What’s behind the US labour shortage? | The Bottom Line

hi i'm steve clements and i have questions why are so many americans refusing to go back to their old jobs and this is creating a labor crisis let's get to the bottom line of all the side effects of the coronavirus pandemic this may be the one that affects the economy most millions of american workers are staying away from the service jobs that actually make america run that's retail stores and restaurants truck drivers you name it across the board businesses say they're desperately looking for new employees and there are millions and millions of job openings but folks just aren't interested in some places you can get fifty dollars that's a lot just for showing up for a job interview and others you get a thousand dollar signing bonus fast food and gas stations are offering double the national minimum wage in some places but there still aren't enough takers economists say this is really slowing down america's economic recovery from the pandemic and it's driving up inflation meaning the cost of everything is going up but why are people reassessing their lives after the global pandemic and deciding that staying at home with their family or just retiring is more important than their old job or are they happier to stay at home and receive an unemployment check rather than work as many republican governors are saying today we're talking to melissa swift the global leader for workforce transformation at the management consultant firm corn ferry and jeremy robbins the executive director of the research and lobbying group new american economy thanks to both of you for joining us today let me just start out and ask melissa right now we have this picture it's very interesting after talking for so long about those workers who were displaced during this pandemic we're now getting to the other side of this and we're seeing a lot of folks not lining up to take those jobs back is that because they're feeling a change in work life and work quality life quality is needed or is it a function of you know they've been receiving a lot of bailout money um and they they're making they're doing better you know not working than working well it's always going to be a balance right it's going to be how am i rewarded for doing this job versus what's in this job right so it's very easy to look at the kind of how am i rewarded right so that's the unemployment benefits that's do we need to pay folks more etc etc but the more interesting side is what's in this job and i think through the pandemic what's in different jobs has changed so as a for instance if i'm a restaurant worker and i now feel like i might you know i'm in a jurisdiction where not a lot of people are vaccinated right i feel like i might still get exposed that uh that calculus changes how i feel about my job similarly if i'm a retail worker i'm having to argue with people about wearing masks that's emotional labor and in some cases folks have been physically endangered and that changes how i think about my job again so that those scales where you balance what's in my job versus what i get paid for it really do change and then there's some of the intangibles you know if i'm going into a workplace where there are fewer people right and i'm not getting that camaraderie that sits on one side of the scales too and i think that's what's interesting is it's easy to kind of look at the compensation aspect but the job side is kind of where the action is i think one of the other uh questions here i mean i've been thinking about a long time now we've come out of four years of a presidential administration i think i'm probably understating uh their ambivalence about immigration into this country but as we have looked at a lot of the jobs that that are not being built oftentimes there's a mix of you know young people college students but we also have a lot of immigrants who want to come this country and these are a lot of the jobs that they do you know on farms and in you know labor and in restaurants and service jobs and so i i love to get a sense of whether or not the you know we we've walked into something that the pandemic began to show guess what we really need immigrants yeah that's a great point steve i mean i think one thing that became very clear in the pandemic was this idea of the essential worker and who were the people that were fundamentally important to getting our economy to work and to keeping us safe and to keeping food on our plates and keeping goods moving and and long before the pandemic we knew we had a skills mismatch right there have been if you look at survey after survey from the bureau of labor statistics there are always five six million jobs that we can't fill because the skills that we need are different than the skills that americans have in the latest survey it's over 9 million jobs 9.3 million jobs as of april that's up a million over the month before because we simply don't have the skills we need where they are um the one thing that america has that's going to make us rebound from this pandemic better than just about any other country though is that we have really robust immigration we have people who are coming here to work with a different set of skills who are more mobile who are more willing to work uh tough jobs when they first get here partly by necessity partly by the fact that we're selecting for people who want to work and that's a huge benefit but as you said over the last four years when there's been a real crackdown on immigration some of that has slowed so at the same time that americans are becoming less mobile this great competitive advantage that we have of having people come in and work and regenerate the economy has slowed in a really dramatic fashion we have right now and tell our audience over nine million unfilled jobs this is a record high in the united states as you look at i also know i mean i know people on all sides of this equation i know a lot of people who say you know we've now gone digital they have a very different kind of social contract they want with their employers they may not have been able to you know the absence of child care or you know schools being shut down to sort of manage that home life but they love their time with their children some do uh and and and others are kind of looking at that whole question of how can they negotiate a new deal do you think we're going to see a lot more of new deal negotiating melissa absolutely i mean we are certainly when you get a dramatic labor shortage right that really empowers the individual worker and i think we're going to see some interesting push pull over what work should look like going forward the reality is that the kind of traditional office construct didn't serve