The Tragic Delusion of America’s “Labor Shortage Crisis”
It doesn’t exist.
We’ve been hearing about a “labor shortage” quite a lot in the last few years. Even before the CVOID pandemic upended the economy employers and the media used that term to describe a labor market in distress.
They expect us to believe that employers are struggling to find employees, but it sure doesn’t seem that way. All you have to do is look around. The evidence of a labor oversupply is everywhere, while the evidence for a shortage stops with the talk that it does.
Think about it…
Consider the law of supply and demand. When there is a true shortage of a particular commodity, its price should rise because of greater demand. This principle holds when it comes to labor just as it does for anything else. If there were indeed a labor shortage, wages should be increasing as employers compete for the limited supply of workers.
But that isn’t happening.
Teachers, childcare workers, corrections officers, and bus drivers are often cited as occupations suffering the greatest labor shortages, but they are also the occupations that stand out for their low pay and poor working conditions. Employers are refusing to address those issues. Why? Because there are so few jobs available and wages…
