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Early retirement and ageing population causing labour shortages: Lords report

62 points by monkeydust 4y ago

okokwhatever 4y ago
Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour. Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  "some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. salaries dont occur in a vaccuum.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > "some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
    - nickpp 4y ago
      Their profit is your opportunity then: open a competing company, pay people better while still making a decent profit and enjoy! Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance. But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
      - dontlaugh 4y ago
        With what capital? Those that own the monopolies already have most of it.
        nickpp 4y ago
        Lots of VCs willing to give you money to try, if you have an idea. This very forum belongs to one of them.
        jacooper 4y ago
        VCs won't pay you to give better wages thats for sure.
        nickpp 4y ago
        Have you tried? VCs beg you to spend the money they give you as long as that increases your chances of success. That is how IT workers got to enjoy the tremendous salaries and benefits we currently have.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. It is simply unviable to try and open up an alternative to Amazon or Walmart - network effects, exclusivity deals, credit history, officials letting it slide to pay your workers pittances because they don't want to battle with the lawyers a billion dollar company can put up against you... and especially, if you do try it, then the mega corporations can and will price-dump you out of business. Subsidising losses for one location for a year or two is nothing for Wal-Mart, especially not if every other store around them is closed afterwards and you are the only player left. Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      An example: Walmart’s yearly profit divided by the number of employees: $4k per employee.
    - buggythebug 4y ago
      People forget that a lot of these companies are small businesses that are not raking in millions and billions....
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        Being a small business does not entitle them to exist at the cost of exploiting underpaid labor.
        buggythebug 4y ago
        "Exploit" is a strong as word. No one is forcing anyone to work for the ABC company.
  - mantas 4y ago
    If clients ain't willing to pay enough to pay salary workers are willing to work for... Maybe there's no product-market fit and/or business model just does not work?
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Yes, but these don't happen in a vacuum. Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
      - mantas 4y ago
        Yes. Products and services would get more expensive. Overall reducing consumption in volume. Which may be negative for the „growth“ in neoliberal sense. But positive in crapload of other metrics.
    - CraigJPerry 4y ago
      It can be more complex than that. My town has a lot of hairdresser salons. It’s hard to make the argument that there’s too many, but that would be my feeling. It’s a small town and the most popular business type on the high street is a food venue followed in 2nd place by hair salons. I’d have expected convenience stores or pubs. However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment. But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past. So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened! According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
      - wrycoder 4y ago
        Unless the owners of the new shop are more skilled than average, the shop will be marginal and probably go out of business, as the debts pile up. What about a coop shop?
  - dotluis 4y ago
    But people pay for goods using the "some bucks" they earned as salaries.
    - phkahler 4y ago
      You guys are missing the point. If we take X percent of the workers out of the market due to retirement (and age discrimination?) there will simply not be enough people to do all the work. Paying more at any or all levels will not create more workers. Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
      - CraigJPerry 4y ago
        The article claims people are not coming out of retirement and are unlikely to do so as the early retirees are comparatively well off.
        Jensson 4y ago
        If there isn't enough labor to pay for their retirement then inflation will eat up all their retirement until there is enough labor.
        vaidhy 4y ago
        They do not have to retire in UK either, right? You can take your nest egg and move to SE Asia?
        wrycoder 4y ago
        Most people don’t have a nest egg these days.
        CraigJPerry 4y ago
        >> enough labor to pay for their retirement Labour doesn't pay for their retirement. >> inflation will eat up all their retirement Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23). >> until there is enough labor Adding labour has no direct impact on pension income, there can't be "enough labour" to reinstate a standard of living in a person's pension situation Instead what will happen is existing groups who are already below water (e.g. foodbank users) will suffer more pain.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    If demand is so low that under-paid staff is needed to keep things afloat, is the business even worth the effort from a societal view-point? Or even as a business case? Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
    - buggythebug 4y ago
      Eh from a superficial view no, but there will be a cascade event. The after effects are more complex For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices. OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
      - AdrianB1 4y ago
        Mom and pop places are supposed to be run by mom and pop, with no other labor, so they should not be affected too much.
        buggythebug 4y ago
        That's not the definition of a "mom and pop" place. lol
      - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
        I agree that this isn't a black and white thing; and that wasn't the point I was making. It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out. As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
  - danaris 4y ago
    I don't know if it's as true in the UK, but in the US, companies have been reporting record profits over the past year or so. This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on. For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future. However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.
  - sunshinerag 4y ago
    "redistribute, redistribute" ... note to self. never should start a company that is profitable if it is to be redistributed.
    - tellmelies 4y ago
      great, redistribute it to your employees instead. It will still go to taxes (income).
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      Why not? Surely a period of profits and the knowledge of having improved society are enough personal reward.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Definitely heading towards neofeudalism.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    I expect it to get easier to tax capital in the current climate where globalization is being reversed by a few notches. Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though. Not if governments don't sleep at the wheel. In the 80s, CEO compensation was a fraction of what it is today [1], and there were only a couple dozen billionaires or billionaire families [2]. Today, we're at at least 735 billionaires in the US, and at least 2668 worldwide [3]. There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and assets, corporate payouts like dividends or stock buybacks - the latter, most egregious practice, was only legalized in 1982 [4]. FFS - what happened to the Ford-era tradition of paying people enough cash for their work so that they could actually live on these wages and buy all the products?! That was the key for the post-WW2 economic success wave, after all. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ [2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of... [4] https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
- notacoward 4y ago
