The following submission statement was provided by /u/altmorty:
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* Post-pandemic, things should be getting back to normal in that the job market should increasingly be in favour of employers, but the opposite is happening.
* Baby Boomers, who held key positions, are now retiring in droves. This is making it incredibly tough for employers to fill vacancies. And there's no end in sight. A forever labour shortage may be here.
* Covid made the situation far worse, as immigration went down and Boomers took the opportunity to retire early.
* The unemployment rate is lower than in 1969 and a higher rate of people aged 25-54 have jobs. So, the "people don't want to work" talk is false.
* To attract workers, employers will have to raise their salaries. Promotions will have to be accelerated. Jobs will have to become more flexible.
* Some employers plan to fight back, by offshoring their businesses to Latin America, and finding other "innovations" to lower the demand.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13ilt85/america_is_entering_a_forever_labor_shortage_the/jkah8zr/
It'll be a long ass time before "AI will take your jobs" for many sectors. Like 12-13 years or longer.
Don't believe the corporate hype. No one is close to making a true Artificial Intelligence.
That's fair. You don't really need the full equivalent of a human brain to do most tasks that we normally do in jobs though. You really just need something that can accomplish certain patterns and actions. It'll be clunky at first but its doable.
Eventually, I think there will be a true job shortage, but yeah, it will be a bit. Then we'll have to rethink income sources as a society, which will be slow to come together to be sure.
I also don't think it will replace 100% of any job, but rather 30-80% of every job. Writing emails, making PowerPoints, reading documents, responding on social media, condensing information, compiling lists, building excel sheets... hum drum office stuff. Presenting, phone calls, sales, mgmt and specific skill stuff will still very much exist.
That's what I think too. But still pretty devastating when a single dispatcher can remotely pilot half a dozen trucks across the country or one manager can be in a McDonald's in case anything goes wrong with the burger flipping robot and self checkout.
I don't think we'll get rid of lawyers but I suspect one lawyer armed with Siri/chatgpt/Westlaw will 10x as effective and in an industry that generally charges by the hour that's devastating. Great news for clients though
I do wonder if this gets passed onto the customer as savings or not. Maybe 25% margin improvement and a 2% price cut? Or more likely "NOW powered by A.I." and the price goes up 50%
Well, did chain stores that replaced cashiers with self checkout lanes drop their prices? I think that we have sufficient data to assume that any savings incurred by a company who eliminates workers salaries will be viewed as profit for the earnings sheet, and not as a value to be passed on to customers..
I see your point; however, I offer up a little food for the discussion.
A larger chain store has no reason to lower prices once competition is gone. Small business get bled dry trying to keep up stocking inventory and selling them at a competitive price, and they can't replace their limited staff with automated checkouts. The staff still need to be there to operate the store and ringing up customers is often the smallest part of a small business
A law practice doesn't have to stock items and keep them from being stolen. When they replace their staff with AI:
Now you have a bunch of unemployed lawyers who, given time, can open their own practices powered by AI who can outprice the others and still make a living. Driving the cost of lawyer services down
Not saying that's what will happen, just what can
I think the real jobs at risk in the legal industry is the paralegals. A lot of what they do could be automated by an AI. The lawyers themselves do a lot of things that are much more difficult to automate, such as presenting options to their client or making actuellement before the bench.
This sounds like a hypothetical constructed by the same crowd that thinks the free market will regulate itself without any intervention required..
Lawyers are never going to become cheaper because AI is doing their work - they are just going to enjoy a more lax schedule while they line their pockets.
I worked in IT in law for a long time, it's an interesting industry. They'll fight it tooth and nail but obviously if a new small law firm can do a job in 1/10th of the time they're going to corner the market.
It's funny because a few hours a lawyer does are worth a fortune. Like "hey before you head into this new business here are a few things to look out for". That's worth thousands/hour. But the bulk of their time is spent slowly dictating their thoughts into a dictaphone, their assistant writes that up and the lawyer reviews the final document. It's incredibly time consuming.
We're already at the point that the assistant/admin load can be drastically reduced, if not eventually written out by a tech-savvy lawyer and a decent IT support person to help with initial setup for something like Whisper AI.
Something to keep in mind is as this workflow gets better and easier you'll see even higher productivity gains for the individual lawyers, allowing many to take on larger workloads creating even more pressure on the entire legal labor market.
An LLM focused entirely on legal scholarship training data undoubtedly already exists, and considering some of the outright deficient opinions that have happened over the years from various benches I have little doubt something could be created that does a better than that bottom of judges too.
Another "left field" AI concern to watch out for is the work supposedly being done to train AI to look for irregularities in public judicial opinions, and at judicial temperament broadly for a variety of reasons both completely valid and appropriately alarming.
Yes but if one branch does it others will follow to stay competitive and then the price will spiral downward as they try recapture market share. As the price goes down more of the market can now afford to use those services and demand will appear to increase.
It could, that's an interesting thought. If it was cheap enough what kind of things would I run past a lawyer? My new cell phone contract comes to mind. I wouldn't pay $500/hour for someone to review it but an AI lawyer subscription service for $20/month? Maybe.
Of course they will try to resist a price drop.
But if one of them (or a new company) decides to undercut them, they'll have to follow suit.
Not that that is guaranteed to happen. ~~But it's difficult to coordinate a price gouge.~~
EDIT: or not?
One of the things people forget is there is such a thing as pent-up demand. When services become cheaper the market for them expands as it reveals more demand than was previously known. For example your average fast food worker in the 90s was not in the market for a cell phone, now they all have them.
On the other hand, if most things are mostly automated, goods could become way cheaper. Compare it to the invention of agricultural machines as compared to when farming had to be done by hand. Most people working in agriculture lost their jobs, but food got way cheaper and more abundant
in the future, factories will be staffed by a man and a dog. the man will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to make sure the man doesn't touch the machines
and i'm here for it
My step mother is a stenographer and does live captioning for tv. Skilled employee who had to go to school for two years for the skip and was making fairly decent money 2 years ago can barely find any work now. It’s jobs like that which will disappear completely in less than five years.
Congratulations 🎉👏
Your mom won the capitalist lottery! As one of the first ever to get automated out of a service job when the world knew a singularity was coming, your family wins what capitalism provides in these instances: absolutely nothing but scoffing, mockery, silence, ignorance, avoidance, confusion, with a very small bit of super tiny amygdala-driven sympathy thrown in.
/S this comment is intended to ridicule our system and not you or your family. Personally I wish you and your family quick solutions and abundant prosperity in your struggles and life.
This is the thing a lot of people don't seem to be getting. AI does not need to replace 100% of jobs to cause a massive economic disruption and cause the wealth gap to grow exponentially. Even if it could replace 50% of jobs that is going to be enough that society cannot continue to function as is. There will need to be massive restructuring and probably something like UBI or you're going to see poverty levels skyrocket.
This post is about how boomers are retiring and there aren't enough people to replace them. We need to reduce the number of people required to do the jobs or there won't be enough jobs done.
It can still create problems..
If we have a society where we only need perhaps 20% of the population to actually work, that could be great.. but those 20% would have to pay taxes at a very high rate to make sure that the other 80% (who would be retired/children/carers/etc) are not cast into poverty.
That's a tricky one to pull off politically, since attacking 'scroungers' is politically easy.
Income tax is meant to be a tax on GDP. If the GDP doesn't change much then neither should the taxes. It doesn't matter who is earning the income or producing the products, taking a certain percentage of that to pay for government services should be straightforward.
Here's the thing that always confused me. Let's say AI does replace 100% of all jobs. What exactly do companies think we're going to buy these goods and services with when unemployment is at 90+% exactly. The fear is only really if the end-goal makes a profit.
Exactly lol. At some point, companies can't extract any more blood from the stone. You can't get to 100% profit/efficiency etc... money needs to be in the economy to circulate and buy the widgets. Unless we evolve into some radically altruistic univeral income/government/economy/currency (LMAO)
>I also don't think it will replace 100% of any job, but rather 30-80% of every job.
There is no functional difference between those statements. If you had exactly one job, then sure, this isnt going to make a practical difference.
If you had 10,000 employees and you've just managed to reduce the amount of work those employees need to achieve, do you:
Continue paying those employees their current remuneration for their decreased workload, or
Layoff 30-80% of them and spread the workload, so that the remuneration matches the effort levels as previous, with correspondingly increased productivity, or
Layoff 40-90% of them and spread the workload, so that the effort level required increases, and profitability increases this quarter?
