Early retirement and ageing population causing labour shortages: Lords report

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/175/economic-affairs-committee/news/175197/early-retirement-and-our-ageing-population-are-causing-labour-shortages-says-lords-report/

by monkeydust • 4 years ago

62 191 4 years ago

committees.parliament.uk

okokwhatever• 4 years ago

Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour. Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.

ekianjo• 4 years ago

"some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. salaries dont occur in a vaccuum.

mschuster918• 4 years ago

"some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods.

In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.

mantas8• 4 years ago

If clients ain't willing to pay enough to pay salary workers are willing to work for... Maybe there's no product-market fit and/or business model just does not work?

dotluis• 4 years ago

But people pay for goods using the "some bucks" they earned as salaries.

2000UltraDeluxe2• 4 years ago

If demand is so low that under-paid staff is needed to keep things afloat, is the business even worth the effort from a societal view-point? Or even as a business case?

Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.

danaris• 4 years ago

I don't know if it's as true in the UK, but in the US, companies have been reporting record profits over the past year or so.

This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.

mschuster918• 4 years ago

Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.

For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future.

However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.

sunshinerag• 4 years ago

"redistribute, redistribute" ... note to self. never should start a company that is profitable if it is to be redistributed.

tartoran• 4 years ago

Definitely heading towards neofeudalism.

trashtester4• 4 years ago

I expect it to get easier to tax capital in the current climate where globalization is being reversed by a few notches. Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.

ilammy2• 4 years ago

It is (mathematically) possible for individual people to work fewer hours with the workstation being manned for exactly the same amount of hours. It just requires paying salary to more people and higher administrative overhead. And slowing down creative types of work.

Whether it’s possible for enterprises to suck up the reductions in profit – that’s a different question. For developed societies being all about The Economy.

notacoward• 4 years ago

Yep. One thing I noticed on a recent plane trip (my first since the pandemic began) was that practically all of the food options involved ordering and paying via tablet or online (assisted by QR code). Front staff just had to bring the food, no time spent taking orders or doing the payment dance. I've seen this trend increasing in non-airport settings too, but it seems to have reached an apex there. Also saw a delivery bot trundling along the sidewalk in Madison, so that's a thing too.

mehphp2• 4 years ago

As a customer, I have preferred this when it's an option. My order is wrong less often and I'm not sitting around waiting for a check when I'm ready to leave.

karmakaze• 4 years ago

This and the other news that jobs will be lost to robotics, ML/AI doesn't add up--which is it? It's not like automation was to make up for retirees, it's to reduce costs so if anything we should be glad for retirees not taking jobs.

mantas8• 4 years ago

Raise wages till workers show up? Or costs go up so much that market shrinks and there's no need for new workers...

Free market!

Kipters• 4 years ago

How was the line? Foreigners steal jobs?

riffraff• 4 years ago

I don't mean to defend xenophobic attitudes against immigration, but labor shortage should lead to higher wages, so the argument against immigration that they depress wages would still hold.

nonethewiser3• 4 years ago

That doesn't defend xenophobia in any way. Being against immigration in some scenarios does not mean you're xenophobic.

trashtester4• 4 years ago

Specifically, labor shortages lead to higher salaries for those groups who no longer have to compete with the type of immigrants that used to come, and only if the demand is limited.

But for most other groups, it may lead to a reduction in real salaries, due to price inflation. Fewer carpenters makes housing more expensive, and fewer tech workers can make many businesses (especially those outside core tech that still depend on such workers) more expensive to run.

And for workers in global hubs, one could argue that the concentration in one geographic location (including immigration) has actually lead to higher demand due to the increase in vibrancy and rate of innovation, leading to an increase in salaries.

skippyboxedhero13• 4 years ago

It isn't. You are saying it "should"...wages in the UK are rising 4% slower than inflation, so there is real erosion of wages WHILST there is the biggest labour shortage in the history of the UK.

Just speaking generally, labour tends to be a market in which there is massive govt intervention (this is particularly the case in the UK). The normal rules of economics do not hold.

One very big factor in the UK is universal credit. You can Google this for yourself but the relevance here is that it acts as a wage subsidy for employers, this gets people into work but there is very little incentive to work more hours (despite the govt being able to remove universal credit from people who refuse to work more).

