The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Throughout the developed world, there is a growing shortage of workers for all kinds of jobs, especially low-skill, low-paying, boring jobs. Now that the world economy at last is picking up after the pandemic, there are too few people applying for the jobs for which employers are seeking workers.
Some of the explanations for this rare economic phenomenon come from the pandemic itself. After have been furloughed or laid off, many people have decided they liked not having to work for a few to several months, and they took early retirement. Others realized the jobs they had are not worth going back to, and so they quit.
But why? Can they afford to retire early, or to live sufficiently comfortably that they can stop working? Apparently millions have given affirmative answers to both of those questions.
Many of those who have returned to their former employment have discovered, to their delight, that they now have higher pay and more benefits. That is because employers know they need to do this in order to keep the smaller number of workers they have. After many years of never even considering strikes, union workers are striking for higher wages and more benefits. The Washington Post reported there have been 178 strikes in the past few months. Probably there have not been that many strikes in the USA for the past ten years.
I suspect there may be another operative factor here, however. Because of COVID, countless numbers of workers may have realized that a lower standard of living has provided them a more rewarding kind of life. They appreciated not having to “labor for that which does not satisfy,” to use the words of Isaiah. They no longer think it is worth it to work too much or too hard if the work they were used to doing was not worth doing.
So who will do the work the newly satisfied non-workers of America used to do? Immigrants! Refugees! They are desperate to get to America, where a low-paying American job here is a high-paying job in the nations from which they have fled. A poor American is a rich Guatemalan or Congolese or Afghan.
We have a labor shortage within our borders. Might the solution be just outside the gates of our borders? Is that a chapter in the American Dream?
- October 22, 2021
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.