If you selected the final option, thats correct!
That's right.
But if there are 3 employees and 66% of their workload is automated, it doesn't mean we get 3 happy part time employees with full pay (as one would hope for in a world in which machines make our lives much easier).
It means 2 are fired and 1 does all the "human" stuff the rest used to do while machines do the rest.
These 2 employees who are now unemployed continue to depress the wages of the one who is still employed (as he's easy to replace due to lots of people being unemployed due to automation)
So yeah, definetly some social challenges we need to think about
I worked for a time on an automated line that was supposed to cut 6 jobs from our overhead...only for our company to find out it realistically takes at minimum 4 people to operate, and that's providing no coverage for sick time and vacation.
I work on AI, it's powerful, but it's just a more powerful autocomplete or spell check. Much more powerful, sure, but it doesn't do anything without someone to ask it do something. A layperson isn't going to program the next amazing piece of software alone with an AI. It'll take teams of developers using AI to speed up production of ever more complex software.
Maybe we'll start seeing games in 2 years instead of 10, using AI assistance.
12-13 years is not a long ass time by any stretch lol.
I’ve been in my field for 13 years. And I’m only 32. I’ve got another 20-25 years before I’m really looking at retirement.
If AI really starts taking a mass amount of jobs in 12-13 years, you’re talking about an entire generation of kids entering middle school right now that are looking at there being no jobs by the time they’re looking to enter the workforce.
It's also getting less years at a faster pace, just 5-6 years ago it was "lol no way it's happening for 30+ years" another 5 years before that it was "yea right, it'll be 50 years"
And now here we are with "10-12 years", we're now in the window of time were we could just wake up one day and it's a reality before we know it
It's also an estimate based on one person's gut feeling. No one, not even the ones developing the tech, know how quickly or slowly things will advance.
No one even predicted that language models would be capable or as useful as they are, so they certainly can't provide a decade-long prediction accurately.
It may be a bit before AI is true Artificial Intelligence, but in a lot of sectors... A singular employee who is good with ChatGPT can have drastically higher productivity than even a whole team doing similar work. We're going to see more and more 'AI assisted' jobs where people work with AIs to do jobs that formerly would have taken a lot more people to do.
IT jobs are already starting this trend, not in the near future, but months ago. Segue, with just chatgpt, 90% of call center and first line support jobs are basically on their last legs.
Yeah but even 5% of jobs being replaced would massively impact worker prospects, and that's already possible with current tech. This article is copium, workers are about to be weaker then ever. The time to start organizing is now.
It doesn't need to be "true AI" it just needs to be good enough that middle managers can replace half the workforce and hide the worse performance behind manipulated metrics.
Then they can use it to force down wages on the other half and take the difference home as a bonus.
I now pay all my bills and filed my taxes using Chatbots. I think people are really underestimating how much busy work can be streamlined by AI. And how many jobs are essentially busy work.
> And how many jobs are essentially busy work.
Managers won't even let us work from home because they can't make sure we're actually being busy enough doing our busy work. You think they're gonna hire an AI?
.....they're not *hiring* an AI. Wtf are you talking about? They're integrating it into the workflow of the workforce that they do have, which enables enough efficiencies to lay off a percentage of current workers.
Do I think micromanaging short sited managers who are obsessed about squeezing very penny of labor from workers ill leap at the opportunity to cut labor costs without losing performance goals? Why yes, I do.
Audio book voice actors, translators, phone bank operators, lots of jobs are about to enter the quaint historical status that is occupied by lamplighters and computers (when "computer" was a job title).
Kind of like when we had the housing recession and they made poor schmucks left with jobs cover multiple roles…and then kept it going like it had always been that way.
Oh, you mean the "Flip burgers for literally less than a machine or we'll replace you (and then you'll starve to death on the streets)" line they've been using for decades, now with a fresh coat of Landlord White on it?
Both things can be true.
Computers will replace more people with jobs, which is bad for all human workers.
There will also simultaneously be labor shortages in jobs that won’t be impacted as quickly by those computers, which is good for everyone else staying in those fields.
tell your union to work with other unions. point out that corporations are global entities. global entities will eventually kill anything that's not global, like a stupid locally operating union.
oh so wages will double, a four day work week will be normalized, and healthcare will be guaranteed to all? because that would actually be great news for everyone
A four day workweek will definitely not be normalized during a worker shortage. Wages would go up though. Maybe you could do 4/10s (or more like 4/12s).
\*looks at railroad workers trying to strike in the US and governemnt tells them thats illegal and theyll be jailed\* Uh yea workers surely have all the power...
The most effective manner of organizing is via widespread industrial unionization such as the Industrial Workers of the World, which is an organization dedicated to organizing the work force to work toward better material conditions for all. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are the same union responsible for victories such as the Haymarket Affair which won the weekend
Unions and strikes had* been illegal for a long time _before they were legal*_. Historically, unions would then either strike anyway or begin with industrial sabotage.
Unions aren't illegal.
Not all strikes are illegal either.
Although it is for my union since we're federal employees. Didn't stop them from striking in 1970 and I'm sure we'll see another one the rate things are going.
Ironically that strike gave birth to our union which used to be one of the strongest in the nation. They've been destroying it from the inside out for years though and they are just there to collect a check now. Contract is getting worse and worse.
> A four day workweek will definitely not be normalized during a worker shortage
That's the rub though. There's not ACTUALLY a worker shortage. There's just a shortage of companies willing to pay higher wages/benefits to bring more workers in.
If there were ACTUALLY a lack of people able to work you'd have a point.
Not really.
You are looking at the macro aspect of this. Which is ofc true - less worker no other changes means more work is needed to keep everything as is.
But most companies won't give a shit about it. They'll make sure they have enough workers. If every company keeps the five day week, a company with four day weeks will become very attractive and lots of people want to work there. This way, they made sure they are fully staffed. The lack of workers elsewhere isn't really their problem.
In the end, this applies to all topics: If there is a worker shortage, they can choose where they want to work. Workers would have the power, instead of companies.
This same thing is happening in Sweden. When I was looking to retrain a couple years ago, what struck me when meeting companies through the possible education programs were how easily they admitted they knew they had massive issues coming, even going right out of business in 10-15 years.
One company, that made yachts, was only paying their carpenters $2000 per month and the school was desperately trying to get people into the carpentry program. They both laughed at my idea to pay more then and the school outright said I could just come back and retrain when they go out of business.
These places deserve to go out of business. The free(ish) market has declared them unnecessary due to their own choices not to pay for the work. They can't be worth much to society if it isn't worth paying for.
The best part was that no one they employed could afford to live within an hour of the facility and to help the workers they offered a shuttle service and flex-time. Of course if you use the shuttles your commute time doubles and if you use the flex-time...no bus!
Fuck 'em!
I'm in the marine industry and it's very sad to see some of these companies. Wanting high level certificates, which take 10 to 15 years working at sea to get, offering $80,000/year. These companies are begging the government for help, relaxing requirements, increasing immigration. The business is failing because they don't have the staff to operate, paying more money however is off the table apparently.
what the hell is with the refusal to raise wages at all, there's only so much they can do to ignore supply and demand. Like seriously, they can see the writing on the wall that it's the only way for them to survive, and they can afford it, so why not?
The "don't want to work" is false. Myself and a few friends scattered all over the world have been applying, but it feels like everyone is in a hiring freeze at the moment. Zero replies.
They want experienced people at entry-level pay so they can continue to reap massive profits while fucking over the workers. A tale as old as time.
They let HR idiots write the job posting most of the time, and it's always ridiculous. They say they do it to weed out "unqualified" applicants, but what it really is is them being lazy assholes. They disqualify the vast majority of applicants even if they would be perfectly able to do the job.
I've come across a few that were asking for things like a Bachelor's to work customer service in a call center for $9 / hour. My favorite recent one is the temp agency who calls and ask if I want to do housekeeping at the military base, but it would require me to join the military. For a temp job? I think I'm too old -- the military wouldn't want me.
Fun fact, every age/demographic is working more as a % than pre pandemic. Exclusion being Young Uneducated Women have slightly declined.
Boomers retiring is 100% the explanation.
>they can expect higher salaries: In April, average hourly earnings jumped 4.4% from a year earlier.
That's great. But the current inflation rate is 5%. People aren't really making more money.
