As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm htt

As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed]. U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely. Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading. Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.