America May Soon Be Facing Largest Labor Shortage in Its History (msn.com) 214
America "is facing what's projected to become the largest labor shortage in its history," according to experts interviewed by the Washington Post:
Economists warn that the worsening labor problem, due in part to a skills shortage and population shifts, will be vast and reach beyond tech. It "could hobble the American economy for years to come," predicts the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Lightcast, a labor market data company, calls it "the largest labor shortage the country has ever seen." JPMorgan Chase warns of a national security risk from "a pervasive talent deficit that constrains the nation's capacity to build, compete, and protect its interests." There will be shortages in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, mental health counselors, construction worker and airplane mechanics — jobs AI generally can't do...
Among the trends that have been leading to this moment: a mismatch between the careers college graduates are pursuing and the jobs employers are struggling to fill. Far fewer students are majoring in health care fields than are needed to meet demand, for instance. "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" when what's really in demand are graduates in other fields, [said Ron Hetrick, Lightcast's principal economist]. "It's like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, 'We really don't need them.' And the factory just keeps pumping them out." But the principal reason for the looming workforce shortages is much more basic. A protracted decline in birth rates is coinciding with a record wave of retirements, data shows.
From 2024 to 2032, when the last baby boomers sign up for Social Security payments, more than 18 million college-educated workers will leave the labor force while fewer than 14 million enter it, according to the Georgetown center. Meanwhile, even as the number of people with associate and bachelor's degrees falls, the number of jobs requiring them will grow, the center forecasts. That will leave a gap of 4.6 million workers. Lightcast puts the deficit at an even higher 6 million... The effect of population shifts on the supply of talent, with or without degrees, has been compounded by a drop in the proportion of high school graduates choosing to go to college, a sharply reduced rate of immigration, and a growing number of Americans leaving the workforce altogether because of such issues as lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
Three interesting statistics from the article:
Among the trends that have been leading to this moment: a mismatch between the careers college graduates are pursuing and the jobs employers are struggling to fill. Far fewer students are majoring in health care fields than are needed to meet demand, for instance. "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" when what's really in demand are graduates in other fields, [said Ron Hetrick, Lightcast's principal economist]. "It's like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, 'We really don't need them.' And the factory just keeps pumping them out." But the principal reason for the looming workforce shortages is much more basic. A protracted decline in birth rates is coinciding with a record wave of retirements, data shows.
From 2024 to 2032, when the last baby boomers sign up for Social Security payments, more than 18 million college-educated workers will leave the labor force while fewer than 14 million enter it, according to the Georgetown center. Meanwhile, even as the number of people with associate and bachelor's degrees falls, the number of jobs requiring them will grow, the center forecasts. That will leave a gap of 4.6 million workers. Lightcast puts the deficit at an even higher 6 million... The effect of population shifts on the supply of talent, with or without degrees, has been compounded by a drop in the proportion of high school graduates choosing to go to college, a sharply reduced rate of immigration, and a growing number of Americans leaving the workforce altogether because of such issues as lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
Three interesting statistics from the article:
- U.S. college/university enrollment in 2023 was down by nearly 2 million students since its peak in 2010, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Education Department.
- America's low birth rate since 2010 "means the number of college-age Americans is forecast to decline by another 13 percent through 2041."
- South Dakota has just 41 workers for every 100 open jobs... while California and nine other states have more workers than jobs, the Chamber of Commerce found.
Oh well (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Oh well (Score:5, Funny)
They might have to do the unthinkable and invest in training and education. The horror!
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LOL to you and the GP.
Seriously though, raising salaries and investing in education are both good, but they won't create human beings with the needed skills. Not unless you encourage young people to choose career paths that are in need. It's either that, or bring in more immigrants who have the required training.
Re: Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously that is done as part of investing in education. You don't just say, here's more money, you also say these are the skills to learn for jobs that are plentiful.
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Gen Z were lied to so frequently that if you tell them something is good for them now, they will probably do the opposite. Only slightly joking.
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my oldest is 26, and my next is 22. oldest was told to go into cyberseurity , get a degree in it, gets out, no one will even interview without 5 years experience. no feeder jobs or anything that would give them that experience, just magically you need experience. they've been a supervisor at a fast food place for some time now, applying to 100-150 roles all over the USA and not getting a response, let alone a rejection.