  Yep. One thing I noticed on a recent plane trip (my first since the pandemic began) was that practically all of the food options involved ordering and paying via tablet or online (assisted by QR code). Front staff just had to bring the food, no time spent taking orders or doing the payment dance. I've seen this trend increasing in non-airport settings too, but it seems to have reached an apex there. Also saw a delivery bot trundling along the sidewalk in Madison, so that's a thing too.
  - mehphp 4y ago
    As a customer, I have preferred this when it's an option. My order is wrong less often and I'm not sitting around waiting for a check when I'm ready to leave.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  This and the other news that jobs will be lost to robotics, ML/AI doesn't add up--which is it? It's not like automation was to make up for retirees, it's to reduce costs so if anything we should be glad for retirees not taking jobs.
mantas 4y ago
Raise wages till workers show up? Or costs go up so much that market shrinks and there's no need for new workers... Free market!
Kipters 4y ago
How was the line? Foreigners steal jobs?
- riffraff 4y ago
  I don't mean to defend xenophobic attitudes against immigration, but labor shortage should lead to higher wages, so the argument against immigration that they depress wages would still hold.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    That doesn't defend xenophobia in any way. Being against immigration in some scenarios does not mean you're xenophobic.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Specifically, labor shortages lead to higher salaries for those groups who no longer have to compete with the type of immigrants that used to come, and only if the demand is limited. But for most other groups, it may lead to a reduction in real salaries, due to price inflation. Fewer carpenters makes housing more expensive, and fewer tech workers can make many businesses (especially those outside core tech that still depend on such workers) more expensive to run. And for workers in global hubs, one could argue that the concentration in one geographic location (including immigration) has actually lead to higher demand due to the increase in vibrancy and rate of innovation, leading to an increase in salaries.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    It isn't. You are saying it "should"...wages in the UK are rising 4% slower than inflation, so there is real erosion of wages WHILST there is the biggest labour shortage in the history of the UK. Just speaking generally, labour tends to be a market in which there is massive govt intervention (this is particularly the case in the UK). The normal rules of economics do not hold. One very big factor in the UK is universal credit. You can Google this for yourself but the relevance here is that it acts as a wage subsidy for employers, this gets people into work but there is very little incentive to work more hours (despite the govt being able to remove universal credit from people who refuse to work more). The UK has got read of the persistently high unemployment under left-wing govts of the 2000s but has failed to improve productivity. We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate. Immigration, more women working (universal credit generally supports more women more), it is all coalescing, nothing is working properly.
rightbyte 4y ago
I London cost of living makes any low payed job unlivable. I wonder of the trend is that people start to realize this? Or that it have gotten so much worse compared to 10 years ago.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  I imagine if you’re willing to live four to a bedroom things get substantially more affordable. There are plenty of people who are willing to do that, though fewer in the legal economy. If building housing was legal that demand would be satisfied by new building but that’s democracy for you. The people get what they want, good and hard.
  - illini1 4y ago
    I’m not sure you can treat the lack of affordable housing as an indictment of democracy as an institution. Of course there’s more nuance to the issue, but it’s not as simple as people get what they want.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      I don't think he meant democracy has failed only that it allows people to create situations that are bad for others.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Maybe works out when you are in your 20s. But they are part of the problem suppressing wages. Have two friends who did that. I don't think megacities is the solution. I'd rather have a living rural area.
- frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  It’s why the ruling class keeps importing people from the third world where people have far lower expectations for living standards. In your example of London that manifested itself by the low paying jobs that serve the support the ruling class being filled by people willing to live in multi generational family units and far more people per square footage. It’s not all that different in places like Paris either. What is really going on OSS that aristocracy and slavery are, and really already have been reconstituted in a different form. Importing/exploring brown people to serve the will and whims of the ruling class at the expense of the native/ their own population. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s of course exactly the foundations of slavery and aristocracy. And yes, it has gotten worse because the process by which the ruling class had defrauded and swindled trillions of dollars and euros from the pockets of their own abused populations has not faced any opposition at all worth mentioning, let alone something serious.
pyb 4y ago
Weird that we keep hearing that tech is overstaffed, when literally every other sector reports labour shortages. My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again.
- rileymat2 4y ago
  I have not heard tech was overstaffed. But it could be generationally different than many industries with a disproportionate number of the workers being younger genX and millennial compared to other industries. So I don’t see it as weird.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again. Tech companies have a staff distribution problem: Meta, Twitter, Google - they all had way too many engineers chasing after the "next big thing" to achieve an early foothold and then expand the massive scale of these companies to utter dominance, while they neglected stuff like content moderation or customer support.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  This isn't the case in the UK. Large tech companies are still hiring. If you don't have the boom, you don't have the bust. US tech companies are still massively and ludicrously overstaffed.
  - 72deluxe 4y ago
    We can't seem to find competent staff. They're all appallingly bad.
    - pyb 4y ago
      Who's "we"?
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      Yep, that has been the difference between companies that grew and the ones that didn't (if you look at Monzo, they needed to hire hundreds of devs overnight...they created an actual HR strategy rather than just posting a listing on Indeed, running bad interviews based around random questions and probing for social cues, and then hiring no-one). Tech jobs in the UK aren't even particularly high skill, tons of applicants for every role but hiring is run by people who have never hired before, have no business knowledge, and end up rejecting everyone...and then they lobby the govt for easing visa rules...it is all very puzzling. Btw...there are businesses in the UK that hire almost anyone with a degree, put them through a three-month bootcamp, and then hire them out £70k/year pro-rata rate. According to most tech companies, this should be impossible...yet these guys do it. The skills required aren't even complex, and we are struggling...shocking.
Proven 4y ago
LatteLazy 4y ago
Reminder: there is no such thing as shortage in a free market. The market, in it's infinite wisdom, will supply exactly the right number of jobs/workers. If you want more, you need only raise prices. This was a cold hard fact of reality for decades when jobs were scarce and workers suffered. Now it is a cold hard fact for employers.
- frameset 4y ago
