I watch a lot of YouTube and sometimes I feel that I have something to contribute to a conversation in the comments. It doesn't happen often but when I do I'll usually try to think about it a bit beforehand and carefully phrase what I say so that I'm actually making a contribution and won't be mistaken for trolling. However, sometimes I get trolled in response. There are times when people think they know about a subject but really they're not very well informed and this is about one of those situations.
This morning I was watching one of my favorite creators who does a weekly report and they were talking about a situation where a company was fined for not keeping up with something (this is my very dumbed down summary of the whole story). The situation was something that I'm really familiar with as it's something I've done and I wanted to add my take on it, basically that just hiring more people for this task isn't always the right solution. It may not be practical and right now one of the things that may be contributing toward it is a labor shortage that we're experiencing not only globally but specifically here in the US. In the response from the content creator it was pointed out that this was happening before the pandemic which, fair enough, but there are other things which make just hiring more people the wrong solution. The labor shortage was just something that popped into my head immediately because it's affecting me right now at work.
However, the part that really got under my skin was that someone came in and made the statement that there isn't a labor shortage, employers just don't want to pay enough. That is misinformed, and for the most part, not true. It's the result of another time someone making an assumption posting it somewhere and it being spread around like a truth. I didn't think it sounded right. I mean there are situations where companies either can't or won't pay enough to have the right kind of people in a position but you can usually hire to get somebody in the position. So I did a little research and I found out that thre is actually a PEOPLE (labor) shortage. I found more than one credible source citing four main reasons for this (actual citations at the end).
The first is assumed to be about what's been going on during the pandemic with extended unemployment benefits and stimulus checks. To me this one doesn't make sense. On CNN the reporter rightly pointed out that the extended unemployment and stimulus checks are done and in the past.
So what are the other 3 reasons that are being cited that actually have a basis in fact? Well the first one is childcare. A lot of women aren't returning to the workforce because child care is so expensive and it doesn't make sense for them to go back and pay more for child care than it does for them to actually stay at home.
Another thing that's a contributing factor is that Baby boomers are actually aging out of the workplace and they're starting to retire, sometimes earlier than expected. Some baby boomers are retiring early because the housing market and stock prices are really high and they're able to afford to retire a little bit earlier than they had planned. So it seems that the Boomers that you dump on so much are a big reason for the current labor shortage.
The last reason for labor shortage right now, specifically in certain industries like agriculture, (which by the way is driving up your food prices) is a lack of immigration. This is for a couple of reasons. One of them is the pandemic because nobody is able or willing to immigrate with the infections the way they are. In addition there is still fallout from the way Trump's policies affected immigrants.
My response to the misinformed person was simply that my experience has been different. Since I wasn't sure if what they had said was true, I did the work to become informed. The result is this blog post.
So in the end what I'm saying is before you jump in to debate a response to somebody's statement online make sure you know what you're talking about. A big issue I keep noticing these days is that people hear something online and accept it as truth. We rightfully call out the conspiracy theorists and all those other crazy people about this but it happens to us too. We need to make sure that we know what we're talking about before we just start spewing things we hear online. This is how the bad stuff gets spread around.
So the biggest reasons for the worker shortage in the US is not that companies are not willing to pay enough money, it is that childcare is too expensive, baby boomers are aging out of the workforce, and there's a lack of immigrant workers. It may also be that there are some people who are still getting unemployment benefits and still have money from your stimulus (although I can't imagine who that still is).
There are some sources that cited workers not willing to settle for low paying jobs as a contributing factor, but it isn't all studies and it's not the sole or even main reason. There are other reasons as well, like burnout, skills mismatches, the automation of recruiting, and more. It's rare that anything is a single issue problem and focusing on just one for whatever reason can backfire.
Sources
