There’s no “labour” shortage. There’s a “wage” shortage.
Companies aren’t really complaining about a labour shortage. They’re complaining that no one wants to work for their ridiculously low pay while the board and CEOs sail around in their yachts.
Yeah it really is hilarious in a way, because you can take many business owners' constant blathering about the so-called free market and throw it right back in their faces:
"No one wants to work for poverty wages in my shitty restaurant!" Sucks bro, that's the market. Raise your wages.
"If I raise my wages I can't stay in business!" Sucks bro, that's the market. Make your restaurant less shitty and get more business. Innovate. This is just competition - we like a little competition in America. You're not against America, are you?
They're just as reactive / emotional as the liberals they decry for being emotional. I know that schadenfreude isn't a workable foundation for a political outlook, but watching these people become ever so slightly uncomfortable about their position in the world before we inevitably return to pre-Covid status quo ante is worth a good chuckle.
You're in for a rudest of all awakenings.
You cannot demand salary to be raised without understanding business will be looking elsewhere to fulfill business needs , and will be outsourcing actual labor.
Business that can't be outsourced in such conditions (restaurants, hospitality) will be forced to shut down when outsourceable business lays out local workers and replaces them with someone half a world away.
The businesses who won't figure out how to raise wages will go out of business and be replaced by new companies who figured out how to have their employees work more efficiently.
It sounds like maybelsyrup has it right, and it's these business owners who are in for the rude awakening. There's a rootbeer stand near me that has a message on their menu saying, "if minimum wage is raised to $15, our prices will go up 10%." They charge $3.60 for a pretty good cheese burger. When I read that message, I sit there thinking that the owner is an idiot. At $4.00, the burger is still a better deal than McDonalds and $15/hr is a solid wage in this area.
Yes! I keep seeing stuff like this, and I think "wait a minute, you're telling me that you want to slightly raise the price of this great product or service, and in exchange, your employees will be paid a living wage, or get decent health insurance, or another half day off, or a vacation? Please take my fucking money."
A long time ago I worked for a small family business. They built their business from the ground up, the old man started it in his garage based off of his industry connections from the 70s before being crushed by more effective outfits in the area. When he got too old he retired and handed the new outfit it to his two sons.
I recall being in an all hands bi-weekly meeting on one Saturday, one of the sons stood up and addressed the entire small company:
"I called around and you know what, we pay about average for the industry. Maybe a little bit on the upper side of average. You know, I could raise my prices and maybe pay you all more, but then I would have less customers. and If I have less customers then I can't afford to pay as many of you."
He looked around with an expression that I felt like was almost contempt, but really wasn't The industry is pretty low margin and they got theirs to be very good with volume sales and very good efficiency in processes. He felt the pressure to execute their plans to expand into another, second facility while remaining profitable enough at the original to fund their plans for world domination.
Every day they had customers waiting in line for literally hours for their turn in a crappy, kind of gross facility that had been cobbled together by these DIYers over a number of years. Every day they turned away customers in droves.
I thought to myself: Old man, if you don't raise your prices, you are a priceless fool. If you can't hire enough people to handle your amazing, envy inducing volume, _and_ you have the gall to exclaim proudly that you pay a little bit better than average, then you are surely and rightfully doomed to this mediocrity until you hopefully die.
What he said next only confirmed my young ideations: "We only want the people who _want_ to work here, to work here. If you don't like working here, well you should go somewhere else."
Nowadays they are still in business. They had indeed increased their pay by over 40% in the next couple of years. They opened their second facility years later after more years of project extensions and overruns, just in time for a global pandemic to shutter their entire operation for months. I'm happy they saw the light and realized what you have to do to attract and keep quality skilled employees, but I am for more pleased to be their competitor.
> You cannot demand salary to be raised without understanding business will be looking elsewhere to fulfill business needs , and will be outsourcing actual labor.
Sure, but this has been happening for all of history, and the end result has been higher wages and lifting people out of poverty. We still have a long way to go, though, both locally and globally.
I just started watching Warrior, which is a TV series set in San Francisco in the 1870s. The Irish-Americans are pissed off that the fat-cat business owners have been importing much cheaper labor from China. Of course they forget that during the early periods of Irish immigration to the US, they were the ones undercutting the wages of the Anglo-Saxon incumbents. This has been the case for pretty much every wave of immigration that included a large component of low-skill workers.
This is in play all the way to modern times, without the need for immigration's effects, with the outsourcing and offshoring movements starting in the end of the last century, moving manufacturing to parts of the world with cheaper labor, and now just this year companies realizing they can employ remote knowledge workers (in the same country, even) for less than their current workforce.
This is just normal (for better or worse), and yet you act like it's an aberration that will cause the sky to fall.
We shouldn't subsidize unlivable business models with human misery.
If that (the closures) also result in misery (of the unemployment kind) that will also be a good thing. It will signal stongly that we depend on broken business models and need to update them.
What you want is a compromise that perpetuates substinence-level wages and working class people needing 2 jobs, for the benefit of keeping alive zombie businesses.
That's not a rude awakening. As long as one's invested in change, that's a speed bump. Businesses can't outsource if outsourcing is severely curtailed by policy or law. Leaders, legislators, policymakers -- they have knobs and dials to turn on this thing. Indeed, leaders fiddling with knobs is what got us here in the first place. In South Korea in the 2nd half of the 20th century, not long ago, capital flight was severely restricted -- punishable by death in some cases! I'm not close to saying we do that here; I'm just saying we have tools.
Like some other commenters, and many thousands more in the broader discourse, you're speaking from a position of "this is the way things are and they can't be changed, so there".
My main point isn't to argue for this or that particular policy. My main point is that the world can be different. People motivated to change it will find a way to do so. In matters like these, arguments for economic determinism are borderline defeatist.
In a truly free market this would happen naturally and slowly equalize the wages in America and elsewhere. Given that the US government exists though it can artificially limit this process and require visas and work permits or else tax businesses that flee offshore.
Outsourcing has costs on it's own but it makes sense for America to artificially inflate those costs to maintain its consumer market. America eats the world and through doing so provides a lot of liquidity to the international market. Whether that is just or whether it should specifically be America is up for debate - but it does have the power for force others to play by its rules within certain limits.
Bare naked capitalism isn't so far off from an anarchic free-for-all with spiked clubs.
Nah. People tried that already with bad results. Not to mention, what happens when the foreigners you are exploiting start demanding the same things the locals are?
Not only that, but the social and political ramifications of having not only blue collar workers out of a job, but also the PMC class as well. You want a revolution? Cause that is how you get one.
Companies aren’t really complaining about a labour shortage. They’re complaining that no one wants to work for their ridiculously low pay while the board and CEOs sail around in their yachts.