  Hmm, suddenly these employers will doubtless be calling for state intervention.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    This has already happened. This year that was coordinated lobbying to increase visa numbers to the UK. The result was that 2022 was the highest level of immigration...ever. And, of course, this started out with only being "skilled labour" but was quickly expanded to professions earning £20k/year. Productivity has gone nowhere, there are millions either unemployed or under-employed (there is reason to believe that the UK is under-reporting unemployment significantly due to how the welfare system works)...quite simply, whether you believe immigration is bad or good in theory, the supply of labour is massively in excess of demand in the UK.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Evidence for this? Do we have a breakdown of the visa issuance? Are people double-counting students again?
      - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
        https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... - net was 500k, the problem with students is significantly understated because (if you can believe it) students are actually able to bring their families. So you have someone on a student visa from West Africa (this is overwhelmingly the source of this problem), they bung £10k to someone who runs a "university", they bring over their extended family (5-10 people), and there is basically no way to deport them now even once the student visa ends. I agree, the statistics are basically unknown precisely...but the context would indicate that the size of flows are understated (the reproduction rate of non-migrants in the UK is not enough to produce population growth...since 1990, UK population is up 18%).
gumby 4y ago
If only there were some agreement or treaty possible in which young workers from neighboring countries could easily (without red tape) come to provide low cost labor, and even allow retirees to easily move to lower cost areas.
- dekken_ 4y ago
  If there was already adequate housing for everyone then yeah, cause otherwise you're going to make getting housing harder for the countries poor, just look at the cost of living in Paris
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    Was there really a housing problem, while the UK was still in the EU?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      Yes, but it had fuck all to do with immigration. The UK's housing issues are largely a housing policy problem. Its not that the UK has a shortage of accommodation units, its largely that the free market rewards property value speculation over actually occupying those accommodation units in areas of high demand, and having actual tenants is seen as a liability. There is an imperial assload of empty residential units across the UK (and especially in London) where the owners are deriving greater value from pure speculation than rent seeking. There's other aspects to the issue than this, but that's one of the bigger issues that could be resolved with policy changes to penalize the fucking absurd practice of keeping properties empty.
- 6510 4y ago
  Even more radical would be to restore purchase power to a point where one can produce new baby workers domestically. If you've squeezed the life out of working peoples baby budget you just wont have fresh bodies for your own parasitic class to suck the life out of. Should we wonder how their empire got this small?
StrLght 4y ago
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?
- sneak 4y ago
  We don't have freedom of movement on Earth.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Rising wages cause massive panic about inflation. That causes rate rises in order to reduce demand. Also, wage rises can't be as easily negotiated in the public sector, which is why so many parts of the UK are on strike around now.
- VLM 4y ago
  I believe the second chapter of the linked report went into considerable detail about how covid had primary and secondary effect in a very small range of industries and otherwise had little long term effect in other industries. As a primary effect of covid, the public has been scared the public away from the healthcare field, which was collapsing and is now collapsing even faster. Its a good time to get out of healthcare and a bad time to get into healthcare. If they would just hurry up and collapse the system quickly so as to enter the stable rebuilding phase, then they could get workers. As a secondary effect of covid, massive income instability in hospitality has scared people away from that field. Those jobs are all going to be replaced by apps and service robots or go out of business anyway. Conveniently many ag jobs opened with brexit and that field is doing MUCH better than healthcare or hospitality. Hospitality used to be very low pay, but at least it was extremely reliable. With covid lockdowns that job could go away in a sneeze and they're all being replaced by apps and robots anyway. Hospitality is the new bottom of the barrel job and as such will always have staffing problems going forward until it goes away entirely. A society can function quite well without overpaying someone else to hand you a beer or kebabs to avoid getting it yourself LOL.
- nine_zeros 4y ago
  > 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? Because attracting more people into the labor market assumes that there are people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for higher wages. The labor force in most western countries is already tapped out, exhausted and cannot do any more work.
lettergram 4y ago
Based on my conversations with retirement or near retirement age individuals I know in the US… Many decided to retire due to: - fear from covid - COVID restrictions - office racism & political ideologues (aka blocked promotions, struggle sessions, etc) - rejection of vaccine mandates All the above I’ve seen multiple people (in each bucket) retire for in the past two years. I also know multiple young people who switched roles for the same reason. One buddy of mine worked in an out patient surgery center on contract (he’d work / sell machines for a fee per-surgery). After a 12-18 months of sparse work he had to switch jobs (and was living on food stamps at this point). I hired him for odd jobs to help him pay the mortgage. He started his own business and is doing okay now ~12 months in.
- VLM 4y ago
  I've also seen ageism as an issue. "They're not going to hire me anyway, may as well put a positive spin on it and retire".
cbeach 4y ago
Automation (particularly of agriculture) should be the focus of national strategy. God forbid we return to the 20th-century solution of throwing more bodies at the problem (uncontrolled mass immigration), which will only exacerbate the underlying issue as immigrants settle and age. The reality is that the first waves of immigration from the EU (skilled workers from developed nations) were hugely beneficial for the UK economy. But as the EU expanded into destitute former Soviet states, later waves of immigration were not the same demographic, from an economic point of view. At some point we have to weigh up the benefits of cheaper fruit and veg, nannies and cleaners versus the cost of providing subsidised housing and wildly expensive public services to immigrant workers on the min wage, who are a net burden on the Treasury. It just doesn't stack up, from the perspective of productive taxpayers. Housing and public services currently have a crisis of demand, not supply. The Tories increased the NHS budget by £40bn in real terms since 2010, but it's still unable to cope with the weight of demand.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
The British people have been going around for years now, holding a smoking handgun, trying to figure out how this painful hole in their foot got there.
rcarr 4y ago
First off, the retirement age is ludicrous anyway. I believe it is now 67 for men in the UK. The average years of good health in this country is 63, but in some parts of the country is as low as 55 [1]. Who wants to essentially work until they get sick then keel over and die? People are wising up to the fact it’s absolutely ridiculous and getting out and enjoying life while they still can rather than putting more money in the pocket of some shareholders. There is no community solidarity when your supposed leaders have been raking in over 20%+ pay rises for years whilst worker pay has declined in real terms, especially when inflation is now what it is. It’s an absolute disgrace what they are trying to fob off nurses and other public workers with atm. Not to mention the fact that working conditions are dire because some MBA has decided all quality of life metrics are irrelevant and all that matters is the bottom line. Good on the people who are dropping out. Make the exploiters squirm. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/05/health-gets-in-the-way-of-work-in-grimsby https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/05/health-gets...
