doctors in some jurisdictions, for example, are often legally prevented from accepting higher offers to prioritize patients. Instead their service fees are fixed and they have to accept patients on system that is usually a mix of first come, first serve and needs-based priority. Therefore a doctor shortage, in said jurisdictions, is quite possible. But you generally won't find such restrictions in the general labour pool.
• jen20 5y ago
  > In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers You need a license to drive a truck in the UK (the actual subject of the article). It takes a minimum of two months acquire [1]. Even paying a thousand dollars an hour does not magic more qualified candidates into existence at short notice as you appear to propose. The reason for the shortage is the trivially foreseeable effects of idiotic hard-line immigration policies, not market economics or “generous” safety nets. [1]: https://www.get-licensed.co.uk/licence/hgv https://www.get-licensed.co.uk/licence/hgv
  • rapind 5y ago
    I doubt it. If the pay was high enough and the term was long enough, you'd see interest from retired licensed drivers and licensed driver's who'd changed jobs. Then you have 2 months to train up and license new drivers.
    • op00to 5y ago
      Plus you can outbid others who are contracting owned and operator drivers.
  • jansommer 5y ago
    If the pay is good, demand is high and all you need is to go on a two month course, I'd bet a lot of unemployed people would be eager to do that. The "shortage" is indeed because of Brexit, but paying a thousand dollars an hour will most certainly magically summon workers en mass in a few months.
    • dd36 5y ago
      Unless people see through it as a short term gimmick in an unstable industry.
      • varjag 5y ago
        Given the example of last two years, what are the chances people see through anything.
• bombcar 5y ago
  There can be practical shortages - there can just literally not be enough people in the area to do the jobs. Saying “it’s not a shortage because you could buy the Yankees and pay the players $millions to assemble widgets” isn’t very informative.
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    It is.. it speaks to wages not raising enough to meet the demand. You wouldn't need the Yankees a lot of people would do it for a million, half a million, 100,000 pounds. There always seems to be a shortage of people willing to work for little never a shortage of people wanting the CEO's jobs
    • username90 5y ago
      There is definitely a shortage of decent CEO's, which is why companies are forced to hire and try to work with the charlatans they have today. That is also why the salaries are increasing, they try to get one of the few good ones.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        There is a huge supply of people who want to be CEOS so much in fact most places will not hire you unless you have been a CEO before or have risen through external ranks. If you take what unemployment defines are qualification.. many able body people could perform those tasks if all CEOs decided to move to other careers. Salaries increase because qualifications increase creating scarcity which benefit the people who create scarcity. If the hiring guidelines say only CEOs can be CEO prices goes up for CEOs, VPs and anyone in charge of making the rules.
    • treis 5y ago
      >It is.. it speaks to wages not raising enough to meet the demand. That doesn't really cover the current situation. In the US 7 million or so fewer people are employed than pre-covid. Wages haven't gone down so they can't explain the change. Something else has changed for these 7 million people.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  You could say the same thing about unemployment. There is no such thing as an unemployment problem in an economy, just workers who want too much and think too highly of their skills.
  • nradov 5y ago
    That's one of the problems with minimum wage laws: they prevent the labor market from clearing. Some people want to work but due to lack of skills their labor is worth less than the minimum and thus no employer will hire them. I understand that people can't live on less than the minimum wage. But the solution to that is a proper social safety net, not imposing arbitrary minimum wage limits.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      The problem with this idea is that, beneath some wage floor, workers lose money by working, and would be better off growing food somewhere. The minimum wage is often below this floor, actually - people working minimum wage are often overall paying to work.
      • nradov 5y ago
        Growing food where? Someone owns all the productive farmland and they aren't giving it away. But people who are willing to work hard and get dirty can certainly find jobs in agriculture.
        • tsimionescu 5y ago
          Maybe growing food is a bad example, especially since you may be homeless, though if you do own a house, you can do subsistence farming in almlst any soil, raise a few chicken etc. A better example could be that rather than working below minimum age in NYC you would be better off moving to a rural area and working there.
    • bumby 5y ago
      >But the solution to that is a proper social safety net Playing devils advocate with your logic, how is this different from preventing the market from “clearing” non-viable businesses? I.e., don’t many safety net programs essentially subsidize business profits by allowing employers to lower wages?
• bumby 5y ago
  >In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers. Certainly there can be a lag effect though. If there is a shortage of doctors that won’t be remedied overnight by simply increasing incentives because of the amount of time to gain the necessary skills, licensing, etc. Unless you are willing to lower quality substantially, there absolutely can be worker shortages in a real pragmatic sense
  • x0x0 5y ago
    Except the discussion here is truck drivers (lag: 60 days) and restaurant workers (lag: ~ 0 days).
    • bumby 5y ago
      The comment I replied to didn’t mention truck drivers. They brought up a hypothetical widget factory as an analogy for the economy at large
• peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers You can't meet the demand by producing more workers per hour in some plant though If you need X doctors and only have X/2, no matter how much you pay them, they won't be enough.
  • f0xytr0xy 5y ago
    Sure you can, skills based immigration. Poach from other countries. In the 1970s the USA had a crippling shortage of nurses and doctors which was filled by relaxing skills based immigration laws and importing trained medical talent from the Phillipines en masse.
    • peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > Sure you can, skills based immigration. Poach from other countries. there's no guarantee people will come to your country. for example: would you go to work on the Iranian nuclear project? Could you even go? Would your country let you do that? You keep counting on the fact that people will come to you instead of everywhere else, like it's the 70s. But more importantly, the conversation is specifically about the hard stop on immigration that Brexit created. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Market can't fix stupidity. I think it's time some nations, like UK, begin thinking about restructuring their society to adjust to the fact that their relevance has plumbed and will keep going down for the next decade.
• ubercow13 5y ago
  Using this logic, in a market economy there can never be a shortage of anything.
  • gruez 5y ago
    Yep, no housing shortage, just millennials who "don't want to meet the market price"! /s
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers That's...not true. If you make a bunch of Econ 101-level simplifying assumptions, like that supply and demand curves are continuous, of infinite range, and monotonically increasing and decreasing, respectively, with price, it is a natural conclusion, but those “assume a cow is a perfectly thermoconducting sphere” kind of assumptions don't hold in real market economies.
• carom 5y ago
  Companies can't just pay infinity wages. They sell a product for a price, often times the economics start to break down for them. Prices are going to rise and we will probably see a reallocation of workers.