The UK has got read of the persistently high unemployment under left-wing govts of the 2000s but has failed to improve productivity. We employ more people but they are barely producing more on aggregate. Immigration, more women working (universal credit generally supports more women more), it is all coalescing, nothing is working properly.

mantas8• 4 years ago

... by working for much lower wages than locals are willing to work for.

willcipriano2• 4 years ago

Labor shortage is a capital euphemism for "the labor market isn't completely saturated and we are starting to have to return some of the rewards of work to the workers as opposed to the capital side". Personally I wouldn't allow any low skill immigration (happy to import lower priced doctors, etc in areas where costs have gone insane) until the standard of living for the poor increases to a more reasonable level, it has shifted to be far more in favor of capitol over the past 50 years or so.

In before the lump of labor folks wake up, low immigration can't simutainously explain why inflation is high (due to high wages) and also not cause lower wages when you increase it.

Edit: made more clear, added context

nonethewiser3• 4 years ago

It's not so slanted. It just means jobs arent filled. It could be lack of able workers. It could be lack of pay. It could be lack of product market fit. Probably some combination of all. You're reading the rest in.

linuxftw2• 4 years ago

The article explains that the low-paid EU workers are no longer there to fill service sector jobs. Domestic employees won't accept those wages or working conditions.

We can see real time in the UK the effect that mass immigration has on wages: it keeps them way lower than the market rate otherwise.

skippyboxedhero13• 4 years ago

You can already see it. The early 2010s was a period of very high population growth due to immigration, the economy has flatlined. This year has seen the same thing: rather than employ the large number of workless Brits, record visa numbers...no growth.

Btw, something interesting about the UK is that there has been zero growth in the natural population for (I believe) almost three decades. All the growth has been immigration and natural growth from immigrants (who often have significantly higher fertility).

neilwilson• 4 years ago

It causes two effects

- wage rises are suppressed

- labour is used instead of capital investment

Labour should always be in short supply and 'reassuringly expensive'. That way there is an incentive to replace it with machinery - which is where productivity and an improved standard of living comes from.

If a firm wants to use 'foreigners' then they should build the factory where the foreigners live and repatriate the profits. That way social capital is maintained.

We shouldn't judge economic success by how far away from your mum you have to live to get a job.

skippyboxedhero13• 4 years ago

If you look at the NHS, this is clearly happening because training is so expensive here (the govt pay for it). Easier to hire someone from West Africa or East Asia whose training cost £1k than hire someone from the UK who will require, at least, £50k+ for training (and ofc, when Covid hit...some of these people just left).

This is multi-faceted. The rise in health problems is related to the collapse in the NHS. Early retirement was related to the Covid stimmy (and you are seeing people come back). There is a massive issue with training, with how companies hire...but it is also the case that high levels of immigration aren't helping (particularly at the low-skill end, the NLW is £10/hour...how are you supposed to compete with someone who will work for £3/hour cash-in-hand because they have govt-subsidized accommodation and don't pay tax).

I don't see how this gets fixed. If you talk to most Brits they will tell you that H2/21 was the best labour market for workers for years, there was unprecedented job switching...that happened to follow a period when immigration was low, ignoring this kind of stuff because you think immigration is always good (it isn't for the countries that are left with no workers either) is committing the same error that you accuse others of.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

I London cost of living makes any low payed job unlivable. I wonder of the trend is that people start to realize this? Or that it have gotten so much worse compared to 10 years ago.

barry-cotter• 4 years ago

I imagine if you’re willing to live four to a bedroom things get substantially more affordable. There are plenty of people who are willing to do that, though fewer in the legal economy. If building housing was legal that demand would be satisfied by new building but that’s democracy for you. The people get what they want, good and hard.

illini1• 4 years ago

I’m not sure you can treat the lack of affordable housing as an indictment of democracy as an institution. Of course there’s more nuance to the issue, but it’s not as simple as people get what they want.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

Maybe works out when you are in your 20s. But they are part of the problem suppressing wages. Have two friends who did that.

I don't think megacities is the solution. I'd rather have a living rural area.

frankfrankfrank• 4 years ago

It’s why the ruling class keeps importing people from the third world where people have far lower expectations for living standards. In your example of London that manifested itself by the low paying jobs that serve the support the ruling class being filled by people willing to live in multi generational family units and far more people per square footage. It’s not all that different in places like Paris either.

What is really going on OSS that aristocracy and slavery are, and really already have been reconstituted in a different form.