- leereeves 4y ago
  > Good on the people who are dropping out Yeah, I'd like to see an occasional article describing the same facts as an "opportunity abundance" instead of a "labor shortage". Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people? From a worker's perspective, having lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay seems like a good thing, especially after decades of decreases in real worker pay.
  - genocidicbunny 4y ago
    > Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people? Only when it's profitable.
  - VLM 4y ago
    > lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay The market is always portrayed as efficient money-for-time but reality is the market is often based around risk minimization and pounding square pegs into round holes and "proving" there's no one available for our immigration or other government program paperwork. Plenty of openings are posted with no intention of filling them.
lortas 4y ago
The ageing population bought up all real estate in the 70s/80s/90s and instituted fierce wage competition by allowing massive immigration. If they lower the rents, perhaps people feel that it is worth working again. Supply and demand does not work in the labor market if worker supply is unlimited and 90% of your income goes to rent seekers of various kinds.
monkeydust 4y ago
Just a thought, there is technology available today that allows a worker in say in Nigeria to make a bowl of salad for city worker in the UK. Be it a lot slower than a human but perhaps more accurate. This type of 'teleprescence' technology from what I have seen is evoloving fast, where things cant be fully automated or a human might need to step in, this concept opens up a countries labour market in a whole new way. Of course the knowedge/service sector has been doing this for over a decade via outsourcing.
bovermyer 4y ago
I'm fairly certain that I'll never be able to "retire" in the conventional sense. It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism. However, I'll probably just have to pivot to a different career at that point. I'll have savings and investment money to live off of, but probably not enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life until I expire. And everything I'm paying into Social Security will probably end up taken away by the government for some concocted reason or other before I can use it. So, that means I don't get to retire.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism If this is in reference to programming, somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn. Personally, I'll probably be working 10-20h a week or so by 60 as consultant. Your retirement burn rate is much, much lower if you have cash coming in, even if it isn't covering all expenses.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn Don't know how old you are but why do I have the feeling that by the time you're 60 the following could happen: "The AI tool subscription we have is already trained on the mountains of existing high quality C++ code written by seasoned graybeards such as yourself, so thanks for training it, but sorry sir, your services are no longer required." "Watch this: Hey ChatGPT 9.0, fix this codebase. Done." "What we're looking for is devs experienced in the latest MonkeButt frontend framework as it just came out so there's no trained models for it yet." "Enjoy your early retirement sir" :)
    - treespace8 4y ago
      I'm taking the time to learn and use these tools now. (Co-pilot, etc) They appear to be more autocomplete on steroids, then programmer replacement. It will make devs more efficient, but I doubt it will replace us.
VLM 4y ago
The link is a report of a report of many reports. I read, well, skimmed, the linked secondary source, although I didn't even examine the primary sources: Its extremely sector specific. No shortage at all in FIRE or retail, huge shortage in hospitality and healthcare. Most of the hypothesis in the report seems to boil down to COVID caused everything followed by raw data disproving that. hospitality is extremely low paying but USED to be stable reliable income, but now someone in China sneezes and your income disappears for months, so people will do anything to avoid hospitality as a field. It seems the low end job of choice is agriculture now. As for health care, I suspect that however trendy and cool it is to compliment our brave health care workers by making congratulatory social media posts for karma, very few people want to get involved in that mess. Much like voluntary soldier recruitment after an unpopular war is an uphill battle for awhile. A truly remarkable number of older people are out of the job market on disability. Cardio trends are flat (edited: slope 0) to declining so its probably not obesity related although the UK is certainly not getting thinner? Mental health is on a flat growth rate (edited, flat line upward slope not slope being zero) of about 2% additional of the population per decade which is starting to add up significantly over time. Fewer students than ever are going to school while working, the market seems too competitive to risk their grades by working and/or student loans make more sense than working. Between those very young and very old ages there is little change. There is some inevitability to the UK problems, because as per Chapter 3's intro, the current problem is caused by a 2% decline in working age labor force participation rate, which would have happened anyway in a decade due to the 2% increase in mental health disability cases per decade. I mean something like the future is distributed unevenly, and in a sense this is all a straight line extrapolation of more than decades old trends and the UK is economically speaking in 2032 rather than 2022. Everything happening now was going to happen in a couple years, not now. Any surprise about the situation is fake PR. Several graphs explaining access to health care in the UK is in a long term collapse, 1 in 20 adults are on a waiting list of some sort, etc. The report strongly implies without stating that ongoing collapse of the medical system is not helping old people stay in the workforce. It seems most of the UKs problems are frozen by divide and conqueror approach; after the health care system completely collapses and is replaced (by what?) the situation will resolve itself, but interests on all sides are too entrenched to fix anything until after it breaks.
anovikov 4y ago
TL;DR: for the most part, people don't work because they can. People who saved enough, refuse to work is exploitative, toxic, sweatshop industries like deliveries and catering? Big surprise!
Red_Tarsius 4y ago
>Where have all the workers gone? >Changes to the structure of migration have had an impact on vacancies, which recently hit record high levels. In recent years many EU workers, who filled lower paid roles (especially in sectors like agriculture and hospitality), have left the UK. In numerical terms, their departure has been counterbalanced by the arrival of non-EU workers, who were granted visas under the new immigration system which prioritises skilled workers. This has contributed to a mismatch within the labour force, accentuating vacancies and labour shortages in certain sectors. Good for them. I hope whoever filled those lower paid roles found a better life elsewhere. I can't stand the false equivalency between immigration and labour shortage. I live in Italy and our media is always sharing sob stories from tycoons who "just can't find hard-working employees anymore". The issue is that the very foundation of our economy is built on masses of disenfranchised serfs forced to e.g. pick veggies for 3€/h. but instead of questioning the dehumanizing working conditions of blue-collar jobs, the real problem is always finding more suckers who have no other choice.
novok 4y ago
Labor shortage = We don't want to pay market price.
r00fus 4y ago
Only reference to COVID is that people are making lifestyle changes due to COVID. No mention of excess mortality or its impact to the labor market. Amazing. UK Gov has moved on from COVID deaths.

