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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A lot of those billions don’t live near those short-staffed businesses. You’re not suggesting we import people to this country so that rich business owners can exploit their labor, are you? 🙄
🤣🤣🤣Go read the “anti-work” subreddit! Those young adults want food and shelter provided to them for FREE and they believe they shouldn’t have to work!!! THAT’s one reason!!!
Have you been doing a lot of worldwide traveling to observe the staffing levels of businesses throughout the entire world? Or are you broadening a general local claim to encompass the entire world?
To be employed, a person has to be:
1) Physically/mentally capable of performing the duties
2) Have the necessary training/skillset/knowledge
3) If not telecommute, has to be willing to possibly move to another town / country, with all the head & heartache that brings
4) The company has to be willing to pay a liveable wage
Imo it’s normally some combination are the above
People running business don’t give a rats ass about staffing as much as they do about growth. “Did we top last years earnings? If not who’s to blame? Certainly not me!”
Businesses do not want to pay a living wage, they want to pay barely minimum wage… and people seeing the wealth inequality of the last 40 years of so called trickle down economics combined with climate emergency only results in billionaires continuing to fuck everyone over and more and more people saying “fuck that, we are sick of working two+ jobs to make ends meet”… Many are giving up any aspirations to move out from their parents places because it is simply unobtainable. I can’t blame them.
This is the currently polite part of end stage capitalism… The not so polite part may be an uprising like the French revolution.
Lot of “anti-work” type of responses to this question so far. While “greed” and “corporate tyranny” contribute to the problem a little, that is not one of the big problems.
Step 1: People’s perspectives changed.
Covid was a shock to many people’s lives. For some it was simply a protracted period where their routine was drastically different; for others it was a highly traumatic time. Both of those led to a similar outcome: people reevaluated their lives, their choices, their values. After that, a large portion of working people changed what they wanted for an occupation. Some decided their labor was worth more, and now have a higher “take” price when accepting employment offers. Some decided to go to work in a different field. Some simply left the work force.
Step 2: Labor market friction
With all these changes in what people _want_, it is now harder to balance employment and needed labor across the entire economy. Need data entrists, but a bunch of people who used to do that job want to go into landscaping now. Landscapers are overrun with newbie employees but don’t have enough experienced managers, because all the shift managers want to go back to grad school and the procurement specialists all want to become union welders.
This is a silly example, but it should demonstrate how there can be ENOUGH workers, but still too much _friction_ in finding the RIGHT workers.
A more boring but realistic example:
Visuallize a services supply chain. Customer reps, managers, IT department, janitors, everything is set up to work as one giant machine. Now suddenly a huge portion of your workforce quits, silent quits, or won’t return to work until you pay them enough to afford a decent, healthy life. How do you afford to increase benefits? Can you take a short-term profit loss? Can you cut costs elsewhere? Will your service-receiving clients tolerate a price hike? Maybe you try completely re-vamping your business model or even try doing the same work with less people?
You can imagine how a wide spread change in perspective leads to rippling effects on employment markets.
Businesses do not want to pay a living wage, they want to pay barely minimum wage… and people seeing the wealth inequality of the last 40 years of so called trickle down economics combined with climate emergency only results in billionaires continuing to fuck everyone over and more and more people saying “fuck that, we are sick of working two+ jobs to make ends meet”… Many are giving up any aspirations to move out from their parents places because it is simply unobtainable. I can’t blame them.
This is the currently polite part of end stage capitalism… The not so polite part may be an uprising like the French revolution.
not all 8 billion people are evenly spread across businesses needing people. Not all business are willing to pay people. Some areas have more jobs than people. Some places even limit people working and how many hours they work, so the business isn’t short staffed to the bosses, it’s short staffed to the emplyees struggling to keep up.
It depends on which country you’re in. Go to a place with a solid rich-poor divide and sufficiently low minimum wages and you’ll often find them massively overstaffed.
The (relatively small) gym I go to has about 4-6 cleaners on hand all day long. They just mooch about with not much to do.
For example, if you use the water fountain they’re often standing right behind you ready to dry it off afterwards… they’re just looking for things to do.
But they’re cheap, so why not have a whole team of them?
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