Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.
your old stand-by doesn't make any sense "there is no such thing as a labour shortage" is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation. This is the basis of every economics supply & demand graph, where explicitly refer to the misalignment as a surplus or shortage.
It would make sense to say something like, "There is a shortage of skilled workers willing to work for $1 per hour", and no-one would be likely to argue with that - there certainly is a terrible shortage of such workers! But that makes it clear that the problem is the compensation, not the available workers.
If you just say "There is a shortage of skilled workers" without that context, it becomes a incomplete statement from an economics perspective, and the GP is essentially objecting to that and pointing out that once you take the necessary context into account, the problem is not some sort of more general shortage of workers.