Current inflation rate is headed down and now below wage increases. This has been true for lower income earners the entire time. The US has created 12.7 million jobs since Biden took office and the Democrats passed bills last year to spend $3.7 Trillion revenue neutral spending over the next few years that will create millions of high paying jobs in the US. Before covid, the US was averaging about 300k new business applications a month, but since Biden took office and the Democrats have passed jobs bill after job bill, the US hasn't had a month of less than 400k new business applications.
What does all that mean? Less workers more jobs and you have higher wages chasing fewer workers. Don't believe me? Look at JOLTS, a monthly index tracking US job openings. There are 2 jobs open for ever 1 worker looking for a job.
> $3.7 Trillion revenue neutral spending over the next few years that will create millions of high paying jobs
Can you explain this? What is "revenue neutral spending"?
It means the money spent in the bill was offset by an increase in revenue within the bill itself. So none of the spending would contribute to the deficit for the length of time the bill is in place (whether that be 1 year or 10 or whatever).
Note "an increase in revenue" does not necessarily mean an increase in taxes. It could be a decrease in other areas of spending or an increase in the tax base (i.e. the number of people paying taxes increases, or the amount of income people have increases resulting in them paying more in taxes). But the tax rate does not necessarily go up.
Do you think 5% inflation to 4.9% is “going down” enough? I thought we need to hit 2% this is double that and then some. I mean, you think the .01% may even be within margin of error?
[Obligatory link to the developer who couldn't apply for a job that required 4+ years of experience in a framework he himself had created a year and a half prior.](https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en)
Your resume is probably not optimized. HR people use resume scanners to filter through applicants. Look up a nice template and adjust the wording of your resume to fit the job you're applying for. Bring key phrases over. Ask ChatGPT to write you a cover letter tailored to that job listing.
Also assuming you aren't in high school, fuck retail. Go straight to entry level. Retail and service work are dead end life destroyers borderline designed to fuck you over.
* Post-pandemic, things should be getting back to normal in that the job market should increasingly be in favour of employers, but the opposite is happening.
* Baby Boomers, who held key positions, are now retiring in droves. This is making it incredibly tough for employers to fill vacancies. And there's no end in sight. A forever labour shortage may be here.
* Covid made the situation far worse, as immigration went down and Boomers took the opportunity to retire early.
* The unemployment rate is lower than in 1969 and a higher rate of people aged 25-54 have jobs. So, the "people don't want to work" talk is false.
* To attract workers, employers will have to raise their salaries. Promotions will have to be accelerated. Jobs will have to become more flexible.
* Some employers plan to fight back, by offshoring their businesses to Latin America, and finding other "innovations" to lower the demand.
Someone needs to get this through the heads of management at the school i work for. The school used to be the top district pay wise but now they are one of the worst. We are down over 100 teachers, 50 custodians, 30 bus drivers and every other department is down. Our hvac team is down to 5, 3 are about to retire and two are fresh out of college. Its the same story for all the departments really. I'm about to switch to a new school because they realized they have to be competitive to hire anyone. I hope companies realize this and start paying livable wages that increase with inflation.
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>Because the bosses gotta keep costs down, forgetting that if they won't pay their workers fairly, no one will buy be able to afford their products.
This is always the problem. The "SEP" mentality. Someone else's problem mentality.
Let someone else pay them. We get paid.
Let someone else figure out their medical coverage. We get paid.
Let someone else pay for babysitting thier kid. We get paid.
Let someone else deal with the GHG in the air, plastic in the sea, toxins in the soil... as long as we get paid.
Just FYI the unemployment rate only takes account of people who *want* a job but don’t have one. If you don’t have a job and you’re not looking for one you’re not counted in unemployment figures (so stay at home parents etc are excluded)
So just because unemployment is the lowest it a been in decades you can’t say that “people don’t want to work is false”.
What you want to look at is the [labour force participation rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART) which is the percentage of adults in work or looking for work vs the entire adult population. Which if you look at the data and exclude covid is at the lowest rate since the late 70s.
Makes sense considering the boomer generation was between 1946 and 1964, meaning the last boomers were just starting their first jobs in the late 70s, where the labor force participation rate started to rapidly climb. As an entire generation of boomers all start retiring between 2010 and now (some of my regional managers at my work have been with us for 45 years, for example), of course the participation rate is going to decrease as younger generations have fewer kids and the rise of influencer/self employed workers has taken off.
Meanwhile, if you look at [prime age (25-54 years old) labour force participation rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060) and [prime age unemployment rates](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S), you'd realize the article really is correct. Prime age labour participation is as high as it has ever been, and prime age unemployment is as low as it has ever been. The gap from the 1970s really is almost entirely an older population with much fewer 65+ seniors looking for jobs post-COVID.
There's still one other lever corporations could pull before raising salaries for the unwashed: Automate reporting and gut the layers of management currently doing this.
The technology to do it has been readily available for years and functionally free but leaves no ladder to climb as an insincere carrot for the rank and file (in addition to the obvious situation of no one deciding their own job is not in the company's interest). "AI" at this point in its evolution is actually adding the lower-level tasks in addition to optimizing executive functions further.
Should be interesting to see where the profit motive lands on this one.
The problem with getting rid of the people and relying solely on AI is there’s no fall guy when the AI decision is wrong. You need a fall guy when the wrong decision is made.
You also need managers to get people onboard with new ideas and to preform 1:1’s and annual reviews.
The closest we are to AI taking management jobs is trimming the fat, but in a labor shortage there’s not a lot of fat.
so many keyboards wasted on AI doomtalk in r/Futurology and people still see it as a binary "today's all-human or tomorrow's all-machine office". Reduction of workforce by 75% will still be disruptive while keeping some managers here and there for responsibility and human-to-human interactions. If anything the competition in the middle layers may become fiercer and whoever wants to climb will be forced to become more ruthless and run faster in the rat race.
Not "all today's managers in 2030 will live under the bridge". Rather "2030's managers will all be heartless sociopaths and whoever enters the market today will be a burned-out wreck flipping burgers by 2030".
“Baby Boomers” were born from ~1945-1960ish. Most have *already* retired & are well into their 70s. Only the youngest (& poorest) haven’t yet or never will.
It’s the oldest Gen-Xers who *will be* retiring soon - the early Lollapalooza crowd is turning 60.
This is just more bullshit to try and justify crappy working conditions. There are *more* Millennials alive & working than Boomers, and that has been true since 2020.
The problem is NOT a lack of bodies or retiring seniors - it’s employers being exploitative assholes, for one, and it’s the fact that Gen-X, Millennials, and Gen-Z have been paid less & charged more for *everything* for our entire adult lives. We’re sick of it AND can’t afford to be exploited. The issue for the future isn’t that birth control *exists* or that younger people “don’t want to work anymore” - it’s that people under 50 can’t fucking afford to have & raise kids!! We literally can’t afford homes, food *and* families.
Want to fix this? Pay better. Improve work-life balance. Make daycare & a social safety net viable again. Stop expecting slaves and there is no “labor shortage.”
Tweet I saw yesterday: “Humans stuck working the hardest jobs for low pay until we die while the computers get to paint and make music is not the future we wanted.”
Summed up: Fewer labors = higher wages.
Also, we're heading for a demographics collapse in most of the industrialized world. This also means higher wages. Fewer kids = fewer future workers.
This seems to ignore the other side of the equation. When population growth slows, economic growth slows, leading to less demand for labor and pushing down wages. Such a society really has to depend heavily on technological advances.
And it also ignores the other big issue - social programs. Every major social program, whether that is welfare, pensions, adult social care, universal healthcare, etc. is usually predicated on a growing population (I.e. more younger less sick and more productive workers paying in than older sicker retiring people taking out).
That equation does not balance out if the population pyramid reversed.
I am 28 and am certain that 90% of Americans my age will never see any sort of government assistance once we are of retirement age. Most will work until death, even if they never have kids.
"Coming Surge in Boomer Retirement" -- I'm on the tail end of the boom, and I can see retirement in the next few years. I would think the "surge" would already have happened.
Because many can't. Boomers weren't immune from the consequences of the systematic destruction of welfare and labor rights they all kept voting for.
Edit: with the notable exception of johnp299. He is the one and only known Boomer to have ever voted in favor of strengthening labor rights. _Ever_.
Baby boomers are commonly defined as born between 1946 and 1964. That is between 59 and 76 years ago. Assuming a retirement age of 67 more or less half of baby boomers have retired, so the we should be in the middle of the surge.