My next just graduated in May, he has a little more of a plan, wants to be a profess
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I'm sorry to hear that. It's a common story, unfortunately. People complain that Gen Z "don't want to work", but it's more accurate to say that they don't have opportunities to work, and when they do get a McJob they have zero loyalty because it's not like working hard there will allow them to progress some sort of career.
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- Business and Finance: relatively easy courses, excellent career prospects and very good pay. Good social status too
- STEM: work long and hard to graduate. Wages are decent but in general there's not a lot of upward mobility (unless you go into management). And no one looks up to engineers.
- Academia: unless you love what you do, forget about it, because you're not going to get anything else out of it. Not even tenure, these
Re: Oh well (Score:2)
Letâ(TM)s recognize the auto mechanics who now have to work on impossible systems that list as requiring 4 hours to fix but take 16.
The truck drivers who have a long boring task and will be replaced soon.
The people who distribute our food. No glory.
The medical professionals who squeezed through an expensive gauntlet that restricted numbers and now are burnt out and need an accounting degree and an air traffic controller to efficiently coordinate the 200 patients they need to help in a day.
There are so
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LOL to you and the GP.
"Lol to you"?? Persuasive language? Got some sort of agenda to pursue here? Some need to rally to peasants?
Interesting choice of words for a man who supposedly has a point.
Anyhow there is no shortage, we dump humans into the trash can because they're wheat too hard to sort from the chaff, You would have encountered them if you'd ever worked a blue collar job.
Re: Oh well (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously though, raising salaries and investing in education are both good, but they won't create human beings with the needed skills.
What? Yes, of course they will.
Not unless you encourage young people to choose career paths that are in need.
You mean by raising salaries? Muppet.
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Seriously though, raising salaries and investing in education are both good, but they won't create human beings with the needed skills.
Education won't give people the needed skills? What does give people the needed skills? Lightening bolts from Zeus?
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Go back in time 20 years and get people to have more babies. Also maybe curb the housing crisis and make salaries keep up with inflation so they can afford those kids. Oh, also maybe do something about the cost of college.
Or just liberalize immigration now. Do those other things, but if we need workers now, you can't magic more people into existence.
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Apprenticeship programs.
The guys (and a few gals) in the orchard across the street never went to college. They have jobs. Not an AI to be seen.
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I *think* his point is that there's a multi-year time-lag. Which is true. And the problem is that by the time that lag-time has passed, the jobs required will be different.
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Not unless you encourage young people to choose career paths that are in need. It's either that, or bring in more immigrants who have the required training.
I'm encouraging my kids to go into trades. I've been competing with H1B's for my entire career and now I just hope I can make it to retirement before AI eliminates my profession.
My neighbor works in HVAC and makes more than I do.
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I mean I wouldn't advise a student to go to college for a career with low pay and college debt. So we either need to reduce the education requirements for things like mental health workers, nurses, and teachers or we need to pay them more.
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"Not unless you encourage young people to choose career paths that are in need."
What jobs are those? The oil patch had a huge shortage once upon a time, but is politically unpopular at the moment. Many are trying to put it out of business even as they hop into airplanes for their summer vacation.
In 1990 I started what everyone assumed was a career with a bright future in mining. 1992 brought Clinton Gore and Babbitt who did all they could to end mining in the U.S. because high quality vacations for the urba
Re: Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be useful to fund schools that provide education pathways to gainful employment.
Also to fund Universal Healthcare and support services as a part of an overall employment tax split between employee and employers.
But all of this requires a thinking that goes beyond pure greed.
Re: Oh well (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)ll have to import skilled labor from a country that subsidizes education.
Wait, the Norwegians arenâ(TM)t coming, best we can do is Pakistan?
Someone call ICE so they donâ(TM)tâ" oh damn. Okay, is there another country we can import skilled labor from that we donâ(TM)t have to invest in our people?
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Given the complete and total failure of US public schools, the funding of which outside of an extremely low funding level per pupil found almost solely in rural schools has zero correlation with performance, the best bet would be for them to open up their own schools and allow applicants or set up workshops for anyone who homeschools to apply to attend, along with making available math, grammar, rhetoric, and science materials available for free.
