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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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.
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.
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.
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*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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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