Will the rich world’s worker deficit last?

Maybe I’m showing my age, but I have to disagree hard with this idea that working conditions are worse in 2021 than they were in the past.

Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees. I’m not exactly old, but I’m old enough to have experienced a significant shift toward better treatment of workers.

At the upper end (e.g. us engineers earning above-average wages), the level of employee pampering we get at modern tech companies feels unreal, even outside of the stereotypical FAANG offices. The amount of flexibility, respect, and attention showered on us (meaning tech workers) now is miles ahead of working conditions decades ago.

Just ask anyone who worked through past recessions what it’s like to work in a crowded job market with far more workers than jobs and where everyone is trying to outperform each other to avoid the next round of layoffs. It’s nothing like our job market today where you can walk out of one company and into another in a matter of weeks or days.

Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.

Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.

What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken...

My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.

Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.

A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.

Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.

I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.

People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.

Sure we have, serfdom. Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them, believe what they believe, and pledge their fealty.

Like serfs, and unlike the period from the industrial revolution to the postwar years, it’s becoming less common for people to change careers, an occupation being more than a job and becoming an identity. Sure we might change employers frequently, but it is not often (and is in fact a spectacle) when someone makes a drastic change of occupation.

I see this quite a bit on HN (the other day someone was saying to no fanfair that he doesn't work because he doesn't like the corporate setting) and other parts of the internet, enough so to assume it must be true, but this notion really confuses me, as it's certainly never been a choice for myself.

Genuinely interested, maybe I'm missing a trick in life, how would you pay for rent, food, electricity, ect... I do genuinely think when I read things like this or see things casually mentioned in the news that there's some alternative route in life nobodies ever told me about

That journey i took 10yrs ago took me all over the world eventually, and reinforced my pre-trip skeptism of what success in life was. To me, climbing the corporate ladder simply meant trading my time for more money and more stress.

So while others looked at me and skoffed at the 80$k i spent travelling the world for 2 years in a search for meaning... I now look at a post-covid world and take solace that i did it. I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them. No matter how much money you eventually get, or how many peers you impress, you cannot get that experience that I had.

And thats really what you are doing by chasing the startup dream. Your trading your life for status and money amoung your peers.

I came to the realisation that what drives me in life not my peers. it was love.... as i travelled around the world and saw poor families with not much nestled into natural environments that provided for them i saw satisfaction. They had a balance. They were poor, but balanced. They took joy in the love that they could give eachother and sharing that time with eachother reinforced that.

So fast forward 10 yrs since that trip. What did i learn? Money cannot by love. No matter how popular you are with your peers, without love, you go home from that recognisition into an abyss of loneliness. You are rish, respected, but alone.

Eventually I came back to life and attempted one last startup venture before figuring that its time i start working Remotely and start living everyday the way i wanted. I love to code, and finding a company that is stimulating and open to this relationship means i will give them the best everyday, day or night.

I thank covid for giving others that shake they all needed. Remote working is much more accessible now. Covid hasnt changed my life at all. I literly have not felt a single day in lockdown, even while the majority of people around me snarl in fear (i also gave up TV, so havnt even seen a covid-news-cast yet). I sit here watching my peers panic buy, while i never go a day without something i desire. I gave away more toilet paper then i bought.

To all those who have those doubt. Dont ignore them. The risks are worth the rewards. You will be calmer inside.

You also have less incentive to be in the race if you do not have kids/spouse, which fewer people have.

You need to spend your time doing something. If you aren't spending a good chunk of it making money, you may be spending too much of it blowing through money out of boredom.

I hypothesize that this is a significant part of why 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years: They quit their job and start spending like there's no tomorrow. And then, oops, the money shockingly doesn't go very far when all you do every minute of every day is spend money like a drunken sailor.

I think the industrial world would love to disagree. Working at a factory my grandma would have carefully regulated break times, food times, etc. All controlled by a central clock for everyone on shift.

It makes sense when you consider factory line workers as part of the machine, but it's also kinda bullshit from a human perspective.

And that was after the big wins of the labor movement in the early 1900's. Imagine how bad it was in the late 1800's.

The new innovation our generation introduced is that because everyone is supposed to be following their dream and passion, you not only have to be a good worker, you also have to love it. If you don't, you are expected to perform the part of someone who does.

So, not only there is no space ship shortage :) there is actually much bigger worker shortage, as I keep a billion positions open (I want slaves, of all kinds, especially with Wall Street experience) and can't fill them (I don't bother to try).

Why would companies raise wages now when they can wait a few months to see if the situation changes?

People seem upset by this, but if you have a free market economy, you should anticipate that actors will work in their own best interest.

Changing regulations around compensation will be much more effective versus hoping that a company will act on a specific moral principle.

I don’t think it’s obvious that large numbers of people are choosing to stay home and earn $0/hour instead of getting a job working $10/hour because they really wanted $15/hour. The worker shortage is a real phenomenon of more jobs existing than people in the workforce.

On the other hand, raising wages would produce inflationary pressure on everything from housing prices to food prices, which would force more people to get jobs just to survive. Not exactly what you meant, I know.

There's something called the backward bending supply curve of labor. At some point, people work fewer hours because they make enough money that more money won't affect their quality of life. Various closures, and, interestingly, labor shortages, have given people fewer ways to spend their money, lowering the inflection point of the curve.

Don't be so quick to think this. Society can't just poof into existence more qualified skilled workers. It takes years to train nurses and a decade or more to do so with M.Ds/O.Ds.

Right now, traveling nurses are being offered pretty insane salaries, up to and including low five figures a week. It hasn't helped bring more people in, or fixed the burnout. People are just traveling to work for the highest bidder. I suspect most are planning to leave the game after they've saved up enough money.

And keep in mind, if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is telling you they'd pay you less if they could.

roommates are a critical social developmental step in your life.

They teach you how to negotiate boundaries without a direct authority figure.

They teach you how to live in a common space with somebody else.

roommates teach you that you must be responsible for your actions which affect the other people who live with you.

roommates teach you the importance of financial responsibility because when the rent is due you both need to pay up.

You may be lazy You may not want to do the dishes, but you know if you take that messy ass plate and you just throw it in the sink it will become a mountain of dirty ass shit and you owe it to somebody else to do your part.

If both of you hold up your end of the bargain and perform 3 seconds of work to place that dish in the dishwasher it avoids this tragedy of the commons.

roommates teach you that self-discipline is critical for a tolerable society.

The article claimed this was negligible.

> How can anyone say there's a worker deficit when we're so far below pre-pandemic employment?

There are be talent and location mismatches that make both of these true.

There is certainly a worker deficit. Our society has moved up the stack and isn't bringing in enough cheap immigrant labor anymore to work the jobs even poor americans won't accept anymore.

What are the market forces that led to this, when there wasn't a worker shortage just a little over a year ago?

The Economist is pushing the dishonest narrative that there's an employee shortage, when actually there's a glut of greedy "we don't want to pay higher wages" employers.

The Economist is, therefore, enabling these greedy employers.

Gee, I wonder what the problem could be?

In particular, please don't copy the most objectionable thing in an article and then paste it here to indignantly object to it. That's a trope of shallow discussion. We're hoping for something more interesting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html