Only 2 in 5 Americans have a good job (Score:2)
But it does mean it's 60% of Americans don't have a job that allows them to afford a one-bedroom apartment, a reliable car and retirement savings for when they physically cannot work anymore. Good job here isn't opulence and splendor it's getting by and saving a bit for when your body breaks down.
So every time I hear there's a labor shortage I get really pissed off. Because there's a massive shortage of jobs th
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It's not a crime if he's not in the US and he doesn't actually have a company.
Re: Oh well (Score:2)
In the USA there is no legal protection for age discrimination under 40.
whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap (Score:5, Insightful)
We could have been working for the last decade or 3 to make this a great country to have and raise children in but nah, we decided to have the most expensive healthcare system in the world (by far), no provisions for childcare for workers, no maturnity leave laws, no social safty net that would make having children less risky and very expensive housing.
Instead we were politically focused on getting rid of immigrants, which we'll eventually need to import more of because we don't have any young people because we were too focused on getting rid of immigrants to make life stable & happy enough for anyone to have babies.
Re:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, they really need to pass a law or something to make it affordable to have healthcare in this country, man. Someone should run on that premise. It's something long past having not been tried.
Re:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score:5, Interesting)
With Silver Healthcare.gov insurance, i was quoted a bill of $17,500 for medical tests and 6 months of medication.
I flew down to Colombia:
* Specialty Doctor's visit: $35 x 2 vs $50 x 2
* Blood tests: $250 vs $1,820
* Medicine: $102/month vs $1,250 x 6
* Injection pen: Free via gov subsidy vs $200
* Flight to Colombia: $650 round trip
* Airbnb for a week: $244
* US insurance: $551/month
* Cost in Colombia: 244 + 650 + (102 × 6) + 250 + 70 = $932 without travel ($1,826 total)
* Cost in USA with insurance: 200 + (1250 × 6) + 1820 + 100 + (551 × 6) = $12,926
So Colombia is 13.87 times cheaper (or a 92.79% discount).
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I left out the MRIs, which cost $80 in the USA and about $1200.
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Wow, only $551/mo? I see silver premiums as high as $900 being paid for by APTC. It's a good thing we did obamacare instead of Medicare for all! Otherwise, how would those poor insurance company shareholders become richer?
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Re: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also re (Score:2)
Thereâ(TM)s a YouTube contributor named âoeVaushâ who highlighted an email about the cost of painting a road to make a pedestrian crossing. Just painting some white stripes at an intersection. Actual cost of materials and labor to just do it; $320. But to do it officially? $1.4 million.
America is cooked. The worker and the paint supplier will fight over that $320, and all the parasites of our rent seeking system over a million. We could not build a bridge or a damn today without a billion.
We
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We could have been working for the last decade or 3 to make this a great country to have and raise children
Which country did that and has a high birth rate?
Re: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also re (Score:2)
âoeWeâ didnâ(TM)t decide anything. The ignorance as supported the good ideas suppressed.
All our problems were caused on purpose and maximized profits and made us dependent.
Our energy infrastructure is to have control. Our healthcare expensive. Our housing. Everything is about wealth extraction and the âoegovernment out of our businessâ never affects the complexity or cost. It just means monopolies with barriers to entry.
We have global warming because of the petro dollar.
This is all
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I thought that the 2026 news narrative on work is that everyone is going to be unemployed soon because their jobs were replaced by AI and robots.
We were all going to be sitting on a beach collecting our UBI checks while OpenAI and Anthropic compete to run the country. That sounds more enjoyable them having to retrain to get into the healthcare and housebuilding trades, anyway.
Re: Oh well (Score:2)
They will import 20 million foreigners instead
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There's a more evil way that businesses can get the employees/slaves that they need.
They'll use that 13th amendment carve-out for prison labor, and lobby to make all crimes felonies no matter how small.
This will enable a large prison/slave labor force.
Let's hope that Congress and state governments are sane enough to prevent this from happening.
Re: Oh well (Score:2)
I have to admit Iâ(TM)m a discouraged worker. My resume looks like you wanted to win every and all BINGO competitions.
Normal people invest in things that give them a reward. Not pick up a skill because one day it will be useful.
Other people who have more ability to learn than endure boredom get a lot of skills.
But the 5 year humiliation ritual that is fishing for jobs with bots and companies that pretend to hire and have 30 minute interactive systems to extract your data and waste your time are too muc
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What they'll have to do is to relieve the strangle hold state medical associations have on medical school training slots.