62 points by monkeydust 4y ago

Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour. Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.

ekianjo 4y ago
"some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. salaries dont occur in a vaccuum.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > "some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
  - nickpp 4y ago
    Their profit is your opportunity then: open a competing company, pay people better while still making a decent profit and enjoy! Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance. But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      With what capital? Those that own the monopolies already have most of it.
      - nickpp 4y ago
        Lots of VCs willing to give you money to try, if you have an idea. This very forum belongs to one of them.
        jacooper 4y ago
        VCs won't pay you to give better wages thats for sure.
        nickpp 4y ago
        Have you tried? VCs beg you to spend the money they give you as long as that increases your chances of success. That is how IT workers got to enjoy the tremendous salaries and benefits we currently have.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. It is simply unviable to try and open up an alternative to Amazon or Walmart - network effects, exclusivity deals, credit history, officials letting it slide to pay your workers pittances because they don't want to battle with the lawyers a billion dollar company can put up against you... and especially, if you do try it, then the mega corporations can and will price-dump you out of business. Subsidising losses for one location for a year or two is nothing for Wal-Mart, especially not if every other store around them is closed afterwards and you are the only player left. Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    An example: Walmart’s yearly profit divided by the number of employees: $4k per employee.
  - buggythebug 4y ago
    People forget that a lot of these companies are small businesses that are not raking in millions and billions....
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Being a small business does not entitle them to exist at the cost of exploiting underpaid labor.
      - buggythebug 4y ago
        "Exploit" is a strong as word. No one is forcing anyone to work for the ABC company.
- mantas 4y ago
  If clients ain't willing to pay enough to pay salary workers are willing to work for... Maybe there's no product-market fit and/or business model just does not work?
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yes, but these don't happen in a vacuum. Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
    - mantas 4y ago
      Yes. Products and services would get more expensive. Overall reducing consumption in volume. Which may be negative for the „growth“ in neoliberal sense. But positive in crapload of other metrics.
  - CraigJPerry 4y ago
    It can be more complex than that. My town has a lot of hairdresser salons. It’s hard to make the argument that there’s too many, but that would be my feeling. It’s a small town and the most popular business type on the high street is a food venue followed in 2nd place by hair salons. I’d have expected convenience stores or pubs. However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment. But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past. So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened! According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Unless the owners of the new shop are more skilled than average, the shop will be marginal and probably go out of business, as the debts pile up. What about a coop shop?
- dotluis 4y ago
  But people pay for goods using the "some bucks" they earned as salaries.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    You guys are missing the point. If we take X percent of the workers out of the market due to retirement (and age discrimination?) there will simply not be enough people to do all the work. Paying more at any or all levels will not create more workers. Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
    - CraigJPerry 4y ago
      The article claims people are not coming out of retirement and are unlikely to do so as the early retirees are comparatively well off.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        If there isn't enough labor to pay for their retirement then inflation will eat up all their retirement until there is enough labor.
        vaidhy 4y ago
        They do not have to retire in UK either, right? You can take your nest egg and move to SE Asia?
        wrycoder 4y ago
        Most people don’t have a nest egg these days.
        CraigJPerry 4y ago
        >> enough labor to pay for their retirement Labour doesn't pay for their retirement. >> inflation will eat up all their retirement Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23). >> until there is enough labor Adding labour has no direct impact on pension income, there can't be "enough labour" to reinstate a standard of living in a person's pension situation Instead what will happen is existing groups who are already below water (e.g. foodbank users) will suffer more pain.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  If demand is so low that under-paid staff is needed to keep things afloat, is the business even worth the effort from a societal view-point? Or even as a business case? Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
  - buggythebug 4y ago
    Eh from a superficial view no, but there will be a cascade event. The after effects are more complex For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices. OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
    - AdrianB1 4y ago
      Mom and pop places are supposed to be run by mom and pop, with no other labor, so they should not be affected too much.
      - buggythebug 4y ago
        That's not the definition of a "mom and pop" place. lol
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      I agree that this isn't a black and white thing; and that wasn't the point I was making. It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out. As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
- danaris 4y ago
  I don't know if it's as true in the UK, but in the US, companies have been reporting record profits over the past year or so. This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on. For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future. However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  "redistribute, redistribute" ... note to self. never should start a company that is profitable if it is to be redistributed.
  - tellmelies 4y ago
    great, redistribute it to your employees instead. It will still go to taxes (income).
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Why not? Surely a period of profits and the knowledge of having improved society are enough personal reward.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Definitely heading towards neofeudalism.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I expect it to get easier to tax capital in the current climate where globalization is being reversed by a few notches. Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though. Not if governments don't sleep at the wheel. In the 80s, CEO compensation was a fraction of what it is today [1], and there were only a couple dozen billionaires or billionaire families [2]. Today, we're at at least 735 billionaires in the US, and at least 2668 worldwide [3]. There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and assets, corporate payouts like dividends or stock buybacks - the latter, most egregious practice, was only legalized in 1982 [4]. FFS - what happened to the Ford-era tradition of paying people enough cash for their work so that they could actually live on these wages and buy all the products?! That was the key for the post-WW2 economic success wave, after all. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ [2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of... [4] https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
notacoward 4y ago
Yep. One thing I noticed on a recent plane trip (my first since the pandemic began) was that practically all of the food options involved ordering and paying via tablet or online (assisted by QR code). Front staff just had to bring the food, no time spent taking orders or doing the payment dance. I've seen this trend increasing in non-airport settings too, but it seems to have reached an apex there. Also saw a delivery bot trundling along the sidewalk in Madison, so that's a thing too.
- mehphp 4y ago
  As a customer, I have preferred this when it's an option. My order is wrong less often and I'm not sitting around waiting for a check when I'm ready to leave.
karmakaze 4y ago
This and the other news that jobs will be lost to robotics, ML/AI doesn't add up--which is it? It's not like automation was to make up for retirees, it's to reduce costs so if anything we should be glad for retirees not taking jobs.

mantas 4y ago

Raise wages till workers show up? Or costs go up so much that market shrinks and there's no need for new workers... Free market!

