If your management philosophy is that you are doing potential workers a favor by offering them a job and that they should be grateful when they learn that whatever it is you are offering them isn’t even more disappointing than they might have expected it to be—yeah, you’re going to experience a “labor shortage.” Because you’re a terrible employer. […]
Higher wages would eat into some corporate profits, to be sure. Have you had a look at the corporate profit chart lately? It looks like my blood pressure graph after two Red Bulls. Corporate profits at last reading were more than 40 percent higher than their pre-COVID peak. I don’t want to be simple-minded about this—a lot of those profits are being driven by the businesses that aren’t complaining about a labor shortage, while many of the firms struggling to attract workers are not hugely profitable—but there’s an awful lot of money sloshing around in the profit bucket, and we have many examples of highly profitable high-growth businesses paying considerable wages for jobs that aren’t reserved for STEM graduates and artificial intelligence specialists and the like. Every C-suite dork walking the face of God’s green Earth says something like, “Our people are our most important asset,” but a little bit of scrutiny shows that to be, in a lot of cases, pure unadulterated corporate-speak bulls—t.