Importing/exploring brown people to serve the will and whims of the ruling class at the expense of the native/ their own population. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s of course exactly the foundations of slavery and aristocracy.

And yes, it has gotten worse because the process by which the ruling class had defrauded and swindled trillions of dollars and euros from the pockets of their own abused populations has not faced any opposition at all worth mentioning, let alone something serious.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

low paying jobs that serve the support the ruling class being filled by people willing to live in multi generational family units

You are making it sound coozzy. I'd say 4-10 unrelated 20-30yo males cramed into an apartment is closer too the truth for The Really Cheap Labour.

taolegal• 4 years ago

It’s why the ruling class keeps importing people from the third world

this is the definition of a conspiracy theory

pyb2• 4 years ago

Weird that we keep hearing that tech is overstaffed, when literally every other sector reports labour shortages.

My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again.

rileymat2• 4 years ago

I have not heard tech was overstaffed.

But it could be generationally different than many industries with a disproportionate number of the workers being younger genX and millennial compared to other industries. So I don’t see it as weird.

mschuster918• 4 years ago

My hunch is that many tech cos will soon realize that they're short-staffed too, and will have to start to hire again.

Tech companies have a staff distribution problem: Meta, Twitter, Google - they all had way too many engineers chasing after the "next big thing" to achieve an early foothold and then expand the massive scale of these companies to utter dominance, while they neglected stuff like content moderation or customer support.

skippyboxedhero13• 4 years ago

This isn't the case in the UK. Large tech companies are still hiring. If you don't have the boom, you don't have the bust.

US tech companies are still massively and ludicrously overstaffed.

72deluxe3• 4 years ago

We can't seem to find competent staff. They're all appallingly bad.

nonethewiser3• 4 years ago

One does not imply the other.

LatteLazy3• 4 years ago

Reminder: there is no such thing as shortage in a free market. The market, in it's infinite wisdom, will supply exactly the right number of jobs/workers. If you want more, you need only raise prices. This was a cold hard fact of reality for decades when jobs were scarce and workers suffered. Now it is a cold hard fact for employers.

frameset• 4 years ago

Hmm, suddenly these employers will doubtless be calling for state intervention.

skippyboxedhero13• 4 years ago

This has already happened.

This year that was coordinated lobbying to increase visa numbers to the UK. The result was that 2022 was the highest level of immigration...ever.

And, of course, this started out with only being "skilled labour" but was quickly expanded to professions earning £20k/year. Productivity has gone nowhere, there are millions either unemployed or under-employed (there is reason to believe that the UK is under-reporting unemployment significantly due to how the welfare system works)...quite simply, whether you believe immigration is bad or good in theory, the supply of labour is massively in excess of demand in the UK.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

Congress is certainly willing to bust strikes in order to keep people from getting sick days. Finally something both sides can agree on! Bipartisanship. As long as it's all about crushing the power of labor.

themitigating2• 4 years ago

Instead of raising prices companies can reduce profit or cut salaries of higher level employees

LatteLazy3• 4 years ago

Sorry, The "price" I was referring to was the price of labour (aka wages), not the end price for the consumer. How the business funds that is up to them and I agree completely about cutting other expenses...

ElfinTrousers4• 4 years ago

Did you just really say "the market in its infinite wisdom" non-ironically? Or did you forget the /s at the end?

mehphp2• 4 years ago

No, you just misunderstood the comment. They are saying that workers are always hit with the "the free market will sort everything out" when workers are suffering but the same concept doesn't seem to apply in a worker's market.

LatteLazy3• 4 years ago

My comment is partly tongue in cheek but also serious.

I don't honestly believe in the infinite wisdom of markets. I like markets. But they're not infinitely wise. That is the peak "/s"

But at the same time, those who live by X can die by X. And since plenty of people were happy with the market's wisdom when it helped them, (like many CEOs, the current governing party in the UK etc), they cannot change course now without being hypocrites...

wrycoder6• 4 years ago

In a truly free market, economy of scale rules, and all workers with non-unique skills will be working at the margin, and so will any smaller businesses that survive.