They are modern guilds, controlling how many incoming doctors, nurses and other professionals there can be.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a cost to increasing salaries. The cost of the product or service will be higher, meaning fewer consumers will have access to it.
This doesn't seem to be a concern when it comes to increasing executive salaries. They could lower some of those and have plenty more money to spend on new workers. Really... "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" -- No shit, Sherlock. Maybe because the only people making 7 figures in healthcare are the administrators and folks in insurance, not the ones actually practicing medicine. The very long shifts medical careers seem famous for are a good indicator healthcare facilities need to hire more people, but who wants to enter a job with such long hours. Meanwhile the work to be done isn't going down, so everyone has to work longer. It becomes a feedback loop.
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Think of it this way if millions of construction workers existed -- all willing to work for $1 an hour .. everyone could live in a mansion because the cost of building a home would be so low. Even the construction worker would be able to afford themselves a mansion as well.
I can't figure out how you calculated this at all. It doesn't make sense mathematically.
blah blah yappity yap (Score:2)
blah balh balh balah *talking puppet hand*
These were the same excuses people made in 2004 about why we can't have anything nice or else things could end up slightly not even as bad as they are today.
Make the MBAs knife fight- (Score:5, Funny)
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The Slashdot title indicates... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that Slashdot could benefit from hiring at least one English major.
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Actually, that's a good point - I find myself correcting that particular "auto-incorrect" mistake quite often.
Re:The Slashdot title indicates... (Score:4, Informative)
This. Every time I see apostrophe abusers use "it's" incorrectly, I die a little.
Once and for all people: "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of "it is." "its" is the possessive pronoun, which was intended here.
But alas, it may be too late. Even the Apostrophe Protection Society shut down temporarily in 2019, throwing in the towel. It was revived in 2022 though. I wish the new guard the best of luck.
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I think the post of Slashdot editor is more important, and would require at least a (modern) Major General [wikipedia.org]
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I think it's (sic) more to do with giving a shit about doing a good job.
Or not.
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"America is Facing Its Largest Apostrophe Surplus in its History"
Is this true? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an American, but this sounds like the kind of drivel spewed on behalf of big companies that want to be able to hire cheap foreign labour. Rather than paying local resources a fair wage, they want to flood the market with job-seekers and reduce salaries for everyone.
Throw in statements like "fall behind China" and "national security" and decision makers will just eat it up blindly without verifying who is paying the economists / paying for these studies, and what the real motivation is, and just as important - what the actual truth is.
There is no such thing as a labour shortage. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what happens when the foundation of your economy is an underpaid class of worker and you chase that class of worker away with racist rhetoric... at the same time the same conditions are forcing highly skilled workers to flee as they know as soon as the immigrants are dealt with, "intellectuals" are next. Whoda thunk fascism would be so destructive.
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When your lifestyle depends on an exploitable underclass that's what happens. The other thing that happens is a sudden interest in gun control, disarmed serfs are much safer to deal with. Then add the cameras to keep an eye on the rabble, an AI to watch all the cameras at once and you have a Democratic Socialists perfect world.
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It doesn't really matter what you call workers, if there aren't enough of them, there aren't enough of them.
The rest of your post was just a reasonably-accurate characterization of part of what is causing the potential problem. The fact is that the US economy has always been driven by immigration, and by shutting off the flow of immigrants, the current administration is strangling the economy. It'll take a generation or so to really take full effect, but if we don't reverse course we'll end up with econ
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There are areas around the USA where people are against those with a college education. They complain that colleges "indoctrinate" people against religion, and nonsense like that. So, with a CULTURE and politicians that support that, it is no wonder we aren't teaching the skills needed for many jobs these days. That is when those same anti-education people complain about immigrants that come and take the available jobs.
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That's exactly whats happening here.
Im tired of this shit. I didn't always say no immigrant workers, I'm not for ruining the lives of the ones here and i think we should provide them honest paths to citizenship.
But beyond that, the rich just want a bunch of people to lick their assholes in a country too fucking miserable to breed in and they're running out of lickers.
Nope it's not (Score:2)
People who don't understand anything will tell you that per capita education spending has gone up without realizing why.