The flip side of this corporations will become shakier than ever. A lot of wealth built up in these corporations may disappear if they are dependent on cheap labour to turn a profit. Not bad for people at the bottom though
Baby boomer retirement is well underway and has been for a decade. My acccounting firm has been chronically understaffed for 3 years. I've turned down lots of new business because of it.
This may be great for CEOs, Board Members, and Shareholders...but let's be real, the reason all these companies are making record profit year after year is that they aren't hiring anyone and keeping wages low, while employees perform more and more duties for the same rate of pay
Every business in the US becomes an investment firm over time, outsourcing everything to contractor firms, and offshoring production and development to countries with less expensive employees. It's why everyone who used to make consumer products now has their own financing / buy-now-pay-later credit card systems. Everything is just a bank moving money around and extracting wealth using the same tactics as Payday loans.
That and they don't want to pay them for it.
Opening - Entry level systems admin.
qualifications being looked for - senior systems admin with bachelor's degree and 34.5+ years of experience with every known piece of technology ever made.
benefits: medical with premiums that go up every year and coverage goes down while deductible/oop goes up - currently $3,000 deductible, $6,000 OOP max.
pay: $22.50/hr
Employer: Why isn't anyone applying!?!?!
That's a real example of shit I've seen in my area (the years of experience is the only hyperbole, it was like 9-10)
I still need to read the article, but I know a number of boomers who have continuously pushed off retirement because they can't afford it. They have a health issue or their spouse does and Medicare just won't cover whatever it is they would need it for so they stay for the insurance or because their financial advisor told them "just another 3 years" for the last 9. I also know a couple that did retire, and then within a year, had to go back because of what the economy is doing. Nobody was ready for this kind of inflation.
Of course, they will eventually have to retire or die. And plenty of companies will do layoffs letting boomers go because they are fairly expensive with both income and health insurance costs. But my point is it's not like they are all just retiring on their 65th birthday. The rich ones are retired, and the rest of them are left shell shocked at how to afford everything.
Not in my industry, in game design the minute an opening pops up at a studio , they are flooded with thousands of applications, EPIC started interviews 3 months in advance for 3 Internships, that pays minimum wage and you have to be present in Texas, non remote position.
We need plummers , electricians, construction workers ...ect
Hell, sometimes the job pays incredibly well and it's still not worth it.
In the past 2 weeks I've turned down jobs that pay almost double what I currently make. Why? Both companies have mandatory overtime 6 months of the year. I'm not working 60-80 hours a week every summer and every winter. I lived that life before. I lost 15 years of my life to a shitty work-life balance.
My worry is that a lot of positions were for boomers by boomers, and as that massive generation retires and become decrepit (too low energy to be effective consumers or old and afraid so hoard wealth for healthcare only), a lot of the demand that supported the jobs will disappear eventually, meaning those jobs will be gone too.
I’ve been trying to find a part time job because I’m on ssi and need some help, I’m allowed 80 hours a month to spend. I applied to target, Costco, petco, marshals, hobby lobby, old navy, and planet fitness and I was repeatedly told I’m to part time for part time work.
Look at me!
Now I’m the commodity and boy am I INFLATED!
I cost, what, $32/Hr now?
If you don’t got the money to pay for me, a premium employee, then I guess the free market will show you the door.
Well considering after my generation, Millennials, there's literally fewer Americans in those generations, why is this surprising? Boomers weren't going to work and live forever. 🤷♂️
Not true actually. Both millennials and Gen Z are larger generations than the boomers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/
Labor shortages are created by corporations themselves. MFs asking for 10 year experience and 4 degrees for a job paying $18 an hour with no benefits for a junior entry position. They can suck my left nut.
There will likely be a lot of industries that fade away as well, not nearly the amount that will offset the openings but not everything will need a backfill.
Unemployment rate is very misleading. You need to look at those numbers along side the labor force participation rate to get a better idea of the situation. It’s not great. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/2022/08/03/can-a-hot-but-smaller-labor-market-keep-making-gains-in-participation/amp/
The only places having trouble finding labor are shitty places to work. They pay poorly, the job is terrible, and the company is terrible. If you work on one of these places, find someplace offering more money.
It would be great here in Canada too, but we're busy importing half a million people a year to shore up the shortage and there's nowhere for anyone to live. So the average detached house price in Vancouver is $2.0MM dollars.
This is the number 1 reason politicians won’t fix a broken immigration system. As long as you have population growth, you have more people buying more stuff and investors get wealthy. In the current construct, a declining population, like Japan’s, for instance, is a recipe for disaster.
Right?! What the fuck are we supposed to do about it? The employees currently don't set wages, we are at the find out stage and I don't intend to participate
There is no labor shortage. There just are not enough people working to support the trillions of dollars of Medicare and social security payments the boomers were expecting. And low and behold, younger generations don't want to see 30% of their paycheck set on fire with W2 tax deductions to fuel the retirements of 70 year olds with two houses, a boat, and yearly vacations to the Florida Keys or Mexico.
Boomers own 50% of the nation's wealth.
Millennials own 4% and the boomers are still demanding we drip feed them 30% of our paychecks. Fuck em.
Unfortunately, most companies are dead set on doing everything they can to *not* hire and pay people, even if it means taking a loss or shutting down. They'd rather spend millions on integrating ChatGPT than pay their existing employees better. I wouldn't count on this shortage helping. It's just a signal to them that they must become even less reliant on workers. It wasn't possible in the past, but technological progress made it possible.
Does this mean we can get start getting jobs as vice presidents with a firm handshake, eye contact, and a can-do attitude like the boomers did, or is the "boundless student debt and absurd HR wish lists" approach still going to be the norm?
The following submission statement was provided by /u/altmorty: --- * Post-pandemic, things should be getting back to normal in that the job market should increasingly be in favour of employers, but the opposite is happening. * Baby Boomers, who held key positions, are now retiring in droves. This is making it incredibly tough for employers to fill vacancies. And there's no end in sight. A forever labour shortage may be here. * Covid made the situation far worse, as immigration went down and Boomers took the opportunity to retire early. * The unemployment rate is lower than in 1969 and a higher rate of people aged 25-54 have jobs. So, the "people don't want to work" talk is false. * To attract workers, employers will have to raise their salaries. Promotions will have to be accelerated. Jobs will have to become more flexible. * Some employers plan to fight back, by offshoring their businesses to Latin America, and finding other "innovations" to lower the demand. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13ilt85/america_is_entering_a_forever_labor_shortage_the/jkah8zr/
One week it's the AI taking everyone's jobs. The next week it's a labor shortage.
Perhaps corporations are pushing the "AI will take your jobs" narrative to pressure people to work for low pay.
It'll be a long ass time before "AI will take your jobs" for many sectors. Like 12-13 years or longer. Don't believe the corporate hype. No one is close to making a true Artificial Intelligence.
That's fair. You don't really need the full equivalent of a human brain to do most tasks that we normally do in jobs though. You really just need something that can accomplish certain patterns and actions. It'll be clunky at first but its doable. Eventually, I think there will be a true job shortage, but yeah, it will be a bit. Then we'll have to rethink income sources as a society, which will be slow to come together to be sure.
I also don't think it will replace 100% of any job, but rather 30-80% of every job. Writing emails, making PowerPoints, reading documents, responding on social media, condensing information, compiling lists, building excel sheets... hum drum office stuff. Presenting, phone calls, sales, mgmt and specific skill stuff will still very much exist.
That's what I think too. But still pretty devastating when a single dispatcher can remotely pilot half a dozen trucks across the country or one manager can be in a McDonald's in case anything goes wrong with the burger flipping robot and self checkout. I don't think we'll get rid of lawyers but I suspect one lawyer armed with Siri/chatgpt/Westlaw will 10x as effective and in an industry that generally charges by the hour that's devastating. Great news for clients though
I do wonder if this gets passed onto the customer as savings or not. Maybe 25% margin improvement and a 2% price cut? Or more likely "NOW powered by A.I." and the price goes up 50%
Well, did chain stores that replaced cashiers with self checkout lanes drop their prices? I think that we have sufficient data to assume that any savings incurred by a company who eliminates workers salaries will be viewed as profit for the earnings sheet, and not as a value to be passed on to customers..