You can try unions, but then they get greedy and you end up like the US auto industry did fifty years ago.

gumby• 4 years ago

If only there were some agreement or treaty possible in which young workers from neighboring countries could easily (without red tape) come to provide low cost labor, and even allow retirees to easily move to lower cost areas.

dekken_• 4 years ago

If there was already adequate housing for everyone then yeah, cause otherwise you're going to make getting housing harder for the countries poor, just look at the cost of living in Paris

hutzlibu2• 4 years ago

Was there really a housing problem, while the UK was still in the EU?

65103• 4 years ago

Even more radical would be to restore purchase power to a point where one can produce new baby workers domestically.

If you've squeezed the life out of working peoples baby budget you just wont have fresh bodies for your own parasitic class to suck the life out of.

Should we wonder how their empire got this small?

ElfinTrousers4• 4 years ago

There's still smaller. Ideally, I'd like to see it, at most, roughly coterminous with the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

wrycoder6• 4 years ago

One does not simply restore purchasing power.

To do that, the society would have to strip out all the nonproductive parasitic layers that accumulate over time, and then redistribute excess wealth.

Those actors will resist strongly, so good luck with that.

AdrianB13• 4 years ago

It makes no sense for these young workers to come. I know people from Eastern Europe use to come to work in UK because even the low cost labor was enough for them to get some money for back home, but the neighboring countries have a much higher cost of living than Eastern Europe, so it is economically not attractive. Also moving permanently to UK is not attractive for a bunch of reasons, from weather to weird laws. Did you know more people are arrested yearly in UK for posting online on social media than in Iran?

nibbleshifter2• 4 years ago

Did you know more people are arrested yearly in UK for posting online on social media than in Iran?

This isn't exactly true.

The Mal Comms laws are a fucking travesty, but the reporting on them has tended to be wildly inaccurate.

Most incidents of "suspected mal comms" are resolved with what's called "words of advice", followed by no further action.

Words of Advice happens like so: you call Karen a slag on Facebook, Karen reports you to the cops, the cops are obliged to "do something", so a neighborhood officer swings by and let's you know its been reported, don't do it again, no further action is taken.

More serious cases tend to involve an invitation for a voluntary interview, usually resulting in no further action or (rarely) a caution or (even rarer still) the CPS deciding to prosecute.

Voluntary interview is a bit of a misnomer - if you refuse to come in for said interview, there is two possible outcomes. Either it gets no further actioned and binned off, or they now have the option to arrest you for the purposes of an interview.

Most of the time when someone is actually arrested for "malicious communication" its something high profile and/or they already refused that so called "voluntary interview" and/or they have been repeatedly given said words of advice.

Personally I think the UK is a fucking hellscape and a police state, but I find the online commentary about the Malicious Communication laws - especially on primarily American forums - wildly inaccurate.

ominous4• 4 years ago

Alright, let's talk in this way.

You mean a sink of human capital that would in the process destroy the social fabric of the neighboring countries by robbing it of their best, while at the same time give no reason for a country's most profitable companies to feel inclined to raise how much they are willing to pay for labor?

Or you meant a way to ignore that a country does have a way to make young workers and expand towards attracting outside young workers, while ignoring the reasons the local sources of young workers fail?

"socio-political degeneration absorbs and neutralizes a decaying trend of techno-economic advance"?

wow, what a great idea.

time_to_smile2• 4 years ago

I'm so glad to hear that your primary concern around immigration is the impact on other countries.

Good news! It turns out that while your thesis sounds reasonable it is in fact not the case.

Here in the US our two largest immigrant groups are people from Indian and China. It turns out that both of these countries seemed to have benefit greatly from the exchange. While many very talented migrants have chosen to remain in the US, a sizable number of taken the skills and experience they've learned here and brought them back to their home countries.

Not only that but during our period of highest immigration, salaries from those very companies hiring the most migrant workers were some of the highest in the world, much higher than typically seen in, for example, the UK. At the same time we've also seen salaries rise in India and China.

I'm guessing on seeing that your theoretical concerns don't pan out in the real world you'll likely change your stance on the issue. If not that there must be some other logic I'm missing that is guiding your opinions on the topic.

kkfdkerpoe• 4 years ago

Only works as a temporary solution. Eventually you'll run out of wage-slaves even if you hire from the entire planet as young people can't afford having children with those salaries.

What if shareholders were happy with a bit less money, and companies used that money instead to provide a decent wage? Seems more sustainable to me than mass migration of the working poor.

jacooper2• 4 years ago

But who's is going to do this? Who's going to push this change?