We don't have factories anymore. They are full of robots if we have them at all. Th
Change of Attitude may be Needed (Score:4, Insightful)
South Dakota has just 41 workers for every 100 open jobs... while California and nine other states have more workers than jobs, the Chamber of Commerce found.
Compare this statement of fact against all this right wing drivel of "liberal hell holes" that everybody wants to leave ASAP. It looks like some regions may have to change their attitude towards educated people, if they want to attract a decent work force.
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Real talk though, there's no chance of SD attracting CA's workforce by changing policy. Leaving sunny CA to live in a tundra and probably be a cowboy is simply a non-starter.
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Real talk though, there's no chance of SD attracting CA's workforce by changing policy. Leaving sunny CA to live in a tundra and probably be a cowboy is simply a non-starter.
The job would be doctor or nurse to the cowboys (more likely petroleum workers). Besides the climate, people look for other (nearby) employers, in case the first doesn't work out. Also, there's no guarantee of long term employment (possible boom town).
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A lot of these areas wanna charge "market rates" too.
Which will be weirdly hard to live on unless you show up with down payment money.
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Real talk though, there's no chance of SD attracting CA's workforce by changing policy.
True, because they will never have any self-awareness in SD or any other flyover state. They will cry and complain about how they can't attract these professionals but they won't make any changes to the shitty society that drove those people away in the first place.
Leaving sunny CA to live in a tundra and probably be a cowboy is simply a non-starter.
There are people who would prefer the weather there, but still won't move there because they don't want to deal with the provincial hicks in sticks bullshit. THAT is the non-starter, which as you said, is not going to change.
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True, because they will never have any self-awareness in SD or any other flyover state. They will cry and complain about how they can't attract these professionals but they won't make any changes to the shitty society that drove those people away in the first place.
All places have some shitty societies somewhere, but in some places these people run the show, and these are not the places a well educated and civilized person wants to be in the long run. God help you, if your significant other looks or sounds foreign, or just doesn't want to blend into the "inject 'em with the Wuhan flu" maga crowd.
Leaving sunny CA to live in a tundra and probably be a cowboy is simply a non-starter.
Lots of people left the sunny south of Europe and moved to the tundra in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Weather only stops people so much, and in times of well observabl
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"All places have some shitty societies somewhere, but in some places these people run the show, and these are not the places a well educated and civilized person wants to be in the long run. God help you, if your significant other looks or sounds foreign, or just doesn't want to blend into the "inject 'em with the Wuhan flu" maga crowd."
That's the most racist/classist thing I've read in a while.
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I had a sister that lived in South Dakota for awhile. The wild lands were great, but she couldn't find decent friends. She left within a few years, even though she had bought a house because she thought she'd like it. It *wasn't* the climate that drove her away.
Re:Change of Attitude may be Needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Then explain the layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they layoffs say there's a surplus.
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The German disease (Score:3)
This might as well be called the german disease because shills like their bitkom have been spewing this BS relentlessly for way over 15 years now - while salaries in germany have staid the same and way below inflation levels even.
The perpetual shortage of experts with 40 years experience getting paid less than a junior...
The sky is falling (Score:4, Interesting)
It's difficult to sympathise with these alarmists.
South dakota (Score:2)
South Dakota is a state full of retirement homes and very few other employment opportunities.
What this data actually means is that investment in new job creation is at an all time low. Having to take care of the aging and dying is not a viable long term jobs strategy.
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South Dakota is a state full of retirement homes and very few other employment opportunities.
Nothing could be more compatible with American crony capitalism than just continually building retirement homes in SD and sending poor old people there to die. But they will need to find some way to give out some nursing degrees.
Experts interviewed by the Washington Post: (Score:3)
Ban Instagram (Score:2)
Simple solution. Ban Instagram and all the other vanity media. Make all the influencers find proper jobs.
Belittling professions doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)
There will be shortages in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, mental health counselors, construction worker and airplane mechanics
When you have an administration which says professions such as nursing or physical therapy aren't professional degrees [cbsnews.com] and want to limit the amount of money people can get as loans to pursue those degrees, it doesn't help.
At least the courts have intelligence [usnews.com] to say otherwise.
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It's not just the US government. State governments have decided that religious biases have a place in medical policy, and are willing to penalize healthcare providers.