Kipters 4y ago

How was the line? Foreigners steal jobs?

riffraff 4y ago
I don't mean to defend xenophobic attitudes against immigration, but labor shortage should lead to higher wages, so the argument against immigration that they depress wages would still hold.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  That doesn't defend xenophobia in any way. Being against immigration in some scenarios does not mean you're xenophobic.
- trashtester 4y ago
  Specifically, labor shortages lead to higher salaries for those groups who no longer have to compete with the type of immigrants that used to come, and only if the demand is limited. But for most other groups, it may lead to a reduction in real salaries, due to price inflation. Fewer carpenters makes housing more expensive, and fewer tech workers can make many businesses (especially those outside core tech that still depend on such workers) more expensive to run. And for workers in global hubs, one could argue that the concentration in one geographic location (including immigration) has actually lead to higher demand due to the increase in vibrancy and rate of innovation, leading to an increase in salaries.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  It isn't. You are saying it "should"...wages in the UK are rising 4% slower than inflation, so there is real erosion of wages WHILST there is the biggest labour shortage in the history of the UK. Just speaking generally, labour tends to be a market in which there is massive govt intervention (this is particularly the case in the UK). The normal rules of economics do not hold. One very big factor in the UK is universal credit. You can Google this for yourself but the relevance here is that it acts as a wage subsidy for employers, this gets people into work but there is very little incentive to work more hours (despite the govt being able to remove universal credit from people who refuse to work more). The UK has got read of the persistently high unemployment under left-wing govts of the 2000s but has failed to improve productivity. We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate. Immigration, more women working (universal credit generally supports more women more), it is all coalescing, nothing is working properly.

rightbyte 4y ago

I London cost of living makes any low payed job unlivable. I wonder of the trend is that people start to realize this? Or that it have gotten so much worse compared to 10 years ago.

barry-cotter 4y ago
I imagine if you’re willing to live four to a bedroom things get substantially more affordable. There are plenty of people who are willing to do that, though fewer in the legal economy. If building housing was legal that demand would be satisfied by new building but that’s democracy for you. The people get what they want, good and hard.
- illini1 4y ago
  I’m not sure you can treat the lack of affordable housing as an indictment of democracy as an institution. Of course there’s more nuance to the issue, but it’s not as simple as people get what they want.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    I don't think he meant democracy has failed only that it allows people to create situations that are bad for others.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Maybe works out when you are in your 20s. But they are part of the problem suppressing wages. Have two friends who did that. I don't think megacities is the solution. I'd rather have a living rural area.
frankfrankfrank 4y ago
It’s why the ruling class keeps importing people from the third world where people have far lower expectations for living standards. In your example of London that manifested itself by the low paying jobs that serve the support the ruling class being filled by people willing to live in multi generational family units and far more people per square footage. It’s not all that different in places like Paris either. What is really going on OSS that aristocracy and slavery are, and really already have been reconstituted in a different form. Importing/exploring brown people to serve the will and whims of the ruling class at the expense of the native/ their own population. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s of course exactly the foundations of slavery and aristocracy. And yes, it has gotten worse because the process by which the ruling class had defrauded and swindled trillions of dollars and euros from the pockets of their own abused populations has not faced any opposition at all worth mentioning, let alone something serious.

pyb 4y ago

Weird that we keep hearing that tech is overstaffed, when literally every other sector reports labour shortages. My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again.

rileymat2 4y ago
I have not heard tech was overstaffed. But it could be generationally different than many industries with a disproportionate number of the workers being younger genX and millennial compared to other industries. So I don’t see it as weird.
mschuster91 4y ago
> My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again. Tech companies have a staff distribution problem: Meta, Twitter, Google - they all had way too many engineers chasing after the "next big thing" to achieve an early foothold and then expand the massive scale of these companies to utter dominance, while they neglected stuff like content moderation or customer support.
skippyboxedhero 4y ago
This isn't the case in the UK. Large tech companies are still hiring. If you don't have the boom, you don't have the bust. US tech companies are still massively and ludicrously overstaffed.
- 72deluxe 4y ago
  We can't seem to find competent staff. They're all appallingly bad.
  - pyb 4y ago
    Who's "we"?
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    Yep, that has been the difference between companies that grew and the ones that didn't (if you look at Monzo, they needed to hire hundreds of devs overnight...they created an actual HR strategy rather than just posting a listing on Indeed, running bad interviews based around random questions and probing for social cues, and then hiring no-one). Tech jobs in the UK aren't even particularly high skill, tons of applicants for every role but hiring is run by people who have never hired before, have no business knowledge, and end up rejecting everyone...and then they lobby the govt for easing visa rules...it is all very puzzling. Btw...there are businesses in the UK that hire almost anyone with a degree, put them through a three-month bootcamp, and then hire them out £70k/year pro-rata rate. According to most tech companies, this should be impossible...yet these guys do it. The skills required aren't even complex, and we are struggling...shocking.

Proven 4y ago

LatteLazy 4y ago

Reminder: there is no such thing as shortage in a free market. The market, in it's infinite wisdom, will supply exactly the right number of jobs/workers. If you want more, you need only raise prices. This was a cold hard fact of reality for decades when jobs were scarce and workers suffered. Now it is a cold hard fact for employers.

frameset 4y ago
Hmm, suddenly these employers will doubtless be calling for state intervention.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  This has already happened. This year that was coordinated lobbying to increase visa numbers to the UK. The result was that 2022 was the highest level of immigration...ever. And, of course, this started out with only being "skilled labour" but was quickly expanded to professions earning £20k/year. Productivity has gone nowhere, there are millions either unemployed or under-employed (there is reason to believe that the UK is under-reporting unemployment significantly due to how the welfare system works)...quite simply, whether you believe immigration is bad or good in theory, the supply of labour is massively in excess of demand in the UK.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Evidence for this? Do we have a breakdown of the visa issuance? Are people double-counting students again?
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... - net was 500k, the problem with students is significantly understated because (if you can believe it) students are actually able to bring their families. So you have someone on a student visa from West Africa (this is overwhelmingly the source of this problem), they bung £10k to someone who runs a "university", they bring over their extended family (5-10 people), and there is basically no way to deport them now even once the student visa ends. I agree, the statistics are basically unknown precisely...but the context would indicate that the size of flows are understated (the reproduction rate of non-migrants in the UK is not enough to produce population growth...since 1990, UK population is up 18%).