They keep getting even more money every year, and they won't stop just for the good of humanity.

bakugo• 4 years ago

Ah yes, lower wages and higher rents, exactly what every country needs right now.

VLM8• 4 years ago

Colonialism with extra steps

StrLght• 4 years ago

Theoretically speaking, labour shortage should affect economy in a way that wages rise to attract more people, right? Why aren't we seeing something like that?

sneak• 4 years ago

We don't have freedom of movement on Earth.

pjc508• 4 years ago

Rising wages cause massive panic about inflation. That causes rate rises in order to reduce demand. Also, wage rises can't be as easily negotiated in the public sector, which is why so many parts of the UK are on strike around now.

VLM8• 4 years ago

I believe the second chapter of the linked report went into considerable detail about how covid had primary and secondary effect in a very small range of industries and otherwise had little long term effect in other industries.

As a primary effect of covid, the public has been scared the public away from the healthcare field, which was collapsing and is now collapsing even faster. Its a good time to get out of healthcare and a bad time to get into healthcare. If they would just hurry up and collapse the system quickly so as to enter the stable rebuilding phase, then they could get workers.

As a secondary effect of covid, massive income instability in hospitality has scared people away from that field. Those jobs are all going to be replaced by apps and service robots or go out of business anyway. Conveniently many ag jobs opened with brexit and that field is doing MUCH better than healthcare or hospitality. Hospitality used to be very low pay, but at least it was extremely reliable. With covid lockdowns that job could go away in a sneeze and they're all being replaced by apps and robots anyway. Hospitality is the new bottom of the barrel job and as such will always have staffing problems going forward until it goes away entirely. A society can function quite well without overpaying someone else to hand you a beer or kebabs to avoid getting it yourself LOL.

nine_zeros2• 4 years ago

Theoretically speaking, labour shortage should affect economy in a way that wages rise to attract more people, right? Why aren't we seeing something like that?

Because attracting more people into the labor market assumes that there are people sitting on the sidelines, waiting for higher wages. The labor force in most western countries is already tapped out, exhausted and cannot do any more work.

lettergram• 4 years ago

Based on my conversations with retirement or near retirement age individuals I know in the US…

Many decided to retire due to:

- fear from covid

- COVID restrictions

- office racism & political ideologues (aka blocked promotions, struggle sessions, etc)

- rejection of vaccine mandates

All the above I’ve seen multiple people (in each bucket) retire for in the past two years. I also know multiple young people who switched roles for the same reason.

One buddy of mine worked in an out patient surgery center on contract (he’d work / sell machines for a fee per-surgery). After a 12-18 months of sparse work he had to switch jobs (and was living on food stamps at this point). I hired him for odd jobs to help him pay the mortgage. He started his own business and is doing okay now ~12 months in.

VLM8• 4 years ago

I've also seen ageism as an issue. "They're not going to hire me anyway, may as well put a positive spin on it and retire".

cbeach• 4 years ago

Automation (particularly of agriculture) should be the focus of national strategy.

God forbid we return to the 20th-century solution of throwing more bodies at the problem (uncontrolled mass immigration), which will only exacerbate the underlying issue as immigrants settle and age.

The reality is that the first waves of immigration from the EU (skilled workers from developed nations) were hugely beneficial for the UK economy. But as the EU expanded into destitute former Soviet states, later waves of immigration were not the same demographic, from an economic point of view.

At some point we have to weigh up the benefits of cheaper fruit and veg, nannies and cleaners versus the cost of providing subsidised housing and wildly expensive public services to immigrant workers on the min wage, who are a net burden on the Treasury. It just doesn't stack up, from the perspective of productive taxpayers.

Housing and public services currently have a crisis of demand, not supply. The Tories increased the NHS budget by £40bn in real terms since 2010, but it's still unable to cope with the weight of demand.

ElfinTrousers4• 4 years ago

The British people have been going around for years now, holding a smoking handgun, trying to figure out how this painful hole in their foot got there.

rcarr• 4 years ago

First off, the retirement age is ludicrous anyway. I believe it is now 67 for men in the UK. The average years of good health in this country is 63, but in some parts of the country is as low as 55 [1]. Who wants to essentially work until they get sick then keel over and die? People are wising up to the fact it’s absolutely ridiculous and getting out and enjoying life while they still can rather than putting more money in the pocket of some shareholders. There is no community solidarity when your supposed leaders have been raking in over 20%+ pay rises for years whilst worker pay has declined in real terms, especially when inflation is now what it is. It’s an absolute disgrace what they are trying to fob off nurses and other public workers with atm. Not to mention the fact that working conditions are dire because some MBA has decided all quality of life metrics are irrelevant and all that matters is the bottom line.