Smart healthcare workers had a mass exodus (pun intended).
What did we expect? (Score:3)
Aging will leave the US with not enough labor... (Score:2)
...or AI will eliminate all need for labor at all?
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Blame private equity (Score:3)
Working in medicine is less desirable than it used to be because private equity now owns most medical outlets. Where a physician used to be essentially self employed, he or she is now subject to the direction of PE agents who are more focused on profit than health. Additionally, dealing with the American insurance system is a logistical nightmare that also frustrates care. We need tax incentives to get medical practices back in the hands of individuals, and we need to massively simplify the funding mechanism of health care.
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This all day. You have to be a bit nuts to want to be a Nurse or Doctor today. The pay isn't worth the horrible work environment. As suggested private equity wants to run Hospitals and medical offices like a McDonalds, and essentially extract value for shareholder rather than provide value to workers and patient. Not to mention getting a Medical Degree is both extremely difficult and wildly expensive.
We have pumped so many young people into business (Score:3)
Absolutely. This is a serious issue and is driven by businesses thinking in the short term in perpetuity.
This framework describes the Kondratiev Wave (or Long Wave Cycle), a theory suggesting capitalist economies rotate through 40- to 60-year multi-decade phases driven by technological revolutions.
Society's dominant demand shifts sequentially from builders to engineers, then to financiers, before collapsing and restarting.The cycle progresses through distinct phases, mirroring seasons:
1. Spring (Expansion)The Drivers: Builders and Entrepreneurs.The Focus: Radical new technologies (e.g., steam power, railroads, IT) drive an explosion of infrastructure and basic production.The Demand: Raw materials, physical capital, and foundational labor.
2. Summer (Stagflation)The Drivers: Complacency and shifting societal attitudes.The Focus: The initial boom matures, leading to affluence, overproduction, and inflation.The Demand: Mass-market consumer goods as wealth becomes widespread, leading eventually to structural inefficiencies.
3. Autumn (Plateau / Financialization)The Drivers: Financiers and Capital Allocators.The Focus: Real economic growth slows, prompting a shift toward financial engineering, debt expansion, and speculation.The Demand: Financial services, wealth management, and capital consolidation. This phase is characterized by growing inequality and asset bubbles.
4. Winter (Recession / Depression)The Drivers: Engineers and Restructurers.The Focus: The structural excesses (debt and obsolete industries) collapse, triggering a painful but necessary period of deflation, restructuring, and cleansing.The Demand: Efficiency and cost-cutting technologies. This phase lays the foundation for the next wave, as the engineers redesign systems for the next major technological revolution.
Need more suckers (Score:2)
US (Score:2)
Seems like a problem you could fix overnight with guaranteed national minimum wage, worker's employment rights, and opening up immigration to regain the trust of those people you shot, killed, kidnapped and ripped their children away from.
Who the fuck would CHOOSE to go work in the US at the moment?
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Seems like a problem you could fix overnight with guaranteed national minimum wage, worker's employment rights, and opening up immigration to regain the trust of those people you shot, killed, kidnapped and ripped their children away from.
Who the fuck would CHOOSE to go work in the US at the moment?
This is an insane assertion and just more black and white thinking. As to who would go to work in the US right now - lots of people from all over the world. I work with many of them and they are happy to have the opportunity. To touch some grass - your news and social media echo chamber has rotted your brain. I'm not saying everything is just fine here - far from it - but your statements are entirely uneducated and untethered from reality. But I bet it made you feel good to type that out.
Predictable (Score:4, Insightful)
When a significant portion of your labour is a near-slave class of recent immigrants doing jobs natural born citizens won't without more pay, and you start chasing immigrants out of your country... that's a cause with an effect.
Then you add on tariff wars with every nation on Earth (and an island of puffins for some reason).
Then you start some wars that cause oil supply disruptions.
And you threaten your allies so they increase military spending... but spend it somewhere else whenever they can.
If only the US had educated economists who could have warned the government this was the certain outcome ...
Actually, I'd kind of expect the loss of labour to have been balanced by a loss of jobs, so maybe this is not quite as predictable an outcome as I initially thought.
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When a significant portion of your labour is a near-slave class of recent immigrants doing jobs natural born citizens won't without more pay, and you start chasing immigrants out of your country... that's a cause with an effect.
