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> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
Exactly. The oil companies got tons of workers in the middle of the frozen hellhole Alberta tar sands, and the mining companies got tons of workers in the middle of scorching desert Australia.
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This is exactly right. The notion of "labor shortages" is a farce. It is rhetoric used to bully politicians into making policy decisions that keep wages/salaries low. There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
What about highly specific technical roles for which there are few paths to fulfilling? Wouldn't that qualify as a shortage in labour supply?
It's a dangerous job, it doesn't earn much, most people have better options and then there's the decline in societal appreciation of manliness, so I understand no one wants this job. No perks at all, not even bragging rights. Perhaps it even is safer to join the military nowadays?
This article reminds me of the one we get from growers periodically. They're having trouble finding people to do the work they need done, so instead of paying higher wages the solution is to start a media campaign to get immigration restrictions relaxed so they can flood the market with labor.
I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because, well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017 dollars. Great job for a high sch…
Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietn…
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$18 dollars an hour for arguably the most dangerous job in the country. That doesn't seem like a great deal to you?
How about: underwater welder, fisherman, skydiving instructor, firefighter, electrician, policeman, astronaut, or sanitation engineer?
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages.
But neither is happening.
So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about highly specific technical roles for which there are few paths to fulfilling? Wouldn't that qualify as a shortage in labour supply?
People will acquire those skills if there are positions and pay for them. Employers simply don't like a demand surplus on labor.