everybody well right it served a certain subset of the population pretty well but if you're let's say a working mother who has to you know sneak out early right to take care of your kids if you're the only person of color in your office and you don't feel included there's a whole kind of bunch of ways that the traditional construct just wasn't working and so now with some actual kind of power on the worker side because of these shortages i think we're definitely going to see a renegotiation i think what's interesting is that the rhetoric at ceo level is so different than what you see in survey after survey at worker level and i'm fascinated to see how that plays out to be honest if you were to give advice to an employer i have a friend who has about 90 employees here in washington dc and and she was saying she's beginning to talk to her people about coming back to the office and working but what they really want and she kind of you know sarcastically smiled she said you know they want to have mondays and fridays at home which of course you know makes nice four day weekends if you're gonna so i guess what if you were to advise a a a a an employer would you would you push them to say hey give them tuesdays and wednesdays or wednesdays and thursdays as opposed to trying to work time into uh free time it's certainly what we're seeing i mean where we're seeing there's a fulcrum point around two to three days a week in the office and generally those days are not monday and friday but you know i think that the bigger picture is also the flexibility and understanding who really needs to be in the office right does your work demand that you be in the office and looking at some of the interdependencies you know okay i say my group has to be in but this other group that we work with all the time they're not in right so does my group have to be in and and really pressing on the work not just kind of trying to snap back to the prior reality which we're not living in anymore the one the one thing i'd add to that quickly is just to we need to experiment i mean i think one thing we're learning even our own organization uh is that there are huge benefits to working at home i mean i i'm doing this for my children's play room right now right and i have those extra commuting hours to to do more work get more things done and and take care of life um but they're also a huge thing we lose right where how do we have the the office cooler conversation where ideas are generating if you're not going out for lunch when your team is seeing each other only in meetings and not in these other organic conversations and i think it's what we're struggling with and the businesses we work are struggling with is how do you do both how do you have a balance that doesn't assume that when people are working from home they're not being productive because in a lot of ways i think what this year has shown is that people can be more productive working from home in some ways but how do you also facilitate all the things that happens when you bring people together and i think that's one of the certainly in the in the idea generative and sort of the innovation economy uh that's where so much of the of the sauce happens jeremy thank you for that you know one of the other things i've been trying to think about is the mathematics of this so about two and a half million jobs in america in the restaurant sector wiped out gone you know who knows if they'll come back but but right now they're gone another two and a half million people have chosen to retire take retirement bennett's benefits and move on and you know travel hang out with their grandchildren you know do all other things and i think you know when you kind of begin looking at it was interesting that we just had a debate recently about what the national minimum wage should be and that national minimum wage today is 7.25 the debate was whether we take it up to 15 or 11 well i've been driving across a lot of western states that have been very opposed to raising the minimum wage uh and guess what dunkin donuts 15 an hour offered sheets auto auto centers and gas stations and convenience stores 15 and 50 cents an hour these are big numbers to people who previously were working at fast food joints for seven dollars and 25 cents an hour so is that debate about the minimum wage now moot is it silly uh given the fact that the that the market prices is now double that it's a great question i mean i think certainly people are going to show that that you can pay a higher wage and still run businesses but you're gonna see some businesses that will struggle with that i think one of the really interesting debates when you look at those jobs is not even those jobs themselves but the broader jobs within those industries when you look at the you mentioned nine million jobs open in april well when you look at the jobs where the fastest increase in those jobs in that in that journal of uh labor statistics report the biggest growth was in accommodation restaurants hospitality so the industries that had been the hardest hit but that are now coming back and especially when you look at the in within those industries there's some really good college educated jobs too but those aren't going to exist if you can't fill uh the really hard jobs the night and weekend jobs the cleaning jobs the front of the front of store jobs and so those are ones where i think certainly you're going to see sort of a rejiggering of like what do we have to pay what do we have to do to get workers how do we have to change the jobs and and restructure them in a way that works for all workers let me ask you just go ahead go ahead melissa no i was going to say just to jump in on that point which i think is a fantastic one uh this idea that jobs are changing and work is changing i think this was happening under the surface for a while and what we got out of covid was an acceleration that people really do want their work to be structured differently and now that we have the opportunity to do it right let's let's keep going with it and that there is a belief that people want to do good jobs and at the same time you also had a large population that was kind of pent up to retire but working longer and longer and you're getting that population saying okay i am going to pull the trigger on retirement thus pulling what was kind of artificially inflated supply of talent out of the market and so really part of what happened was just there were a bunch of things that were kind of creeping up on happening and then they happened all at once well i mean let me just talk to you both let me listen to you first and then we'll just add i find it very ironic at some level both of you are thinking about workforce transformation