What's up with all the staff shortages?

The reports are piling up. People are quitting jobs in large numbers. Customers are getting impatient. Employers are trying almost anything to add workers. And many people are simply left wondering where all the potential replacement workers are.

Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University credited with coining the term the “Great Resignation,” attributed the departures to four main causes: a backlog of workers who wanted to resign before the pandemic but held on a bit longer; burnout, particularly among frontline workers in health care, food service and retail; “pandemic epiphanies” in which people experienced major shifts in identity and purpose that led them to pursue new careers and start their own businesses; and an aversion to returning to offices after a year or more of working remotely.

Some of this phenomenon can be traced to the normal rhythms of people making expected job changes, for all sorts of valid reasons.

My view is that when we see that about 10,000 people are turning 65 everyday in this country, there is a domino effect as Americans simply phase out of the workforce. They may retire earlier or later, but a rapidly aging population logically will reduce the total number of potential workers.

A quick search reveals that we have gone from 61 percent of American adults working pre-pandemic to about 56 percent in 2020. I think this means that about 44 percent of Americans don't have a job or are not actively looking for employment, and that seems quite high... but that includes children, retirees, the disabled, homemakers, and many other categories of folks not employed.

But if that 5 percent drop is accurate, that's a lot of people... about 10 million or so, and that alone might account for some of our current labor shortage.

I also wonder how someone like me is classified. I am retired but teach part-time. I am drawing on PERA, Colorado's state retirement system, and social security, so that may put me in the "Americans who are not employed" group. Honestly, I don't know and I'm not willing to get too far into the weeds on this issue.

It makes some sense that people will choose "better" jobs when they can, so perhaps some of the "resignations" will sort themselves out.

I do wonder whether the economy works very well when we don't have a significant number of people willing to work for at least some time at crappy jobs. High school part-time jobs, unskilled labor, and entry-level positions may not be very appealing, but they are also not permanent for many workers.

Sorry to return to math, which has been a theme of these posts for a few weeks, but at some point don't we need either lots more children (and there is a lag there between birth and being old enough for a job) or more immigrants willing to take on some understaffed jobs until they can "move up the ladder."

In the meantime, our local Noodles franchise is now closed on Sundays and Mondays. 

They are short on staff.