Right now, labor is a scarce resource. At a survivable wage, demand exceeds supply, even for many forms of relatively unskilled labor. Thus, the market wage is historically high, and there are many jobs.
In what industry? That might be true in some areas, but not broadly for the US.
Nation wide in the USA labor is massively in surplus. FRED labor data shows if you pull out the retired and the disabled, you are left with a pool of 7-12 million (depending on age range you select for your workers) men who report “don’t want to work”. But are absolutely able to. There’s another pool about the same size of people with disabilities who think they can’t work, but can with the right supports (which supports are understaffed, underfunded, and mostly government supplied therefore mostly inefficient). And then a smaller but still significant pool of women. Combined this is not “labor supply is scarce” this is “the large pool of labor available is hard to activate with current policies and practices.” This is some 15-20 million people nation wide. A very sizeable percentage of our labor force.
We also have perverse incentives that punish companies for training their internal staff, vs poaching skilled staff from their competitors and/or just leaving positions unfilled. Which is causing shortages in specific skills.
In what industry? That might be true in some areas, but not broadly for the US.
Nation wide in the USA labor is massively in surplus. FRED labor data shows if you pull out the retired and the disabled, you are left with a pool of 7-12 million (depending on age range you select for your workers) men who report “don’t want to work”. But are absolutely able to. There’s another pool about the same size of people with disabilities who think they can’t work, but can with the right supports (which supports are understaffed, underfunded, and mostly government supplied therefore mostly inefficient). And then a smaller but still significant pool of women. Combined this is not “labor supply is scarce” this is “the large pool of labor available is hard to activate with current policies and practices.” This is some 15-20 million people nation wide. A very sizeable percentage of our labor force.
We also have perverse incentives that punish companies for training their internal staff, vs poaching skilled staff from their competitors and/or just leaving positions unfilled. Which is causing shortages in specific skills.