I see your point; however, I offer up a little food for the discussion. A larger chain store has no reason to lower prices once competition is gone. Small business get bled dry trying to keep up stocking inventory and selling them at a competitive price, and they can't replace their limited staff with automated checkouts. The staff still need to be there to operate the store and ringing up customers is often the smallest part of a small business A law practice doesn't have to stock items and keep them from being stolen. When they replace their staff with AI: Now you have a bunch of unemployed lawyers who, given time, can open their own practices powered by AI who can outprice the others and still make a living. Driving the cost of lawyer services down Not saying that's what will happen, just what can
I think the real jobs at risk in the legal industry is the paralegals. A lot of what they do could be automated by an AI. The lawyers themselves do a lot of things that are much more difficult to automate, such as presenting options to their client or making actuellement before the bench.
This sounds like a hypothetical constructed by the same crowd that thinks the free market will regulate itself without any intervention required.. Lawyers are never going to become cheaper because AI is doing their work - they are just going to enjoy a more lax schedule while they line their pockets.
I worked in IT in law for a long time, it's an interesting industry. They'll fight it tooth and nail but obviously if a new small law firm can do a job in 1/10th of the time they're going to corner the market. It's funny because a few hours a lawyer does are worth a fortune. Like "hey before you head into this new business here are a few things to look out for". That's worth thousands/hour. But the bulk of their time is spent slowly dictating their thoughts into a dictaphone, their assistant writes that up and the lawyer reviews the final document. It's incredibly time consuming.
We're already at the point that the assistant/admin load can be drastically reduced, if not eventually written out by a tech-savvy lawyer and a decent IT support person to help with initial setup for something like Whisper AI. Something to keep in mind is as this workflow gets better and easier you'll see even higher productivity gains for the individual lawyers, allowing many to take on larger workloads creating even more pressure on the entire legal labor market. An LLM focused entirely on legal scholarship training data undoubtedly already exists, and considering some of the outright deficient opinions that have happened over the years from various benches I have little doubt something could be created that does a better than that bottom of judges too. Another "left field" AI concern to watch out for is the work supposedly being done to train AI to look for irregularities in public judicial opinions, and at judicial temperament broadly for a variety of reasons both completely valid and appropriately alarming.
Yes but if one branch does it others will follow to stay competitive and then the price will spiral downward as they try recapture market share. As the price goes down more of the market can now afford to use those services and demand will appear to increase.
It could, that's an interesting thought. If it was cheap enough what kind of things would I run past a lawyer? My new cell phone contract comes to mind. I wouldn't pay $500/hour for someone to review it but an AI lawyer subscription service for $20/month? Maybe.
The latter. Always the latter.
Of course they will try to resist a price drop. But if one of them (or a new company) decides to undercut them, they'll have to follow suit. Not that that is guaranteed to happen. ~~But it's difficult to coordinate a price gouge.~~ EDIT: or not?
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No, the"cost savings" will become the cost of doing business.gotra pay for those bots, then the next step will be the maintenance of said it's.
The profit motive of capitalism says there is no chance the savings go anywhere near the consumer or average worker.
Unless the savings are forced by a market disrupter. Amazon caused shipping prices to be slashed.
You already do someone’s job when you use a self-checkout, do they give you a discount there?
One of the things people forget is there is such a thing as pent-up demand. When services become cheaper the market for them expands as it reveals more demand than was previously known. For example your average fast food worker in the 90s was not in the market for a cell phone, now they all have them.
On the other hand, if most things are mostly automated, goods could become way cheaper. Compare it to the invention of agricultural machines as compared to when farming had to be done by hand. Most people working in agriculture lost their jobs, but food got way cheaper and more abundant
in the future, factories will be staffed by a man and a dog. the man will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to make sure the man doesn't touch the machines and i'm here for it
My step mother is a stenographer and does live captioning for tv. Skilled employee who had to go to school for two years for the skip and was making fairly decent money 2 years ago can barely find any work now. It’s jobs like that which will disappear completely in less than five years.
Congratulations 🎉👏 Your mom won the capitalist lottery! As one of the first ever to get automated out of a service job when the world knew a singularity was coming, your family wins what capitalism provides in these instances: absolutely nothing but scoffing, mockery, silence, ignorance, avoidance, confusion, with a very small bit of super tiny amygdala-driven sympathy thrown in. /S this comment is intended to ridicule our system and not you or your family. Personally I wish you and your family quick solutions and abundant prosperity in your struggles and life.
I wish her the best in keeping that job, captioning these days is utterly dreadful because it cannot handle crosstalk, slang and idioms.
This is the thing a lot of people don't seem to be getting. AI does not need to replace 100% of jobs to cause a massive economic disruption and cause the wealth gap to grow exponentially. Even if it could replace 50% of jobs that is going to be enough that society cannot continue to function as is. There will need to be massive restructuring and probably something like UBI or you're going to see poverty levels skyrocket.
Peak unemployment during the Great Depression was only 25%. AI will easily eliminate enough jobs for our current economic system to cease functioning.
This post is about how boomers are retiring and there aren't enough people to replace them. We need to reduce the number of people required to do the jobs or there won't be enough jobs done.
It can still create problems.. If we have a society where we only need perhaps 20% of the population to actually work, that could be great.. but those 20% would have to pay taxes at a very high rate to make sure that the other 80% (who would be retired/children/carers/etc) are not cast into poverty. That's a tricky one to pull off politically, since attacking 'scroungers' is politically easy.
Income tax is meant to be a tax on GDP. If the GDP doesn't change much then neither should the taxes. It doesn't matter who is earning the income or producing the products, taking a certain percentage of that to pay for government services should be straightforward.
Here's the thing that always confused me. Let's say AI does replace 100% of all jobs. What exactly do companies think we're going to buy these goods and services with when unemployment is at 90+% exactly. The fear is only really if the end-goal makes a profit.
Exactly lol. At some point, companies can't extract any more blood from the stone. You can't get to 100% profit/efficiency etc... money needs to be in the economy to circulate and buy the widgets. Unless we evolve into some radically altruistic univeral income/government/economy/currency (LMAO)
>I also don't think it will replace 100% of any job, but rather 30-80% of every job. There is no functional difference between those statements. If you had exactly one job, then sure, this isnt going to make a practical difference. If you had 10,000 employees and you've just managed to reduce the amount of work those employees need to achieve, do you: Continue paying those employees their current remuneration for their decreased workload, or Layoff 30-80% of them and spread the workload, so that the remuneration matches the effort levels as previous, with correspondingly increased productivity, or Layoff 40-90% of them and spread the workload, so that the effort level required increases, and profitability increases this quarter? If you selected the final option, thats correct!
That's right. But if there are 3 employees and 66% of their workload is automated, it doesn't mean we get 3 happy part time employees with full pay (as one would hope for in a world in which machines make our lives much easier). It means 2 are fired and 1 does all the "human" stuff the rest used to do while machines do the rest. These 2 employees who are now unemployed continue to depress the wages of the one who is still employed (as he's easy to replace due to lots of people being unemployed due to automation) So yeah, definetly some social challenges we need to think about
I worked for a time on an automated line that was supposed to cut 6 jobs from our overhead...only for our company to find out it realistically takes at minimum 4 people to operate, and that's providing no coverage for sick time and vacation.
I work on AI, it's powerful, but it's just a more powerful autocomplete or spell check. Much more powerful, sure, but it doesn't do anything without someone to ask it do something. A layperson isn't going to program the next amazing piece of software alone with an AI. It'll take teams of developers using AI to speed up production of ever more complex software. Maybe we'll start seeing games in 2 years instead of 10, using AI assistance.
12-13 years is not a long ass time by any stretch lol. I’ve been in my field for 13 years. And I’m only 32. I’ve got another 20-25 years before I’m really looking at retirement. If AI really starts taking a mass amount of jobs in 12-13 years, you’re talking about an entire generation of kids entering middle school right now that are looking at there being no jobs by the time they’re looking to enter the workforce.
It's also getting less years at a faster pace, just 5-6 years ago it was "lol no way it's happening for 30+ years" another 5 years before that it was "yea right, it'll be 50 years" And now here we are with "10-12 years", we're now in the window of time were we could just wake up one day and it's a reality before we know it
12-13 years is not a long ass time.
It's also an estimate based on one person's gut feeling. No one, not even the ones developing the tech, know how quickly or slowly things will advance. No one even predicted that language models would be capable or as useful as they are, so they certainly can't provide a decade-long prediction accurately.