Good on the people who are dropping out. Make the exploiters squirm.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/05/health-gets...

leereeves• 4 years ago

Good on the people who are dropping out

Yeah, I'd like to see an occasional article describing the same facts as an "opportunity abundance" instead of a "labor shortage". Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people?

From a worker's perspective, having lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay seems like a good thing, especially after decades of decreases in real worker pay.

genocidicbunny• 4 years ago

Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people?

Only when it's profitable.

VLM8• 4 years ago

lots of available jobs and the leverage to negotiate for better pay

The market is always portrayed as efficient money-for-time but reality is the market is often based around risk minimization and pounding square pegs into round holes and "proving" there's no one available for our immigration or other government program paperwork.

Plenty of openings are posted with no intention of filling them.

randomdata3• 4 years ago

A shortage occurs when the buyer (in the case of labour, the employer) is prevented from paying more. While there are certain labour segments, healthcare in particular, where government often prevents buyers from paying more, there is no real constraint on the general labour pool in this regard.

This means that the only reason there is a shortage is because labour is choosing to not charge higher rates for their work. When the media/government states that there is a labour shortage they are saying: "Hey workers, charge more already!" If that's not pro-labour, I don't know what is.

BaseballPhysics• 4 years ago

While I agree with you that there are potential upsides, the problem is that this shift has happened so incredibly rapidly that markets and policies haven't had a chance to adapt. The boomer retirement wave has been anticipated for a while, and it was happening pre-COVID, but the pandemic supercharged things.

While I've not personally dug into the numbers, the reporting I've come across suggests decent portion of the inflation we've seen wasn't a result of labour shortages leading to wage spirals and supply shocks.

That inflation then destroys any gains made due to salary increases.

ChuckNorris892• 4 years ago

Isn't anyone in the media or government on the side of working people?

Definitely not. Here in the EU some newspapers published articles saying "the hyper inflation is caused by workers earning too high wages, pushing the prices up. So if we cut down on wage growth, and we cut down on unemployment benefits to force people to take any job, we can solve this"

It's definitely not caused by opportunistic companies and conglomerates that compete on who can raise prices the fastest, seeing massive profits and shareholder returns in this market, especially in the energy sector. /s

lortas• 4 years ago

The ageing population bought up all real estate in the 70s/80s/90s and instituted fierce wage competition by allowing massive immigration.

If they lower the rents, perhaps people feel that it is worth working again.

Supply and demand does not work in the labor market if worker supply is unlimited and 90% of your income goes to rent seekers of various kinds.

monkeydust• 4 years ago

Just a thought, there is technology available today that allows a worker in say in Nigeria to make a bowl of salad for city worker in the UK. Be it a lot slower than a human but perhaps more accurate.

This type of 'teleprescence' technology from what I have seen is evoloving fast, where things cant be fully automated or a human might need to step in, this concept opens up a countries labour market in a whole new way.

Of course the knowedge/service sector has been doing this for over a decade via outsourcing.

bovermyer• 4 years ago

I'm fairly certain that I'll never be able to "retire" in the conventional sense.

It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism. However, I'll probably just have to pivot to a different career at that point.

I'll have savings and investment money to live off of, but probably not enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life until I expire. And everything I'm paying into Social Security will probably end up taken away by the government for some concocted reason or other before I can use it. So, that means I don't get to retire.

mattgreenrocks• 4 years ago

It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism

If this is in reference to programming, somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn.

Personally, I'll probably be working 10-20h a week or so by 60 as consultant. Your retirement burn rate is much, much lower if you have cash coming in, even if it isn't covering all expenses.

