Is there a labor shortage?

Why are so many part-time workers struggling to find full-time work during a labor shortage?

David Leonhardt spoke with NYTimes reporter Noam Scheiber about worker shortages. He discovered many corporations do not want to move part time workers to full time positions to fill the gap of the labor shortage. The biggest reason they may not be getting hired fulltime, it's cheaper to have a labor force that does not qualify for benefits. 

There are people willing to do the work. Does this mean corporations are creating the labor shortage to keep from paying people a fair wage for their labors?

The bottom line

The increasing inequality of the U.S. economy over the past half-century is unlikely to end because of a temporarily tight labor market. “Labor shortages may be a necessary condition for changing the nature of these jobs,” Noam says, “but they’re generally not a sufficient condition.”

Effects of income inequality, researchers have found, include higher rates of health and social problems, and lower rates of social goods, a lower population-wide satisfaction and happiness and even a lower level of economic growth when human capital is neglected for high-end consumption. (International Monetary Fund)

The National Equity Access reports, The percentage of working poor has increased overall since 1980 from 8 percent of workers to 10 percent of workers although Mixed populations and Black populations experienced slight decreases. Since 1980 the share of Latinx people who are working poor increased from 17 to 21 percent.

Meanwhile the middle class share of income is diminishing. Middle-class workers are earning a national income share that is 8.5 percentage points lower, which translates to a 16.0 percent reduction. And the middle class is shrinking. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to further accelerate these trends. May 14, 2021     https://www.rand.org › blog › 2021/05 ›

Once upon a time, this was a problem for reserved minorities, but now the plight of a working class cuts across all sectors. The anger of the white middle class is a product of an unwillingness of those in power to share the wealth. The deck is stacked. PARTISAN politics on the right is blinding people to the real reasons for their plight.

Rani Molla and Emily Steward wrote an article for Vox, Why Everybody's hiring but Nobody is Getting Hired. In it they explain it's a difficult undesirable job market. "A lot of what people are seeing are low-paying jobs with unpredictable or not-worker-friendly scheduling practices, that don’t come with benefits, don’t come with long-term stability,” Shelly Steward, director of the Future of Work Initiative at the Aspen Institute, told Recode. “And those are not the types of jobs that any worker is eager to take on.”

The jobs available do not offer a future. That problem did not begin with the pandemic, but it got worse because of it. "A survey of workers actively searching for a job on FlexJobs, a jobs website that focuses on remote and flexible work, found that about half of job seekers said they were not finding the right jobs to apply for. Some 46 percent of respondents said they were only finding jobs that are low-paying, while 41 percent said there weren’t enough openings in their preferred profession."  And many workers do not have the skill necessary for the newer highly skilled positions. 

Too many Americans feel left behind. The dream of a better future has faded away.