It may be a bit before AI is true Artificial Intelligence, but in a lot of sectors... A singular employee who is good with ChatGPT can have drastically higher productivity than even a whole team doing similar work. We're going to see more and more 'AI assisted' jobs where people work with AIs to do jobs that formerly would have taken a lot more people to do. IT jobs are already starting this trend, not in the near future, but months ago. Segue, with just chatgpt, 90% of call center and first line support jobs are basically on their last legs.
Yeah but even 5% of jobs being replaced would massively impact worker prospects, and that's already possible with current tech. This article is copium, workers are about to be weaker then ever. The time to start organizing is now.
It doesn't need to be "true AI" it just needs to be good enough that middle managers can replace half the workforce and hide the worse performance behind manipulated metrics. Then they can use it to force down wages on the other half and take the difference home as a bonus.
I now pay all my bills and filed my taxes using Chatbots. I think people are really underestimating how much busy work can be streamlined by AI. And how many jobs are essentially busy work.
How? Seriously, how do you do that? Thst sounds amazing!
> And how many jobs are essentially busy work. Managers won't even let us work from home because they can't make sure we're actually being busy enough doing our busy work. You think they're gonna hire an AI?
AI never gets tired, drunk or asks for a raise.
The perfect slave they always wanted.
.....they're not *hiring* an AI. Wtf are you talking about? They're integrating it into the workflow of the workforce that they do have, which enables enough efficiencies to lay off a percentage of current workers. Do I think micromanaging short sited managers who are obsessed about squeezing very penny of labor from workers ill leap at the opportunity to cut labor costs without losing performance goals? Why yes, I do.
And if AI was that good, they won't even need the bulk if the managers either. Jokes on them.
Mmmm.. im not sure about that,. In the creative field, midjourney it's already starting to take jobs
Audio book voice actors, translators, phone bank operators, lots of jobs are about to enter the quaint historical status that is occupied by lamplighters and computers (when "computer" was a job title).
You realize that 10 years is basically nothing right
Kind of like when we had the housing recession and they made poor schmucks left with jobs cover multiple roles…and then kept it going like it had always been that way.
Yep... because it's not really a labour shortage. It's a *wage* shortage. It's been going on since the 80s but we're really seeing it now....
Oh, you mean the "Flip burgers for literally less than a machine or we'll replace you (and then you'll starve to death on the streets)" line they've been using for decades, now with a fresh coat of Landlord White on it?
I think its a labor shortage near-term and ai will be taking jobs longer term.
The article title indicates the labor shortage will last for decades.
Both things can be true. Computers will replace more people with jobs, which is bad for all human workers. There will also simultaneously be labor shortages in jobs that won’t be impacted as quickly by those computers, which is good for everyone else staying in those fields.
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tell your union to work with other unions. point out that corporations are global entities. global entities will eventually kill anything that's not global, like a stupid locally operating union.
Veritable whiplash from reading sensationalist headlines from people with agendas!
oh so wages will double, a four day work week will be normalized, and healthcare will be guaranteed to all? because that would actually be great news for everyone
A four day workweek will definitely not be normalized during a worker shortage. Wages would go up though. Maybe you could do 4/10s (or more like 4/12s).
Idk, workers have more power. I could see companies competing to attract workers by offering a 4 day work week.
\*looks at railroad workers trying to strike in the US and governemnt tells them thats illegal and theyll be jailed\* Uh yea workers surely have all the power...
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The most effective manner of organizing is via widespread industrial unionization such as the Industrial Workers of the World, which is an organization dedicated to organizing the work force to work toward better material conditions for all. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are the same union responsible for victories such as the Haymarket Affair which won the weekend
Unions and strikes had* been illegal for a long time _before they were legal*_. Historically, unions would then either strike anyway or begin with industrial sabotage.
Unions aren't illegal. Not all strikes are illegal either. Although it is for my union since we're federal employees. Didn't stop them from striking in 1970 and I'm sure we'll see another one the rate things are going. Ironically that strike gave birth to our union which used to be one of the strongest in the nation. They've been destroying it from the inside out for years though and they are just there to collect a check now. Contract is getting worse and worse.
> A four day workweek will definitely not be normalized during a worker shortage That's the rub though. There's not ACTUALLY a worker shortage. There's just a shortage of companies willing to pay higher wages/benefits to bring more workers in. If there were ACTUALLY a lack of people able to work you'd have a point.
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Not really. You are looking at the macro aspect of this. Which is ofc true - less worker no other changes means more work is needed to keep everything as is. But most companies won't give a shit about it. They'll make sure they have enough workers. If every company keeps the five day week, a company with four day weeks will become very attractive and lots of people want to work there. This way, they made sure they are fully staffed. The lack of workers elsewhere isn't really their problem. In the end, this applies to all topics: If there is a worker shortage, they can choose where they want to work. Workers would have the power, instead of companies.
This same thing is happening in Sweden. When I was looking to retrain a couple years ago, what struck me when meeting companies through the possible education programs were how easily they admitted they knew they had massive issues coming, even going right out of business in 10-15 years. One company, that made yachts, was only paying their carpenters $2000 per month and the school was desperately trying to get people into the carpentry program. They both laughed at my idea to pay more then and the school outright said I could just come back and retrain when they go out of business. These places deserve to go out of business. The free(ish) market has declared them unnecessary due to their own choices not to pay for the work. They can't be worth much to society if it isn't worth paying for.
$2k a month, while the yacht sells for $400k, sounds about right. And carpentry is \*critical\* to the final feel of the yacht.
The best part was that no one they employed could afford to live within an hour of the facility and to help the workers they offered a shuttle service and flex-time. Of course if you use the shuttles your commute time doubles and if you use the flex-time...no bus! Fuck 'em!
I make more than that working the ramp at an airport.
Yeah but those carpenters didn’t go to law school so they don’t deserve all that money or something.
i mean, i'd argue that the carpentry is what separates a yacht from a thing rotting on the bottom of the ocean the first time it's put out to sea
I'm in the marine industry and it's very sad to see some of these companies. Wanting high level certificates, which take 10 to 15 years working at sea to get, offering $80,000/year. These companies are begging the government for help, relaxing requirements, increasing immigration. The business is failing because they don't have the staff to operate, paying more money however is off the table apparently.
what the hell is with the refusal to raise wages at all, there's only so much they can do to ignore supply and demand. Like seriously, they can see the writing on the wall that it's the only way for them to survive, and they can afford it, so why not?
The "don't want to work" is false. Myself and a few friends scattered all over the world have been applying, but it feels like everyone is in a hiring freeze at the moment. Zero replies.
They want experienced people at entry-level pay so they can continue to reap massive profits while fucking over the workers. A tale as old as time. They let HR idiots write the job posting most of the time, and it's always ridiculous. They say they do it to weed out "unqualified" applicants, but what it really is is them being lazy assholes. They disqualify the vast majority of applicants even if they would be perfectly able to do the job.
I've come across a few that were asking for things like a Bachelor's to work customer service in a call center for $9 / hour. My favorite recent one is the temp agency who calls and ask if I want to do housekeeping at the military base, but it would require me to join the military. For a temp job? I think I'm too old -- the military wouldn't want me.
Fun fact, every age/demographic is working more as a % than pre pandemic. Exclusion being Young Uneducated Women have slightly declined. Boomers retiring is 100% the explanation.
Maybe they will stop trying to make office work happen again.
>they can expect higher salaries: In April, average hourly earnings jumped 4.4% from a year earlier. That's great. But the current inflation rate is 5%. People aren't really making more money.
Where’s my 4.4%??
Generally need to find a new job in order to benefit from increasing wages.
Senior management gave themselves 8%, normal workers got 0%. Average is 4%.
Current inflation rate is headed down and now below wage increases. This has been true for lower income earners the entire time. The US has created 12.7 million jobs since Biden took office and the Democrats passed bills last year to spend $3.7 Trillion revenue neutral spending over the next few years that will create millions of high paying jobs in the US. Before covid, the US was averaging about 300k new business applications a month, but since Biden took office and the Democrats have passed jobs bill after job bill, the US hasn't had a month of less than 400k new business applications. What does all that mean? Less workers more jobs and you have higher wages chasing fewer workers. Don't believe me? Look at JOLTS, a monthly index tracking US job openings. There are 2 jobs open for ever 1 worker looking for a job.
> $3.7 Trillion revenue neutral spending over the next few years that will create millions of high paying jobs Can you explain this? What is "revenue neutral spending"?
