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There is no shortage of labor. There is just a shortage of labor at the price workers are willing to accept. The market has spoken. If your business can't surv

• hnac12 5y ago
  I’m curious how the workers can afford not to work. I’ve been hearing my whole life that some high percentage of Americans have almost no savings and are one missed paycheck from problems. Maybe a lot of better jobs are now available? Unemployment is all done so probably not that
  • 999900000999 5y ago
    They lean more on their parents , collect various benefits, etc. I had a good friend of mine brag about getting a some SNAP to get chips , combine that with parents who don't mind you doing nothing, and why work. Theirs's an entire anti-work sub on Reddit dedicated to this mindset. I've become rather grateful for my childhood instability now, it taught me to stand on my own two.
    • jjulius 5y ago
      That's what ya call a blanket generalization.
    • xanaxagoras 5y ago
      > Theirs's an entire anti-work sub on Reddit dedicated to this mindset /r/NEET and I recommend everyone spend an hour there, it's fascinating.
      • grawprog 5y ago
        There's also /r/antiwork/
      • gremlinsinc 5y ago
        that is kinda fascinating.... something I wouldn't mind after bouts of dev burnout... though, I'd rather maybe start a tiny house community, w/ some shared spaces, and a glamping site that pays the bills so we can at least not be destitute... self-sustainable-neet'ism... if you will... Maybe we'd build tiny homes from earth bags, and be very eco-friendly like earthship homes.... that'd be nice... we could also have an outdoor movie theater, and lots of outdoor activities...
  • nekoashide 5y ago
    I have done no research on this but maybe these are dual income households where one spouse stopped working to take care of children because of covid closing schools and they adapted to a single source of income. With childcare cost are there any reasons for them to go back at this point if the wages are low enough it doesn't make financial sense?
    • jjulius 5y ago
      >I have done no research on this but maybe these are dual income households where one spouse stopped working to take care of children because of covid closing schools and they adapted to a single source of income. [raises hand]
      • spaceisballer 5y ago
        Daycare was already expensive, know plenty of people myself included who are no longer doing it because they work from home. None the less because of COVID protocols meant less space in the daycare. Daycare really needs to be subsidized so costs can come down without totally screwing employees.
    • j8014 5y ago
      Anecdotal but I know 4 Boomers who retired during covid. I also know a lot of younger folks who opted in to the gig economy instead of working at a store/restaurant, including 3 of my nieces and a nephew. DoorDash went from 850ish million to 2.6Billion dollars in 2020 with over a million dashers and they account for about 45% of food delivery in the US.
    • gremlinsinc 5y ago
      Honestly if 5 families could go in together, purchase land, and build community homesteads, you could build homes for everyone for 10-20k a pop, and maybe share tools, printers, and other big ticket items not worth owning in tiny quarters. Professionally constructed homes for 400k, or for 200k you can get homes for 5 families (maybe a lot more depending on the land deal). Then each family can easily live the 50's lifestyle w/ one parent working one taking care of kids... I hope more people start doing this, and as much as "tiny homes" are trending on youtube, etc I don't think it's a stretch to think it might take off and maybe even lift up renters, and bring down rental empires.
  • rabuse 5y ago
    Well there's a massive rise in homelessness around the country that never seems to be mentioned, so there's a lot of people just tapping out of society.
  • jandrewrogers 5y ago
    I know several people in this position. They are largely choosing to work the minimum number of hours that pay the bills instead of a steady 40-ish hours per week at a main gig because that has become difficult. These are people that make $20-40/hr and accustomed to living inexpensively. The entire system is caught in a vicious cycle. Restrictions on businesses left them in zombie half-open/half-closed states that destroyed their staffing for the last 18 months. Employees and employers adapted to the reality that aimless government mandates would almost arbitrarily change their staffing requirements on a week by week basis. Employee behavior changed to diversify their exposure to this risk, spreading a handful of hours across a large number of businesses. Inability to reliably staff means businesses are significantly reducing opening hours, which means that employees that do want regular 40 hours are having a harder time getting them even though businesses have few restrictions now. Because it is too difficult to coordinate across multiple part-time jobs, most limit it to a manageable subset that pay enough to pay the bills; even though they are making less than before they've learned to live in this new reality somewhat comfortably. Also, many service workers left the city and moved back home during this time to save money, and it still doesn't make much sense for them to move back. At least in my city, the various business closures and restrictions over 18 months broke a metastable economic equilibrium and we are now stuck in a new equilibrium where even well-paid workers have their hours fragmented over multiple jobs. Everyone is finding it difficult to reverse this situation because it doesn't make economic sense for anyone individually because it exposes them to a lot of risk -- everyone would have to change their behavior together. I expect things to return to normal eventually, the current situation profits neither employers nor employees, but it will take a while. There is an interesting economic lesson here.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    > I’ve been hearing my whole life that some high percentage of Americans have almost no savings and are one missed paycheck from problems. I've known many people like that who had high incomes. They simply spent all that was in their pocket. If they had less in their pocket, they spent less. If they got a bonus, they'd buy a ski boat. If they needed some cash, they'd sell the boat.
• azinman2 5y ago
  Meanwhile they’ll raise prices, which will cause inflation, and the cycle continues.
  • HarryHirsch 5y ago
    You hope that instead commercial real estate drops in price. The rent is the other great expense that no one talks about.