about what it takes uh in a new economy and i have to tell you before covet hit before we made this big jump from really what was still an analog world to a digital world we were talking about digital skills we were talking about the coming disruptive technologies that were going to you know transform work transform the workplace and a lot of people were going to be put out of work if they didn't keep up with that level of skills that we were going to have automated trucks uh autonomous vehicles and you know we would see this uber driver force and truck force but if you go out right now truck drivers get such a premium in getting trained and out there it is a it is a great time if you're a truck driver but i'm just sort of interested are we in a in a kind of a moment uh uh an oasis for a certain kind of low-skilled job that all of a sudden we need and will these other digital transformation issues come back because that's what i find interesting is we're not talking about those high-end high-skilled jobs we're talking about regular folks that may be not educated and and up to the datas in terms of you know digital skill sets melissa well i think part of what's interesting is that we've thought about those jobs in terms of binaries right that one day there's a human driving a truck and then the next day right there's a truck driving a truck and what's actually happened is the pace of automation is kind of crept up so the sort of computerized component of being a truck driver is much greater than it used to be right it's a it's a continuum not kind of a fall off a cliff and i think that's part of what's interesting you know working in a starbucks right there are far more automated computerized components than there used to be but that barista job isn't gone yet and i think that's the the trend that we're gonna see and the interesting thing about a lot of these jobs that we've gotten very fixated on like let's say you know building software right a lot of software building is gonna get automated in the next decade and what we think of as those great jobs that folks are supposed to go into those jobs are actually going to go away so i think it's kind of interesting to then think about okay automation comes in human jobs change but then other humans can kind of come in i think what we see when jobs get automated is that it also creates space for kind of more emotional labor empathic labor you know the pieces that only humans can do and i think it'll be very interesting to see what jobs get created in that part of the economy jeremy say what you like but i want to know are we going to have a future where we can have emotional and empathic robots i'm sure we will i mean i think we can't even imagine what's coming and i think that's sort of the point i wanted to make because i think melissa's point is fabulous but we're really bad at predicting what's going to happen with automation right we've had automation uh for 30 years has been accelerating in a real way and it's like oh it's gonna take this job and it is i mean there are eight million truck drivers who are gonna there are gonna be self-driving trucks and and all the workers and you think about amazon factory in the hundreds of thousands or millions of people that are employed there that will be robotic and those people those jobs will be replaced but but what will come next right i mean before the recession we were at four percent unemployment after 30 years of automation and so you think about the questions not so much i think it is where will there be enough jobs but will they be good jobs and for people especially people who are not going to be who don't have the the education level or ability to be part of their the creative economy which i think is going to reap a lot of the spoils of this automation for the jobs that exist especially the service level jobs which there will be many of are they going to be jobs so you can make a living wage are they going to be jobs that are safe and that you can support your family and so i think those are going to be the questions that are going to dominate far more than will there be jobs at all you know i i thank you for that i want to just you know be very careful here about one thing because i think we've been focusing on on on those who haven't gotten i mean there are more than 10 million people who have gone back to work who have you know taken up this load in their back you know in these service jobs and doing things so so we see that we're running a deficit but also those people in deficit i i just want to give them a chance to you know to be thought about for a moment because you know i was reading yesterday um about a family um who at home they're they both have elder care um this lady also has a son um with with uh who is in remission from cancer and so there's still a fear out there uh as we see variants uh circling around in in you know from covet in the united states and this whole question about the fragility of health the fragility of life i just want to tell our audience that's also a legitimate part of this question is it not melissa yeah absolutely absolutely and i think probably one of the most positive things to come out of kovid is a different way of thinking about kind of what health and safety on the job means right you know it's not just i'm not going to fall off a ladder and break my neck right there's a much broader definition and it extends to things like exposure to disease it extends to things like burnout you know we've seen some really interesting data recently from the world health organization about burnout literally killing people uh very very timely after you know what a lot of people's you know work-life balance looked like during covid and i think we're going to think about those themes more expansively and and in more depth and you know what does it mean to be a frontline worker constantly exposed to you know sort of negative emotional impacts in your job or things like that jeremy when you kind of look at this question of people where they are and meeting them where they are as we think about the new american economy i guess another dimension i mean you know i'm trying to kind of get my head around what does the modern worker social contract look like you know is it going back down in my case in washington dc on k street where we have lots of new buildings and i don't think they're going to be that full for a while you know how do we kind of bring together something that's fair to all sides and also nimble and i guess part of the question i have for you when you think about the new american economy we also had a lot of gig workers we had workers that were not going back for full-time work and they were you know and we we also have