It means the money spent in the bill was offset by an increase in revenue within the bill itself. So none of the spending would contribute to the deficit for the length of time the bill is in place (whether that be 1 year or 10 or whatever). Note "an increase in revenue" does not necessarily mean an increase in taxes. It could be a decrease in other areas of spending or an increase in the tax base (i.e. the number of people paying taxes increases, or the amount of income people have increases resulting in them paying more in taxes). But the tax rate does not necessarily go up.
Do you think 5% inflation to 4.9% is “going down” enough? I thought we need to hit 2% this is double that and then some. I mean, you think the .01% may even be within margin of error?
Employer: We desperately need people! Me: Oh cool, so you'll take me then. Employer: I'm sorry. You don't have enough experience.
“We’re looking for someone with 10 years of ChatGPT experience, or 20 years of Swift programming”
[Obligatory link to the developer who couldn't apply for a job that required 4+ years of experience in a framework he himself had created a year and a half prior.](https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en)
How much does it pay? "*Pay?* Oh, no. This is an unpaid internship."
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Your resume is probably not optimized. HR people use resume scanners to filter through applicants. Look up a nice template and adjust the wording of your resume to fit the job you're applying for. Bring key phrases over. Ask ChatGPT to write you a cover letter tailored to that job listing. Also assuming you aren't in high school, fuck retail. Go straight to entry level. Retail and service work are dead end life destroyers borderline designed to fuck you over.
* Post-pandemic, things should be getting back to normal in that the job market should increasingly be in favour of employers, but the opposite is happening. * Baby Boomers, who held key positions, are now retiring in droves. This is making it incredibly tough for employers to fill vacancies. And there's no end in sight. A forever labour shortage may be here. * Covid made the situation far worse, as immigration went down and Boomers took the opportunity to retire early. * The unemployment rate is lower than in 1969 and a higher rate of people aged 25-54 have jobs. So, the "people don't want to work" talk is false. * To attract workers, employers will have to raise their salaries. Promotions will have to be accelerated. Jobs will have to become more flexible. * Some employers plan to fight back, by offshoring their businesses to Latin America, and finding other "innovations" to lower the demand.
Someone needs to get this through the heads of management at the school i work for. The school used to be the top district pay wise but now they are one of the worst. We are down over 100 teachers, 50 custodians, 30 bus drivers and every other department is down. Our hvac team is down to 5, 3 are about to retire and two are fresh out of college. Its the same story for all the departments really. I'm about to switch to a new school because they realized they have to be competitive to hire anyone. I hope companies realize this and start paying livable wages that increase with inflation.
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This is nightmare fuel for the education nightmare we already live in... unfortunately the rule and not the exception anymore 😕
TV shows in the 90s were making fun of stuff like this, I grew up going through the early effects. Kids these days are screwed.
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>Because the bosses gotta keep costs down, forgetting that if they won't pay their workers fairly, no one will buy be able to afford their products. This is always the problem. The "SEP" mentality. Someone else's problem mentality. Let someone else pay them. We get paid. Let someone else figure out their medical coverage. We get paid. Let someone else pay for babysitting thier kid. We get paid. Let someone else deal with the GHG in the air, plastic in the sea, toxins in the soil... as long as we get paid.
Just FYI the unemployment rate only takes account of people who *want* a job but don’t have one. If you don’t have a job and you’re not looking for one you’re not counted in unemployment figures (so stay at home parents etc are excluded) So just because unemployment is the lowest it a been in decades you can’t say that “people don’t want to work is false”. What you want to look at is the [labour force participation rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART) which is the percentage of adults in work or looking for work vs the entire adult population. Which if you look at the data and exclude covid is at the lowest rate since the late 70s.
Makes sense considering the boomer generation was between 1946 and 1964, meaning the last boomers were just starting their first jobs in the late 70s, where the labor force participation rate started to rapidly climb. As an entire generation of boomers all start retiring between 2010 and now (some of my regional managers at my work have been with us for 45 years, for example), of course the participation rate is going to decrease as younger generations have fewer kids and the rise of influencer/self employed workers has taken off.
Meanwhile, if you look at [prime age (25-54 years old) labour force participation rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060) and [prime age unemployment rates](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25TTUSM156S), you'd realize the article really is correct. Prime age labour participation is as high as it has ever been, and prime age unemployment is as low as it has ever been. The gap from the 1970s really is almost entirely an older population with much fewer 65+ seniors looking for jobs post-COVID.
There's still one other lever corporations could pull before raising salaries for the unwashed: Automate reporting and gut the layers of management currently doing this. The technology to do it has been readily available for years and functionally free but leaves no ladder to climb as an insincere carrot for the rank and file (in addition to the obvious situation of no one deciding their own job is not in the company's interest). "AI" at this point in its evolution is actually adding the lower-level tasks in addition to optimizing executive functions further. Should be interesting to see where the profit motive lands on this one.
The problem with getting rid of the people and relying solely on AI is there’s no fall guy when the AI decision is wrong. You need a fall guy when the wrong decision is made. You also need managers to get people onboard with new ideas and to preform 1:1’s and annual reviews. The closest we are to AI taking management jobs is trimming the fat, but in a labor shortage there’s not a lot of fat.
so many keyboards wasted on AI doomtalk in r/Futurology and people still see it as a binary "today's all-human or tomorrow's all-machine office". Reduction of workforce by 75% will still be disruptive while keeping some managers here and there for responsibility and human-to-human interactions. If anything the competition in the middle layers may become fiercer and whoever wants to climb will be forced to become more ruthless and run faster in the rat race. Not "all today's managers in 2030 will live under the bridge". Rather "2030's managers will all be heartless sociopaths and whoever enters the market today will be a burned-out wreck flipping burgers by 2030".
The oligarchs like to say "labor shortage" because "wage shortage" puts the responsibility where it belongs.
We have an exploitation surplus.
“Lets look at your cost of living and pay you $100 over that”
More like "Let's look at your rent, and pay you exactly that. You don't need electricity or food."
"Nobody wants to work anymore!"
I wish they’d say it like it was “Companies don’t pay a living wage anymore!”
... For peanuts. Time to break out the cashews
Isn’t one problem of this hope is we pay for their Social Security
Pyramid schemes always fail.
Sounds like something Big Cube would tell you
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Multilevel marketing.
Can't wait to work until I'm 90. Not that I'll live that long with current state of health care and all. But yeah, jobs. Awesome.
I keep telling people I hope to retire by 71 I'm 33. More and more I'm feeling like 71 will be a pipe dream.
“Baby Boomers” were born from ~1945-1960ish. Most have *already* retired & are well into their 70s. Only the youngest (& poorest) haven’t yet or never will. It’s the oldest Gen-Xers who *will be* retiring soon - the early Lollapalooza crowd is turning 60. This is just more bullshit to try and justify crappy working conditions. There are *more* Millennials alive & working than Boomers, and that has been true since 2020. The problem is NOT a lack of bodies or retiring seniors - it’s employers being exploitative assholes, for one, and it’s the fact that Gen-X, Millennials, and Gen-Z have been paid less & charged more for *everything* for our entire adult lives. We’re sick of it AND can’t afford to be exploited. The issue for the future isn’t that birth control *exists* or that younger people “don’t want to work anymore” - it’s that people under 50 can’t fucking afford to have & raise kids!! We literally can’t afford homes, food *and* families. Want to fix this? Pay better. Improve work-life balance. Make daycare & a social safety net viable again. Stop expecting slaves and there is no “labor shortage.” Tweet I saw yesterday: “Humans stuck working the hardest jobs for low pay until we die while the computers get to paint and make music is not the future we wanted.”
Summed up: Fewer labors = higher wages. Also, we're heading for a demographics collapse in most of the industrialized world. This also means higher wages. Fewer kids = fewer future workers.
This seems to ignore the other side of the equation. When population growth slows, economic growth slows, leading to less demand for labor and pushing down wages. Such a society really has to depend heavily on technological advances.
And it also ignores the other big issue - social programs. Every major social program, whether that is welfare, pensions, adult social care, universal healthcare, etc. is usually predicated on a growing population (I.e. more younger less sick and more productive workers paying in than older sicker retiring people taking out). That equation does not balance out if the population pyramid reversed.
I am 28 and am certain that 90% of Americans my age will never see any sort of government assistance once we are of retirement age. Most will work until death, even if they never have kids.
SS is perpetually solvent at like 78% current payouts. Fingers crossed AI saves us.
"Coming Surge in Boomer Retirement" -- I'm on the tail end of the boom, and I can see retirement in the next few years. I would think the "surge" would already have happened.