    • milkytron 5y ago
      I've been wondering about this. Why is commerical real estate so expensive? Would that not suggest that there is a high demand by companies to operate somewhere? Or is it similar to other real estate, where giant corporate interests see value in controlling a scarce asset
      • rabuse 5y ago
        It's kinda like NYC, where the prices are still astronomical, but the demand is just not there. They just aren't willing to negotiate the price, because the other's aren't changing their prices, so they all sit vacant.
      • kiklion 5y ago
        Can’t find the source, but the long of it is that the value of commercial property is a function of the rent that you can get. If you are ‘looking’ for a renter at a given rate, then the value isn’t reassessed. If you lower your rate and rent it at a reduced rate, then the value gets reassessed. If it gets reassessed too low, now your loan gets margin called and you need to pay cash to keep your loan to value within a set range. If you don’t have that money, then it’s in your interest to keep looking at unrealistic rents. There is also commonly a provision to tack missed payments on to the end of the loan + interest so the financiers aren’t that quick to foreclose. Finally, any changes to the agreement require a % of financiers to agree which gets difficult when the financiers get more numerous.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• aqme28 5y ago
  Right. This is a capital strike moreso than a worker shortage.
• ghaff 5y ago
  Well, and at a price that will result in prices for goods that customers are willing to pay. There is no shortage of services that people would like but that middle class-ish people can't/won't pay for if they have a large labor component. Maybe I'd like to be able to ring up a personal chef. But I'm not actually going to pay for that.
  • throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Sure. You're not going to say that means there's a shortage of chefs though, or lobby for policies that undermine the labor force's negotiating position with the aim to cut their wages until you can afford one.
• arrosenberg 5y ago
  For small businesses, they often can't survive the labor cost increase because bigger, monopolistic enterprises have cut their available operating margin through means unavailable to an aspiring entrepreneur. Saying they don't deserve to exist is giving way too much credit to the incumbents in many cases.
  • rabuse 5y ago
    The U.S. is going the way of Standard Oil and Carnegie again, with wealth consolidation to the few massive corporations.
  • jit_hacker 5y ago
    There is another dimension to this that most people haven't talked about, remote and gig work. For most small and medium businesses, it's cost prohibitive to hire remote employees. For larger companies it's very easy. This has created a regional imbalance. Lots of knowledge working and call center opportunities are moving to full time remote. Paying employees the same with better benefits to never leave their house.
• treis 5y ago
  I wish people would stop saying this. It's pedantic and doesn't reflect what's happening. There are 5 million fewer people working today than before the pandemic. It's an actual shortage.
  • mabbo 5y ago
    When supply decreases in a market, prices increase. That's what supply and demand are all about.
  • kiklion 5y ago
    Not to mention that raising wages really only helps localized labor shortages. If you raise wages and get employees from your competitor, then you’ve moved the labor shortage to another company but it still exists. The only way raising wages helps with a labor shortage is if you hire from a pool of people either currently unemployed or people working in a field with a labor surplus. For the latter, I don’t know what fields have a labor surplus right now and it’s uncommon for people to be skilled enough to do two completely different skilled labor jobs that are worth equal pay that this can be an option for the company. For the second group, hiring the unemployed, $10 an hour is already significantly more than $0. So if you think raising it more would make a difference, you need to explain what $11 an hour would do that $10 doesn’t. For instance, some people can’t work because the cost of daycare exceeds the income they’d bring in. Raising wages could change that formula… though I’ve also heard from daycare operators that they are dealing with a labor shortage. If they raise wages then they raise daycare costs then other companies need to raise their wages even more. Some people can’t work because school is doing remote learning. These people can’t work no matter what the wages offered are.
    • atatatat 5y ago
      What if you take employees from your competitor and your firm performs more work given the same resources?
  • Zigurd 5y ago
    And of the people who are working low wage jobs, Amazon hired 500,000 of them. Small restaurant operations are notorious for wage theft and poor working conditions. Amazon jobs can be a grind, but you do get paid.
• MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  If labor’s bargaining power is indeed sufficient to significantly raise wages, it will be interesting to see if higher wages eliminate large swaths of low margin industries, and price surviving businesses in those industries out of reach of most people. For example, restaurants are only accessible to lower-middle class and up patrons because of how underpaid their employees are. Pay them an actual living wage, and restaurant dining will become prohibitively expensive for most people. As a result, there will be far fewer restaurants and therefore far fewer (but much better compensated) restaurant employees.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  I think the problem with this argument is that wages have risen yet labor participation has fallen. I put some of the blame on increased barriers to work: screening, tests, background checks, automated resume filtering, long and difficult interviews, mandatory credentials for jobs that don't need them. It's cheaper for companies to aggressively filter and have permanently unfilled spots, than train or take risks with sub-optimal hires.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    I am curious about this. One company I know raised wages, but is being more picky as they think they should get more and are less willing to take risk.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  This assumes the workers are choosing between no income and low income when they are actually choosing between low income and low income (but no work).
• WalterBright 5y ago
  > There is no shortage of labor. There is just a shortage of labor at the price workers are willing to accept. If there are 100 workers and 200 employers, only 100 of the employers is going to get a worker.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  Were you saying "there is not shortage of toilet paper" in March, 2020?
• prostoalex 5y ago
  Don’t forget scheduling. Even when the money is decent, the part time nature of work combined with ”optimized” on-demand scheduling that interferes with other errands (such as dropping off and picking up kids), makes people iffy about applying for any low-level retail or hospitality job.