/quote> And if either "side" wanted to actually do a good job of this they would simply addre4ss the demand by severly prosecuting the EMPLOYERS hiring these people. Not by building walls like we're in medieval times. But going after the employers would be going after the people payiung the bills thanks to citizens united.
Its a "Pay shortage" not a "labor shortage" (Score:3)
Every time I see an alarming article about a "labor shortage" in some field, I first ask:
1)Are wages shooting up to astronomical levels in that field as a result of that "shortage"?
2)Can people in the "shortage" industry afford proper housing and healthcare on their incomes?
3)Are they on a pension system or first rate retirement plan?
If the answer is 'no' (and usually the answer IS no), then the issue is a pay shortage, not a labor shortage.
There are tons of grads right now that cannot get jobs. There are tons of people working in these 'shortage' fields right now that are renting apartments, cannot buy homes in their city that cost way too much, and have crap (or no) pension / retirement plans.
So no, there is no "labor shortage", there is a "pay shortage", in pretty much the entire list above.
Fix that, and the problem will start to fix itself in a few years as people graduate from those fields and fill those jobs.
Shortages? Yeah, no. (Score:3)
If businesses were having problems hiring people in these fields, you'd think that they'd be a) offering higher pay and better benefits to make themselves more attractive to workers, and b) scrupulously avoiding filtering out qualified candidates for no good reason. Yet we don't see them doing either one. Tells me they want to use "shortage" as an excuse to move work overseas or bring in cheap labor from elsewhere.
We pay nurses, doctors, pharmacists, teachers and such crap wages, overwork them, force them to deal with idiotic gig-app scheduling, is it any wonder nobody wants to go into those fields? You have ICE showing up at construction sites arresting or scaring off half or more of the crew, pay them crap wages, and wonder why you can't get construction laborers? You outsource aircraft maintenance to the cheapest firm around and wonder why nobody wants to be an aircraft mechanic? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Seems like the Americans will have (Score:2)
Interest rates (Score:2)
Lack of child care easiest to fix. (Score:3)
Of the listed factors (lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction) the only one we can easily handle is the lack of child care.
Child care is ridiculously expensive, in part because of insurance and regulations. Many state regulations limit it to no more than 4 or 5 children per worker, which makes the labor expensive even though we underpay them ($12/hour is common). $12/4 kids = each parent paying $3/hour just for the labor, not including rent, supplies, and of course, insurance. Insurance is high because of the high value we place on the children.
So the solution is to have either local governments or large businesses supply the child care. In those cases, they can self-insure.
Re: I agree (Score:2)
In your idea, is the minimum wage a living wage? If yes, how do you define living wage and ensure that the minimum wage does indeed meet that standard over time? How does your idea work in countries without a minimum wage?
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose you want to eliminate the minimum wage at the state, federal and local level next. That way people will have to work for subsistence wages?
After all why not pay what the market will bear? [Sarcastic]
Re: (Score:2)
Young people see how poorly paid people in different fields are, and decide not to go in that direction. Health care is one example, where you hear about doctors being paid well, but then, all of the others getting paid very little. Nurses need to go on strike to get paid properly all over the place and on a regular basis, and that doesn't talk about the rest of the staff in a hospital.
You also have to look at where things will be in the next 20 years. With the Baby Boomers, when that generation dies o
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"The notion that there is a shortage of physicians is preposterous - the residency programs will continue to be filled every single year."
How on earth are those two things contradictory? The problem is there are too few residencies for how many physicians we need.
Re: (Score:2)
Read the post above for an alternative explanation.
It begins:
There is no shortage of physicians. What happened during the pandemic was a lot of practices sold out to these massive holding corporations. Working as an independent or small company physician has been made almost impossible. You combine that with nonsense like the cabal of the American Board of Medical Specialties not even allowing practicing physicians to take the damned board exam (despite the fact that they're going to charge $3000 for it).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The purchasing of practices you can get from publically available data. I don't have a link for that because I watched it happen in real time. You can easily go to Linkedin (as an example) and search for physician jobs. Practically every one of them is going to say "board certified/board-eligible" or "BC/BE". Some of them will even brag that they accept new graduates, but the subtext is that those people are "board-eligible" upon graduation. Once that expires, it doesn't matter what kind of job someone has
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