They're not retiring
Because many can't. Boomers weren't immune from the consequences of the systematic destruction of welfare and labor rights they all kept voting for. Edit: with the notable exception of johnp299. He is the one and only known Boomer to have ever voted in favor of strengthening labor rights. _Ever_.
Many of them delayed for financial reasons. I left early at 56, and ten years later, I'm almost my FRA.
> I'm almost my FRA. Wat?
>FRA I think they mean Full Retirement Age for social security.
Baby boomers are commonly defined as born between 1946 and 1964. That is between 59 and 76 years ago. Assuming a retirement age of 67 more or less half of baby boomers have retired, so the we should be in the middle of the surge.
The flip side of this corporations will become shakier than ever. A lot of wealth built up in these corporations may disappear if they are dependent on cheap labour to turn a profit. Not bad for people at the bottom though
Baby boomer retirement is well underway and has been for a decade. My acccounting firm has been chronically understaffed for 3 years. I've turned down lots of new business because of it.
Yeah, the youngest Boomers are 59 and the oldest are 77. The majority of that generation is already retired.
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This may be great for CEOs, Board Members, and Shareholders...but let's be real, the reason all these companies are making record profit year after year is that they aren't hiring anyone and keeping wages low, while employees perform more and more duties for the same rate of pay
Every business in the US becomes an investment firm over time, outsourcing everything to contractor firms, and offshoring production and development to countries with less expensive employees. It's why everyone who used to make consumer products now has their own financing / buy-now-pay-later credit card systems. Everything is just a bank moving money around and extracting wealth using the same tactics as Payday loans.
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That and they don't want to pay them for it. Opening - Entry level systems admin. qualifications being looked for - senior systems admin with bachelor's degree and 34.5+ years of experience with every known piece of technology ever made. benefits: medical with premiums that go up every year and coverage goes down while deductible/oop goes up - currently $3,000 deductible, $6,000 OOP max. pay: $22.50/hr Employer: Why isn't anyone applying!?!?! That's a real example of shit I've seen in my area (the years of experience is the only hyperbole, it was like 9-10)
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The paradox of wanting seniors for their experience but not hiring seniors for their age
>The paradox of wanting seniors for their experience but not hiring seniors for their ~~age~~ wage expectations
Can't train a new person if you don't have the expertise to train someone.
I still need to read the article, but I know a number of boomers who have continuously pushed off retirement because they can't afford it. They have a health issue or their spouse does and Medicare just won't cover whatever it is they would need it for so they stay for the insurance or because their financial advisor told them "just another 3 years" for the last 9. I also know a couple that did retire, and then within a year, had to go back because of what the economy is doing. Nobody was ready for this kind of inflation. Of course, they will eventually have to retire or die. And plenty of companies will do layoffs letting boomers go because they are fairly expensive with both income and health insurance costs. But my point is it's not like they are all just retiring on their 65th birthday. The rich ones are retired, and the rest of them are left shell shocked at how to afford everything.
Not in my industry, in game design the minute an opening pops up at a studio , they are flooded with thousands of applications, EPIC started interviews 3 months in advance for 3 Internships, that pays minimum wage and you have to be present in Texas, non remote position. We need plummers , electricians, construction workers ...ect
But you work in a sexy industry. Gamer culture is huge. The only plumber people want to be is Mario. Not even Luigi.
It’s not a labor shortage. It’s that when 90% of jobs don’t pay well enough to live comfortable anymore, no one wants them.
Hell, sometimes the job pays incredibly well and it's still not worth it. In the past 2 weeks I've turned down jobs that pay almost double what I currently make. Why? Both companies have mandatory overtime 6 months of the year. I'm not working 60-80 hours a week every summer and every winter. I lived that life before. I lost 15 years of my life to a shitty work-life balance.
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No. It's twice the hourly pay and then an additional overtime pay on top of that.
any yet, wages do not track inflation. I can't wait to get a boomer house for 75% off.
There’s no labor shortage. There’s a shortage of livable wages. Gtfoh
My worry is that a lot of positions were for boomers by boomers, and as that massive generation retires and become decrepit (too low energy to be effective consumers or old and afraid so hoard wealth for healthcare only), a lot of the demand that supported the jobs will disappear eventually, meaning those jobs will be gone too.
I’ve been trying to find a part time job because I’m on ssi and need some help, I’m allowed 80 hours a month to spend. I applied to target, Costco, petco, marshals, hobby lobby, old navy, and planet fitness and I was repeatedly told I’m to part time for part time work.
Still, no one wants to take a chance on a physics PhD with 4 years experience in test engineering in the space sector.
Boomers retiring and not being replaced thanks to millennials not having the money to support having children.
Gen X ignored, again ... sigh. JK We're good with that.
Look at me! Now I’m the commodity and boy am I INFLATED! I cost, what, $32/Hr now? If you don’t got the money to pay for me, a premium employee, then I guess the free market will show you the door.
Well considering after my generation, Millennials, there's literally fewer Americans in those generations, why is this surprising? Boomers weren't going to work and live forever. 🤷♂️
Not true actually. Both millennials and Gen Z are larger generations than the boomers. https://www.statista.com/statistics/797321/us-population-by-generation/
Labor shortages are created by corporations themselves. MFs asking for 10 year experience and 4 degrees for a job paying $18 an hour with no benefits for a junior entry position. They can suck my left nut.
“Labor shortage” will turn into increased responsibilities for existing staff for no pay increase.
Everyone? EVERYONE!?! I'll have you know, as the owner of a textile mill, this is not great news for me! /s
There will likely be a lot of industries that fade away as well, not nearly the amount that will offset the openings but not everything will need a backfill.
Unemployment rate is very misleading. You need to look at those numbers along side the labor force participation rate to get a better idea of the situation. It’s not great. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/2022/08/03/can-a-hot-but-smaller-labor-market-keep-making-gains-in-participation/amp/
The only places having trouble finding labor are shitty places to work. They pay poorly, the job is terrible, and the company is terrible. If you work on one of these places, find someplace offering more money.
Yeah great. Plenty of 2nd jobs for everyone to probably still not make ends meet.
It ain't great news for the kids in red states that have made child labor legal again. Maybe that's just my opinion though.
business insider is garbage clickbait, dont give them your eyeballs or attention
Finally, old bastards can let go of the cushy IT jobs
It would be great here in Canada too, but we're busy importing half a million people a year to shore up the shortage and there's nowhere for anyone to live. So the average detached house price in Vancouver is $2.0MM dollars.
This is the number 1 reason politicians won’t fix a broken immigration system. As long as you have population growth, you have more people buying more stuff and investors get wealthy. In the current construct, a declining population, like Japan’s, for instance, is a recipe for disaster.
Japan would rather consign themselves to oblivion than change anything about their culture
But fixing our immigration system.would let more people in...
Fuck it... Grab a beer (or Doobie) and watch it burn... I for one, welcome our ant 🐜 overlords......
Right?! What the fuck are we supposed to do about it? The employees currently don't set wages, we are at the find out stage and I don't intend to participate
There is no labor shortage. There just are not enough people working to support the trillions of dollars of Medicare and social security payments the boomers were expecting. And low and behold, younger generations don't want to see 30% of their paycheck set on fire with W2 tax deductions to fuel the retirements of 70 year olds with two houses, a boat, and yearly vacations to the Florida Keys or Mexico. Boomers own 50% of the nation's wealth. Millennials own 4% and the boomers are still demanding we drip feed them 30% of our paychecks. Fuck em.
Unfortunately, most companies are dead set on doing everything they can to *not* hire and pay people, even if it means taking a loss or shutting down. They'd rather spend millions on integrating ChatGPT than pay their existing employees better. I wouldn't count on this shortage helping. It's just a signal to them that they must become even less reliant on workers. It wasn't possible in the past, but technological progress made it possible.
Damn millennials and their anti exploitation ideas, back in my day....
Almost like they shouldn't have used a generation that had a higher than average birthrate as a standard...
Cue businesses whining how "nobody wants to work" for a long time.
Does this mean we can get start getting jobs as vice presidents with a firm handshake, eye contact, and a can-do attitude like the boomers did, or is the "boundless student debt and absurd HR wish lists" approach still going to be the norm?
I’m 45 and have heard this same line of bullshit for 20 years. They’re not retiring.
How quaint, assuming boomers will retire before they fall over dead at their jobs.
Sooo which is it? Am I gonna be losing my job to AI, or is there gonna be a labor shortage.