Tag Archives: Labor shortage

After Slashing 33% of Workers in 6 Years, Railroads Complain about Labor Shortages, amid Uproar over Slow Shipments, by Wolf Richter

Posted on July 23, 2021 | 1 comment

Sometimes its nice to have a few extra workers; you never know when you’re going to need them. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

“No way did I realize how difficult it was going to be to try and get people to come to work these days”: CEO of CSX.

So there are few hiccups in the US economy right now. James Foote, the chief executive of CSX, one of the largest railroads in the US, put it this way during the earnings call yesterday (transcript by Seeking Alpha):

“I’ve never seen any kind of a thing like this in the transportation environment in my entire career where everything seems to be going sideways at the same time,” he said.

“In January when I got on this [earnings] call, I said we were hiring because we anticipated growth. I fully expected that by now we would have about 500 new T&E [train and engine] employees on the property,” he said. “No way did I or anybody else in the last six months realize how difficult it was going to be to try and get people to come to work these days.”

“It’s an enormous challenge for us to go out and find people that want to be conductors on the railroad, just like it’s hard to find people that want to be baristas or anything else, it’s very, very difficult,” he said.

“Nor did we anticipate that a lot of the people were going to decide they didn’t want to work anymore. So attrition was much higher in the first half of the year than what we had expected,” he said.

“So even though we brought on 200 new employees, we fell short of where we thought we would be by now….”

Railroads are grappling with a weird phenomenon that is a combination of “labor shortages” and 12.6 million people still claiming some form of unemployment compensation, amid stimulus-fueled demand.

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Beware the Rise of Scamerica, by Robert E. Wright

Posted on May 21, 2021 | 1 comment

Counterintuitively to those who think of government as some sort of font of morality, the more the government, the more the scams. From Robert E. Wright at aier.org:

Scams, frauds, flim flams, and grifts are nothing new to America. In fact, confidence games were old hat when Clifton Wooldridge published his 1906 classic, The Grafters of America: Who They Are and How They Work, which describes common cons in fin de siecle Chicago. The recent death of notorious investment scamster Bernie Madoff should remind Americans that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

As America descends into policy disarray, the scamming of others is increasing. Wire fraud is rampant, as is the impersonation of government workers, apparently because Americans now expect government officials to accost them for quick cash at least occasionally. I focus here on a much more insidious type of scam that also seems to be on the rise, something that I will politely refer to as “substandard work,” but that in informal adult conversation usually goes by a fecal four-letter word followed by “job.”

Much of the substandard work being conducted across the country right now ultimately is the government’s fault, specifically a set of policies seemingly deliberately designed to induce Americans not to work: extra unemployment pay; major school systems remaining virtual until fall; bizarre summer camp masking requirements. The first entices lower income people to stay out of the labor market and the latter two make parents think twice, or thrice, about returning to work.

As a result, many usually reliable businesses cannot find any workers, much less good ones. Robin Jones, a regional manager for a major fast food chain in the Upper Midwest, recently told me that April and May of this year have been the tightest labor market he can remember in his 43-year restaurant career, which includes stints in Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. His back is giving out because his desk job has turned into a role as a stopgap line worker in the cheap taco wars. While he does what he can, he is only one man. The extreme dearth of workers means much longer wait times than usual and substandard service overall.

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Doug Casey on the Labor Shortage and Other Disturbing Distortions in the Economy

Posted on May 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

No good can come from paying people not to work. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

Labor shortage

International Man: According to the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report, only 266,000 new jobs were created in April—well below the one million new jobs that was expected.

At the same time, American businesses are desperately seeking to fill job openings which they can’t fill. A survey by the National Federation of Independent Business found that 44% of small businesses had jobs they couldn’t fill, which is a record high.

What’s going on with these seemingly contradictory trends?

Doug Casey: First of all, I don’t trust the government’s statistics. Some are surely better than others, but especially when we’re looking at monetary and economic numbers, it’s increasingly apparent that the US government’s statistics are only marginally more reliable than those of the Argentine government at this point. As the US is increasingly politicized, they’ll deteriorate further, fudged and adjusted for propaganda purposes.

Eventually, they’ll approach the inaccuracy of those in the old Soviet Union. It’s understandable, I suppose, because people believe in, and love to quote, that old saw of Franklin Roosevelt’s: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It’s nonsense, of course; you can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

The government likes to publish happy, optimistic numbers for lots of reasons. A belief that economic health is based on psychological smiley faces is prominent among them. Unfortunately, optimism can blow away as easily as a pile of feathers in a hurricane.

That said, there are huge distortions that have been cranked into the economy because of the ongoing COVID hysteria, compounded by the government’s reaction to it. It appears there are over 16 million workers collecting unemployment bennies, while there are about 8.5 million job openings, 13% more than in the before times. How is that possible? Lots of fast-food chains are paying $15 an hour, plus recruiting bonuses—and that’s for unskilled labor. There are loads of highly-paid manufacturing and construction jobs going begging. Anyone who wants a job can have one.

There are several reasons for this.

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Biden’s State-Sponsored Labor Shortage, by Greg Orman

Posted on May 15, 2021 | 1 comment

Businesses are crying for workers and the government is paying people not to work. From Greg Orman at realclearpolitics.com:

Biden's State-Sponsored Labor Shortage

Huh)

President Biden spoke at the White House earlier this week to address an unsettling national trend – millions of jobs going unfilled in an economy still struggling to right itself. The president couldn’t deny the existence of the paradox: His own administration’s numbers show that millions of Americans are drawing unemployment while millions of jobs are going unfilled. But he and his top economic officials dismissed the most obvious explanation for April’s dismal job numbers – generous unemployment benefits eroding the incentive to work. “We don’t see much evidence of that,” Biden said.

It was a line dutifully echoed by his designee to run the Commerce Department, the Cabinet department tasked with compiling employment numbers. But it’s a disingenuous argument. The Commerce Department, through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, derives employment numbers by compiling two surveys of employment – one completed by roughly 144,000 employers and another completed by approximately 54,000 American citizens. Neither of these surveys actually ask if an employee has been offered a job and turned it down. And it’s awfully hard to find evidence of something when you’re not actually looking for it.

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The Labor Shortage Is Real, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on October 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

This is an incisive analysis of the labor shortage, from Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Few conventional-media commentators are willing or able to discuss these factors in the labor shortage / declining participation trends.
Is there a labor shortage in the U.S.? Employers are shouting “yes.” Economists keep looking for wage increases as evidence of a labor shortage, and since wage increases are still relatively modest, the argument that there are severe labor shortages in parts of the U.S. is unpersuasive to many conventional economists.
But if we look at “we’re hiring” signs and billboards, it’s clear employers are having trouble filling available positions. Longtime correspondent Harvey D. recently submitted this list of billboards advertising job openings in South Carolina:

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