gumby 4y ago

If only there were some agreement or treaty possible in which young workers from neighboring countries could easily (without red tape) come to provide low cost labor, and even allow retirees to easily move to lower cost areas.

dekken_ 4y ago
If there was already adequate housing for everyone then yeah, cause otherwise you're going to make getting housing harder for the countries poor, just look at the cost of living in Paris
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Was there really a housing problem, while the UK was still in the EU?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    Yes, but it had fuck all to do with immigration. The UK's housing issues are largely a housing policy problem. Its not that the UK has a shortage of accommodation units, its largely that the free market rewards property value speculation over actually occupying those accommodation units in areas of high demand, and having actual tenants is seen as a liability. There is an imperial assload of empty residential units across the UK (and especially in London) where the owners are deriving greater value from pure speculation than rent seeking. There's other aspects to the issue than this, but that's one of the bigger issues that could be resolved with policy changes to penalize the fucking absurd practice of keeping properties empty.
6510 4y ago
Even more radical would be to restore purchase power to a point where one can produce new baby workers domestically. If you've squeezed the life out of working peoples baby budget you just wont have fresh bodies for your own parasitic class to suck the life out of. Should we wonder how their empire got this small?

StrLght 4y ago

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?

sneak 4y ago
We don't have freedom of movement on Earth.
pjc50 4y ago
Rising wages cause massive panic about inflation. That causes rate rises in order to reduce demand. Also, wage rises can't be as easily negotiated in the public sector, which is why so many parts of the UK are on strike around now.
VLM 4y ago
I believe the second chapter of the linked report went into considerable detail about how covid had primary and secondary effect in a very small range of industries and otherwise had little long term effect in other industries. As a primary effect of covid, the public has been scared the public away from the healthcare field, which was collapsing and is now collapsing even faster. Its a good time to get out of healthcare and a bad time to get into healthcare. If they would just hurry up and collapse the system quickly so as to enter the stable rebuilding phase, then they could get workers. As a secondary effect of covid, massive income instability in hospitality has scared people away from that field. Those jobs are all going to be replaced by apps and service robots or go out of business anyway. Conveniently many ag jobs opened with brexit and that field is doing MUCH better than healthcare or hospitality. Hospitality used to be very low pay, but at least it was extremely reliable. With covid lockdowns that job could go away in a sneeze and they're all being replaced by apps and robots anyway. Hospitality is the new bottom of the barrel job and as such will always have staffing problems going forward until it goes away entirely. A society can function quite well without overpaying someone else to hand you a beer or kebabs to avoid getting it yourself LOL.
nine_zeros 4y ago
> 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? Because attracting more people into the labor market assumes that there are people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for higher wages. The labor force in most western countries is already tapped out, exhausted and cannot do any more work.

lettergram 4y ago

Based on my conversations with retirement or near retirement age individuals I know in the US… Many decided to retire due to: - fear from covid - COVID restrictions - office racism & political ideologues (aka blocked promotions, struggle sessions, etc) - rejection of vaccine mandates All the above I’ve seen multiple people (in each bucket) retire for in the past two years. I also know multiple young people who switched roles for the same reason. One buddy of mine worked in an out patient surgery center on contract (he’d work / sell machines for a fee per-surgery). After a 12-18 months of sparse work he had to switch jobs (and was living on food stamps at this point). I hired him for odd jobs to help him pay the mortgage. He started his own business and is doing okay now ~12 months in.

VLM 4y ago
I've also seen ageism as an issue. "They're not going to hire me anyway, may as well put a positive spin on it and retire".

cbeach 4y ago

Automation (particularly of agriculture) should be the focus of national strategy. God forbid we return to the 20th-century solution of throwing more bodies at the problem (uncontrolled mass immigration), which will only exacerbate the underlying issue as immigrants settle and age. The reality is that the first waves of immigration from the EU (skilled workers from developed nations) were hugely beneficial for the UK economy. But as the EU expanded into destitute former Soviet states, later waves of immigration were not the same demographic, from an economic point of view. At some point we have to weigh up the benefits of cheaper fruit and veg, nannies and cleaners versus the cost of providing subsidised housing and wildly expensive public services to immigrant workers on the min wage, who are a net burden on the Treasury. It just doesn't stack up, from the perspective of productive taxpayers. Housing and public services currently have a crisis of demand, not supply. The Tories increased the NHS budget by £40bn in real terms since 2010, but it's still unable to cope with the weight of demand.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

The British people have been going around for years now, holding a smoking handgun, trying to figure out how this painful hole in their foot got there.

rcarr 4y ago

First off, the retirement age is ludicrous anyway. I believe it is now 67 for men in the UK. The average years of good health in this country is 63, but in some parts of the country is as low as 55 [1]. Who wants to essentially work until they get sick then keel over and die? People are wising up to the fact it’s absolutely ridiculous and getting out and enjoying life while they still can rather than putting more money in the pocket of some shareholders. There is no community solidarity when your supposed leaders have been raking in over 20%+ pay rises for years whilst worker pay has declined in real terms, especially when inflation is now what it is. It’s an absolute disgrace what they are trying to fob off nurses and other public workers with atm. Not to mention the fact that working conditions are dire because some MBA has decided all quality of life metrics are irrelevant and all that matters is the bottom line. Good on the people who are dropping out. Make the exploiters squirm. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/05/health-gets-in-the-way-of-work-in-grimsby https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/05/health-gets...