i'll just mention this fascinating study called the venture forward study which godaddy and the university of iowa ucla anderson school of business and arizona state did that looks there's been an explosion of micro businesses online of people kind of doing their own thing and i kind of applaud all that i sort of think it wow that's a sign of health and breaking away from the traditional you know long-term service at one company do you have any insights into how that evolution is going and what's sped up and and what you're worried about in that yeah it's a great question and i think look disruption is messy but ultimately if you look at the history of america and our economy it's been very good right moments where you had to have something new happen i mean one of the things we're studying now uh is we're looking at the last recession to try and understand who what were the cities that fared well and what were the cities that struggled and what what made them set them apart and one of the things we're seeing because we look at immigration is that the cities that were more welcoming towards immigrants were actually the hardest hit in the last recession after 2008 because they had more of those people that were bringing in new ideas new businesses on the front lines and those are the most vulnerable but also the most responsible for growth and so when they just like in this pandemic when the people who are losing their jobs were the restaurant workers and the small entrepreneurs and people who didn't have the capital to stay going that's what happened there but then when you looked at the recovery the cities that recovered the fastest and ultimately were doing the best were the ones that were investing in bringing in new people and new ideas and people from and they were more dynamic they were more responsive because they had people with different networks different capabilities different interests they were starting new businesses i live in new york and if you look at new york what happened and there were closed businesses all throughout 2008 just as there are now but the neighborhoods that responded the fastest were bay ridge in brooklyn and jackson heights in queens where you'd have largely immigrants but but people volunteered coming in starting new mom-and-pop shops new main street businesses and so i think that's one recipe is that we have to say look there are going to be people who are going to be displaced and we need to invest really heavily in them it can't just be about what are the jobs of tomorrow we should also be investing in creating jobs for the skills we have today but we can't lose sight of the fact that it is going to be a new economy and we do want to experiment and we do want to invest in entrepreneurs and we do want to invest in in trying to upskill people and make sure that they have jobs that work for them melissa you were nodding are you you want to comment yeah absolutely i i everything you're saying really resonates i mean i think of this as if you look at graphs of who was in what sector of the economy around 1900 right you see the agrarian graph coming down pretty dramatically and services and manufacturing coming up you know pretty dramatically and they're kind of crossing at one point i think we're at another point like that to be honest where you know again kovitz speeded it up but there is just a lot of transition between sectors of the economy and to the point that was just made the whole economy isn't it's not all sort of industrial right there are artisanal parts of the economy and during those transition moments those parts can be really vibrant and we shouldn't discount the impact or you know kind of not look at how we care for that part of the economy right we have about a minute left so really quickly i'm going to get some free consulting advice from both of you corn face so don't charge don't send me a bill but real quick the federal reserve of san francisco has said that one in seven americans that 300 a week extra unemployment uh insurance that they get would not stop them from going to get a job so it's a small portion for which that matters according to the survey 26 republican governors have squeezed off those benefits another set of governors are keeping them placed until september do you think that those checks make a difference right now in the calculus is the worker not going back because that worker is just i'm having a good time getting unemployment checks um just real quick melissa and jeremy i'll give jeremy the last word yeah i don't i don't think those checks are making a major difference i think again there are a lot of other needs that work fills for people and so if people are not coming back it's because there's not the right work not because that 300 on the margin makes a difference and i think it's important to keep that in place to support the folks that really are still teetering about jeremy i'm going to give you a real fast quick word last word yeah i don't have the expertise to disagree or agree but i will say unfortunately we're going to get a real experiment where you're going to see and it's going to at the cost of a lot of pain for people you're going to see how people are faring but i certainly think at this moment we need to invest in workers and we need to invest in making sure that people are able to stay afloat love this conversation really appreciate melissa swift workforce transformation consultant at not and it can be available is it any wonder that folks are rethinking their lives and their options nowadays well i don't think so this was happening even before the pandemic and was one of the major drivers of immigration both legal and illegal into the united states folks at the border were trying to get into america well they want those jobs and a lot of the folks already here well they don't want those jobs so for workers in low paying jobs like retail and fast food or even in some higher paying jobs like teachers and office workers many people just burn out during the pandemic and now they're looking for something different so don't be surprised if soon you drop by a department store or a fast food window and a robot says here's your order the algorithms are coming and that's the bottom line [Music]

Channel: Al Jazeera English

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Keywords: What’s behind the US labour shortage?, covid 19, coronavirus, corona, labor shortage 2021, labor shortage, labor shortage in US, labour shortage, labour shortage usa, labour shortage us, united states, united states of America, Al Jazeera live, al Jazeera, al Jazeera English, al Jazeera news, the bottom line, bottom line

Id: sJ6M4cIPofE

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021