How is it that we have 8 billion people on Earth, and yet it seems like almost all businesses and services are short-staffed?
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The 8 Billion people are not all potential employees.
You need someone in the right place of the right age.
Of the 8 billion, a quarter (2 billion) are under the age of 15 and about 1 in 10 are 65 and over.
If your restaurant in the US is short-staffed it won’t help that there is a 90 year old in Japan or a 4 year old in Niger.
You need someone of the right age where the job is.
More importantly you need someone qualified for the job and willing to do the job for the money they are willing to pay.
The last part is often the biggest issue.
If the job pays less than it costs you to commute to work and get your child looked after while you are working, that is not something that makes sense to most people.
During the height of the pandemic lots of people were let go by their explorer and found something else to do in order to survive. Many found the new thing less stressful and more fulfilling than the old one and never came back.
Others left the workforce entirely and retired earlier than they would have if it hadn’t been for covid.
Some switched industries or decided to become self employed or stay at home to look after their children or work on the personal project they always wanted and many of those never came back.
Inflation means everything costs including labor. Many small businesses simply don’t have the money to pay for workers.
They say that nobody wants to works anymore while in truth nobody wants to work for what little they are offering.
because businesses in general want ot get away with paying below a living wage to potential employees. if they could get away with not paying people at all they would
short-staffing is 99% of the time a problem of a business putting porfit above its people.
the same businesses that complain bout short staffing often also have very high turn overs because new employees realize the shtshow that place actually is and how poorly it pays.
Because according to inflation and economic “growth” people are being paid about half what they’re worth at any given job.
What good are billion people in India when you need one engineer in Germany? You need people with specific abilities in specific locations, where all such people are already gainfully employed. Good luck.
People don’t want to pay who want to work?
There’s some super interesting things going on in the world right now. First and foremost is our population has taken a major swing. Over the last 50 years the birth rate has typically been higher in most countries then the death rate/retirement rate. Think baby boomer generation and prior. We’ve consistently been growing in population size. This has meant that there have been enough people to fill all the jobs that needed to be filled. But over the last decade or so it’s started going the other way. There are more people retiring then there are people moving into the workforce. Like some other users have mentioned here as a country develops and urbanizes family size typically gets smaller. When you live in a rural community on a farm you have a bunch of kids so you have someone to take care of the farm and you as you age. As people move into cities you don’t need to do that nor is it economical to do that. So that’s what happened over the last few decades around the world (Generally Speaking). This means more people are retiring from the workforce then we can fill. Covid really kickstarted the issue too. Lots of people that were getting close to retirement decided to retire during the pandemic and left a large hole in the workforce. There weren’t people ready to fill those positions. There are a lot of interesting articles on this and it’s going to be a major issue over the next couple of decades. How are we going to fill the positions that are open and take care of an aging populace?
Just my two cents, it is no longer possible to live on fast food wages. Cost of living has gone up too much. Anyone who CAN get a better job has made efforts towards that. The pool of long-term workers goes down. A higher percentage has to be high schoolers but you can’t really schedule them consistently like an adult.
A lot of people giving pretty good answers, but I feel like the most direct answer is it takes 8 billion people to keep 8 billion people alive.
Look at it this way. In a village of 100 people you might only need 1 baker. That baker is kept very busy. If you increase the village population to 200 another person will have to take up baking if everyone wants to have bread.
There might be some jobs that don’t scale linearly like baker. You only need 1 village chief whether there are 100 people or 1000 people in the village. But most jobs are more like baker than village chief. Most jobs have a practical limit to how many other people can use their labor. A waitress can only wait on so many table as once, a mechanic can only fix so many cars in a day. So the more people you have the more you need doing the same jobs.
It’s really more technological innovation that leads to an ability for more people to be served by the same number of jobs. Give the baker an electric mixer and now all of a sudden he can make bread for 200 people.
Shortages are not universal globally, but there are various shortages due to a number of factors:
– COVID has caused millions of deaths, many of working age
– COVID has caused tens of millions of long COVID cases creating disabilities that make workers have to stop working or work reduced schedules
– COVID risks/health factors have caused some workers to leave workforce temporarily (my wife, for example, was a physical therapist but was laid off in Apr ’20 and then was hit with health issues that would be exacerbated by COVID, so hasn’t looked for new job)
– Demographics of post WW2 “baby boomers” rapidly hitting retirement age and leaving workforce
– Reduced immigration due to COVID making it harder for countries to fill labor shortages by letting more foreign workers
– Many low paid jobs have seen large pay increases due to shortages and ability to get more hours, so workers who had 2-3 jobs can now get by with 1 job
– Shifts in demand have caused workers to shift to new jobs, but not returning to old jobs as demand returns there, too…. the retail or fast food workers who went to work in a warehouse or as delivery driver stayed with new job.
How is it that the Earth is covered 70% in water yet almost everyone is dry? One thing has nothing to do with the other.
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