this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Shame there aren't billions in real estate profits that could be used to attract workers with higher wages.
There isn't a labour shortage, there are more people working than ever, there is a demand shortage - the same demand that is saying the supply is the problem.
If you want to get workers you have to pay them competitively (in relation to what other companies are offering). I work in an office but if someone offers me twice the salary I would go in construction.
Saying there is a shortage of labour is like going to the store full of bread, demanding to buy the bread at 10% the asking price & when they won't sell it to you at that price complain there is a huge bread shortage ... as you stand in the middle of a huge stock of bread (and with enough money in your pocket to easily afford the asking price).
It's just propaganda to not pay workers more & keep profits up. There is no labour shortage.
Or to bring in more TFW, errode wages and safety standards too! Yay!
The lives of the many for the good of the few.
And increase the demand by the same amount as the extra supply!
"There are more people working than ever before" that is exactly what economists mean when they say there is a labor shortage, there are not many unemployed people. Higher wages alone won't change that. It mostly just shifts around who is employed by whom. To actually build a larger work force you need not only higher wages, but making it easier for those who don't work to do so like young people and those currently residing in other countries.
How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?
Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn't even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I'd like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into "full time equivalent" for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into "unemployment equivalent" for inclusion in our statistics.
How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?
Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.
Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.
It's obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it's being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.
What is fast fashion?
Making nearly disposable clothes in short runs at high volume. Originally and still primarily an online phenomenon of quick knock-offs of "runway" designs, it is finding its way into retail outlets and can actually drive novelty (trends) separate from the normal fashion creation pipeline.
Here is a pretty good article that includes a brief history: https://www.cnn.com/style/what-is-fast-fashion-sustainable-fashion/index.html
You can't find these outlets on every street corner the way you can fast food, but pretty much every mall, department store, and supermarket will have something that comes out of the fast fashion pipeline.
In addition (my opinion), it seems to be driving a boom in clothing stores, most which seem to be speeding up their style turnover. It seems to me that the underlying model is bleeding over to other retail sectors like furniture.
Like fast food, it's more about artificially created demand than true consumer demand. More and more, I see that what's for sale is what someone wants you to buy rather than things you actively seek out.
LOUDER, for the Parasite-Class owners in the back who refuse to pay more because it would cut into their obscene profit margins. Maybe they should put off that yacht or pristine-condition pavement princess or $10m mansion up on the hill?