leereeves 4y ago
> Good on the people who are dropping out Yeah, I'd like to see an occasional article describing the same facts as an "opportunity abundance" instead of a "labor shortage". Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people? From a worker's perspective, having lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay seems like a good thing, especially after decades of decreases in real worker pay.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  > Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people? Only when it's profitable.
- VLM 4y ago
  > lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay The market is always portrayed as efficient money-for-time but reality is the market is often based around risk minimization and pounding square pegs into round holes and "proving" there's no one available for our immigration or other government program paperwork. Plenty of openings are posted with no intention of filling them.

lortas 4y ago

The ageing population bought up all real estate in the 70s/80s/90s and instituted fierce wage competition by allowing massive immigration. If they lower the rents, perhaps people feel that it is worth working again. Supply and demand does not work in the labor market if worker supply is unlimited and 90% of your income goes to rent seekers of various kinds.

monkeydust 4y ago

Just a thought, there is technology available today that allows a worker in say in Nigeria to make a bowl of salad for city worker in the UK. Be it a lot slower than a human but perhaps more accurate. This type of 'teleprescence' technology from what I have seen is evoloving fast, where things cant be fully automated or a human might need to step in, this concept opens up a countries labour market in a whole new way. Of course the knowedge/service sector has been doing this for over a decade via outsourcing.

bovermyer 4y ago

I'm fairly certain that I'll never be able to "retire" in the conventional sense. It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism. However, I'll probably just have to pivot to a different career at that point. I'll have savings and investment money to live off of, but probably not enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life until I expire. And everything I'm paying into Social Security will probably end up taken away by the government for some concocted reason or other before I can use it. So, that means I don't get to retire.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
> It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism If this is in reference to programming, somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn. Personally, I'll probably be working 10-20h a week or so by 60 as consultant. Your retirement burn rate is much, much lower if you have cash coming in, even if it isn't covering all expenses.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn Don't know how old you are but why do I have the feeling that by the time you're 60 the following could happen: "The AI tool subscription we have is already trained on the mountains of existing high quality C++ code written by seasoned graybeards such as yourself, so thanks for training it, but sorry sir, your services are no longer required." "Watch this: Hey ChatGPT 9.0, fix this codebase. Done." "What we're looking for is devs experienced in the latest MonkeButt frontend framework as it just came out so there's no trained models for it yet." "Enjoy your early retirement sir" :)
  - treespace8 4y ago
    I'm taking the time to learn and use these tools now. (Co-pilot, etc) They appear to be more autocomplete on steroids, then programmer replacement. It will make devs more efficient, but I doubt it will replace us.

VLM 4y ago

The link is a report of a report of many reports. I read, well, skimmed, the linked secondary source, although I didn't even examine the primary sources: Its extremely sector specific. No shortage at all in FIRE or retail, huge shortage in hospitality and healthcare. Most of the hypothesis in the report seems to boil down to COVID caused everything followed by raw data disproving that. hospitality is extremely low paying but USED to be stable reliable income, but now someone in China sneezes and your income disappears for months, so people will do anything to avoid hospitality as a field. It seems the low end job of choice is agriculture now. As for health care, I suspect that however trendy and cool it is to compliment our brave health care workers by making congratulatory social media posts for karma, very few people want to get involved in that mess. Much like voluntary soldier recruitment after an unpopular war is an uphill battle for awhile. A truly remarkable number of older people are out of the job market on disability. Cardio trends are flat (edited: slope 0) to declining so its probably not obesity related although the UK is certainly not getting thinner? Mental health is on a flat growth rate (edited, flat line upward slope not slope being zero) of about 2% additional of the population per decade which is starting to add up significantly over time. Fewer students than ever are going to school while working, the market seems too competitive to risk their grades by working and/or student loans make more sense than working. Between those very young and very old ages there is little change. There is some inevitability to the UK problems, because as per Chapter 3's intro, the current problem is caused by a 2% decline in working age labor force participation rate, which would have happened anyway in a decade due to the 2% increase in mental health disability cases per decade. I mean something like the future is distributed unevenly, and in a sense this is all a straight line extrapolation of more than decades old trends and the UK is economically speaking in 2032 rather than 2022. Everything happening now was going to happen in a couple years, not now. Any surprise about the situation is fake PR. Several graphs explaining access to health care in the UK is in a long term collapse, 1 in 20 adults are on a waiting list of some sort, etc. The report strongly implies without stating that ongoing collapse of the medical system is not helping old people stay in the workforce. It seems most of the UKs problems are frozen by divide and conqueror approach; after the health care system completely collapses and is replaced (by what?) the situation will resolve itself, but interests on all sides are too entrenched to fix anything until after it breaks.

anovikov 4y ago

TL;DR: for the most part, people don't work because they can. People who saved enough, refuse to work is exploitative, toxic, sweatshop industries like deliveries and catering? Big surprise!

Red_Tarsius 4y ago

>Where have all the workers gone? >Changes to the structure of migration have had an impact on vacancies, which recently hit record high levels. In recent years many EU workers, who filled lower paid roles (especially in sectors like agriculture and hospitality), have left the UK. In numerical terms, their departure has been counterbalanced by the arrival of non-EU workers, who were granted visas under the new immigration system which prioritises skilled workers. This has contributed to a mismatch within the labour force, accentuating vacancies and labour shortages in certain sectors. Good for them. I hope whoever filled those lower paid roles found a better life elsewhere. I can't stand the false equivalency between immigration and labour shortage. I live in Italy and our media is always sharing sob stories from tycoons who "just can't find hard-working employees anymore". The issue is that the very foundation of our economy is built on masses of disenfranchised serfs forced to e.g. pick veggies for 3€/h. but instead of questioning the dehumanizing working conditions of blue-collar jobs, the real problem is always finding more suckers who have no other choice.

novok 4y ago

Labor shortage = We don't want to pay market price.

r00fus 4y ago

Only reference to COVID is that people are making lifestyle changes due to COVID. No mention of excess mortality or its impact to the labor market. Amazing. UK Gov has moved on from COVID deaths.