Could there be a labor shortage?

Rhetorically, employers routinely play up the idea of a labor shortage to pray for state intervention to either secure labor at lower prices or other incentives. The central issue move is to deflect blame from their own inability to retain or train workers, toward the workers themselves. Twinned with this deflection is a rhetoric of entitlement to labor, in the fantasy world of an American business owner, there should always be throngs of people waiting to work for next to nothing. Also, they should bring their own tools and train themselves. In our economic melodrama the heroic job creator is thus in a fight for survival both in the Schumpeterian world of ultra-competition and against their own canny, yet lazy, employees.

Amazon has dramatically higher turnover than other operations in PDX because it is a terrible job, they can’t retain their subcontractors either. Uber and Lyft can’t find drivers anymore. Workers do what they do for money. While I understand the temptation to simply say: there is no worker shortage, rhetorically it may make more sense to say there is a worker shortage because you just won’t pay them. Melodramatic takes about job creators often treat wages as charity in their narrative of a labor shortage, wages are wages. It is strategically more useful to say there is a labor shortage because pay is terrible than there is no labor shortage. Digging into the fantasy is more effective than clumsily denying then walking that back.

Why are we here?

1. The Boomer Overhang Ended. Pew reports…