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 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.
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.
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?
People don’t want to pay who want to work?
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.
Because according to inflation and economic “growth” people are being paid about half what they’re worth at any given job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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