“The U.S. Occupations at Greatest Risk of a Labor Shortage” is a WSJ story about how some of the finest minds in corporate America believe that we’re about to have a labor shortage. Here are some excerpts:
“In the next 10 to 15 years, we expect U.S. employers to demand more labor than will be available, which will, in turn, constrain overall economic growth,” the Conference Board said in a report to be released Tuesday.
It may seem premature to talk about a labor shortage while the Great Recession and its 10% unemployment rate are a recent, painful memory. Meanwhile, the share of Americans in the labor force is historically low and wages are barely showing signs of picking up.
I’m wondering if this report was prepared by the Harvard Business School and McKinsey alums who set up the compensation plan and overall strategy at Enron.
We’re going to be chronically short of “Religious Workers” they say. How is that possible when people can study religion and become qualified as religious leaders at any age? We’re going to be short of “Top Executives”? I guess you could argue that we already are short-handed in this department since the Yahoo board felt compelled to pay Marissa Mayer $365 million. But by definition wouldn’t any pyramidal bureaucracy have a sufficient number of people at the top? We’re going to be short of fire fighters? 25,000 people applied for jobs with the Chicago fire department the last time that they allowed applications. Wikipedia says that the entire department has only 5,143 employees. We’re going to be more short of lawyers than engineers say the 10 lb. heads behind this report? We’re going to be desperately short of “Motor Vehicle Operators” as the self-driving vehicles come off the robot-rich assembly lines?
Is it time to invest all of our money in Asia if this is the best that American business minds can come up with?
If only there were a source of workers willing to do low end jobs like fruit picking, landscaping and basic construction. Then American workers could focus on these more complex jobs like driving and proselytizing.
From this plot (http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000) it appears that we might wring a few million more workers out of our existing workforce. Unless xbox is more fun than working.
For those guys: prevailing wage > minimum = shortage
In my economics textbook it said that supply and demand were automatically balanced at a market clearing wage/price for labor or any other commodity so that long term “shortages” were never possible in the absence of (usually government) interference with market mechanisms. Thus the price of eggs goes up and down as the intersection point of the supply and demand curves changes over time but there are always (except for rare occasions such as a bird flu epidemic) an adequate # on the shelves in a market economy. This seems to match my real world experience, at least in the egg market. Have the laws of economics changed since my college days?
Why be confined by 4 walls and 40 hours when you can collect money from some one else to take care of your lifestyle needs?