How is it that we have 8 billion people on Earth, and yet it seems like almost all businesses and services are short-staffed?

397 views

How is it that we have 8 billion people on Earth, and yet it seems like almost all businesses and services are short-staffed?

In: 11

48 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Its simply because business don’t want to pay for employees. The big bosses in charge always want to see financial growth, even if it means trimming people from jobs. That way, the payroll is a few hundred dollars cheaper but their own pays and bonuses can remain intact.

This almost always collapses in on itself, since you have less people doing more work. This is how you get strikes.

But the take away is short-staffing is always, 100% of the time, because business are prioritizing profits over people.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Of the 8 billion people, not all of them are employable….children, sick folks, elder folks, etc or those who do not work for a business with staff…

Anonymous 0 Comments

Besides the underpaid employees, this is similar to the question “When there are people starving, why do we throw away so much food everyday?”.

The areas of high population density (such as India and China) have a lot of unemployment as there is a huge supply of unskilled labour. The richer countries have far fewer people and hence fewer supply of this labour.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because they are not evenly distributed.

60% of everyone lives in Asia, another 17% in Africa, 9.6% in Europe and 7.6% in North America, 5.5% in South America and 0.5% Oceania.

You are most likely from North America or Europe where the population growth has been stagnant for decades.

Now another factor is that not everyone is qualify for every job. And there might be no qualified personal in where the job is.

Another reason is that the business is unwilling to provide proper compensation for that job. It might just be more profitable to operate understaffed for them.

Another thing is that the number of young people has not been going up with population growth. The number of old people is going up.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are a lot of retirees. Some jobs require masters for janitorial work. Lots of places dobt pay fair wages.

Its a workers market.

Millennials and gen z are the kind of people that don’t want to work 60 hours a week with no life. Especially since you can’t buy a house in today’s market.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is a very broad question, with not a definite ‘simple’ answer.

Some parts of the answer:

*Demographics*

The richer a country gets, the less children are born in general. Meaning there are less people to fill jobs.

In poorer countries there are more people, but also higher rates of unemployment. Many of those people don’t have the skills (language, schooling) to fill jobs in ‘rich’ countries, plus migration is a tricky subject, integrating many migrants from poor areas into rich areas is difficult, so people are not spread across the world evenly to fill all gaps in the job market.

Another part of demographics in the developed world is the population is ageing, so there are more old people who are unable to work, but still require services and consume goods, yet there are relatively less young people to create all those goods and services.

*Cost of living vs. Pay*

The richer a country becomes, the higher the cost of living. That means you need a very good job in order to be able to afford to live there. That’s why you see a lot of shortages in areas of work that traditionally do not pay very well.

If you’re an elementary school teacher and you can either take a job in a big city where you have to pay $2000 in rent for a small apartment, or you can take a job in a small town where you can rent a whole house with a yard for $1000, and both jobs pay about the same, then what would you choose?

Food service and hospitality are another example, since they experience most shortages currently.

If you work as a cook or a hotel receptionist, generally you don’t earn a lot. So if that means you can’t afford to live in a place, you will either learn skills to find a higher paying job, or you find work in an area that you can actually afford to live in.

In order to lure workers, business need to raise the wages, which means they will have to raise prices or make less profits, and that’s generally not what businesses want.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Businesses are in business to make money. It just so happens that providing goods and services is a fairly reliable way to make money. But it isn’t a no cost way to make money. There are expenses that businesses have. In order to make a profit, their income must be greater than their expenses. One of the few expenses that they have any control over is anything to do with labor. So, a lot of businesses try to pay as little as they can and still function as a business.

On the other side of the coin, the are simply a lot of really shitty jobs out there. Jobs that a lot of people simply wouldn’t choose to do, except for the fact that they need an income. But everyone has a price they’re willing to take to do jobs they don’t really want.

So that’s where the problem lies. Businesses are only willing to pay so much money in labor costs, and people want more compensation to do these jobs than they are willing to pay.

Anonymous 0 Comments

As well as the other answers about distribution of people, ability to work, skills, etc – the obvious answer is that the more people there are, the more demand there is on services as well.

All those 8 billion people are both potential staff, but also potential customers.

Anonymous 0 Comments

1) lots are too young or too old to work
2) many lack the education or training needed for specialized jobs and businesses don’t want to pay for their training
3)in many of the simpler service jobs the pay has become so pitiful and the conditions so poor that people are basically unwilling to work under those conditions.

If you were being asked to work 12 hour days with no break, treated like an animal or expected to work continuously like a robot with pay so low that you will only ever just barely be able to cover your immediate expenses with no hope of ever improving your lot or investing in your future, you’d give up on working too.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because most of the societies on earth are running on a capitalistic foundation.
The philosophy of capitalism is to give the business owner an incentive to increase efficiency of their business by letting the business owner keep the profit. And to decrease the profit by allowing a free market where all businesses strive for lower price items to beat the competition.
The idea lies in the prices being as cheap as possible for the consumer as the market will regulate itself and thereby bankrupt all “bad” business-owners.
The problem with this is that the model only takes into consideration the monetary profits of any business, thereby if they can reduce quality (without the consumer noticing too much) or if they can drive down wages or skip on safety regulations or any other way that a business costs money but doesn’t inherently make back that money by itself, the owners (or managers) will be incentivised to cut those costs. That means that any business that treats their employees well (by benefits or higher wages) will lose profit and eventually declaire bankrupsy.

So how does this connect with the businesses being short staffed?

Well the businesses that do survive are usually the businesses that pay minimum wage. However when minimum wage is lower than the lowest required income to survive in that area, the plebs don’t want to work, because they can’t survive on that job. This means its more profitable to steal/look for a higher paying job (even if it will go out of business) or simply make their own ways to meet their monthy demands (e.g homelessness and social wellfare).

I tried to not include any political standpoint in this text. But personally I think capitalsm is a fundamentally flawed idea that builds on enslaving the masses. If a country wants to run efficiently, then the state should run the big corporations to make sure that the monopoly it creates isn’t taken advantage off. And if it wants to open a free market. Then that market still needs to be regulated to not have chains or multiple location branches.