ChuckNorris892• 4 years ago

somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn

Don't know how old you are but why do I have the feeling that by the time you're 60 the following could happen:

"The AI tool subscription we have is already trained on the mountains of existing high quality C++ code written by seasoned graybeards such as yourself, so thanks for training it, but sorry sir, your services are no longer required." "Watch this: Hey ChatGPT 9.0, fix this codebase. Done." "What we're looking for is devs experienced in the latest MonkeButt frontend framework as it just came out so there's no trained models for it yet." "Enjoy your early retirement sir" :)

72deluxe3• 4 years ago

The kids are missing out! What are they learning instead?

trashface• 4 years ago

I've seen a few high-profile younger Rust programmers doing C++ work since mozilla laid so many off. I think younger people will do that work going forward, especially if there are too many workers relative to jobs, itself a product of industry "learn to code" marketing. As an older worker now I guess I could do Cobol or something, but that stuff is ancient even for me (I did use it for a week in college).

VLM8• 4 years ago

career

The fact of life of a pyramid shaped employment structure, is almost everyone is forced out eventually anyway, regardless of age.

VLM8• 4 years ago

The link is a report of a report of many reports. I read, well, skimmed, the linked secondary source, although I didn't even examine the primary sources:

Its extremely sector specific. No shortage at all in FIRE or retail, huge shortage in hospitality and healthcare.

Most of the hypothesis in the report seems to boil down to COVID caused everything followed by raw data disproving that. hospitality is extremely low paying but USED to be stable reliable income, but now someone in China sneezes and your income disappears for months, so people will do anything to avoid hospitality as a field. It seems the low end job of choice is agriculture now. As for health care, I suspect that however trendy and cool it is to compliment our brave health care workers by making congratulatory social media posts for karma, very few people want to get involved in that mess. Much like voluntary soldier recruitment after an unpopular war is an uphill battle for awhile.

A truly remarkable number of older people are out of the job market on disability. Cardio trends are flat (edited: slope 0) to declining so its probably not obesity related although the UK is certainly not getting thinner? Mental health is on a flat growth rate (edited, flat line upward slope not slope being zero) of about 2% additional of the population per decade which is starting to add up significantly over time. Fewer students than ever are going to school while working, the market seems too competitive to risk their grades by working and/or student loans make more sense than working. Between those very young and very old ages there is little change.

There is some inevitability to the UK problems, because as per Chapter 3's intro, the current problem is caused by a 2% decline in working age labor force participation rate, which would have happened anyway in a decade due to the 2% increase in mental health disability cases per decade. I mean something like the future is distributed unevenly, and in a sense this is all a straight line extrapolation of more than decades old trends and the UK is economically speaking in 2032 rather than 2022. Everything happening now was going to happen in a couple years, not now. Any surprise about the situation is fake PR.

Several graphs explaining access to health care in the UK is in a long term collapse, 1 in 20 adults are on a waiting list of some sort, etc. The report strongly implies without stating that ongoing collapse of the medical system is not helping old people stay in the workforce.

It seems most of the UKs problems are frozen by divide and conqueror approach; after the health care system completely collapses and is replaced (by what?) the situation will resolve itself, but interests on all sides are too entrenched to fix anything until after it breaks.

anovikov• 4 years ago

TL;DR: for the most part, people don't work because they can. People who saved enough, refuse to work is exploitative, toxic, sweatshop industries like deliveries and catering? Big surprise!

Red_Tarsius• 4 years ago

Where have all the workers gone?
Changes to the structure of migration have had an impact on vacancies, which recently hit record high levels. In recent years many EU workers, who filled lower paid roles (especially in sectors like agriculture and hospitality), have left the UK. In numerical terms, their departure has been counterbalanced by the arrival of non-EU workers, who were granted visas under the new immigration system which prioritises skilled workers. This has contributed to a mismatch within the labour force, accentuating vacancies and labour shortages in certain sectors.

Good for them. I hope whoever filled those lower paid roles found a better life elsewhere. I can't stand the false equivalency between immigration and labour shortage. I live in Italy and our media is always sharing sob stories from tycoons who "just can't find hard-working employees anymore". The issue is that the very foundation of our economy is built on masses of disenfranchised serfs forced to e.g. pick veggies for 3€/h. but instead of questioning the dehumanizing working conditions of blue-collar jobs, the real problem is always finding more suckers who have no other choice.

novok• 4 years ago

Labor shortage = We don't want to pay market price.

r00fus• 4 years ago

Only reference to COVID is that people are making lifestyle changes due to COVID. No mention of excess mortality or its impact to the labor market.

Amazing. UK Gov has moved on from COVID deaths.

Early retirement and ageing population causing labour shortages: Lords report

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