Piece in the NY Times today about Vermont, which has the oldest population in the US, from which I extract these:
At Lake Champlain Chocolates, the owners take shifts stacking boxes in the warehouse. At Burlington Bagel Bakery, a sign in the window advertises wages starting at $25 an hour. Central Vermont Medical Center is training administrative employees to become nurses. Cabot Creamery is bringing workers from out of state to package its signature blocks of Cheddar cheese. . . .
Vermont’s unemployment rate was 1.9 percent in September, among the lowest in the country, and the labor force is still thousands of people smaller than before the pandemic. Employers are fighting over scarce workers, offering wage increases, signing bonuses and child care subsidies, alongside enticements such as free ski passes. When those tactics fail, many are limiting operating hours and scaling back product offerings.
This is presented as a sort of doomsday demographic scenario, but does that sound like a crisis to you? OMG, companies have to pay a living wage to attract workers!
My own business has already experienced this transition in the form of a severe shortage of archaeological field techs. Our field crews used to be made up mainly of recent graduates with anthropology or history degrees who would work as field techs for a few years, bouncing from company to company and project to project – shovelbumming, it's called – before either moving on to a more lucrative field or going to graduate school to get the master's degree you need to hold a professional position.
But that pipeline is pretty much broken. You may have heard that college students these days are much more career oriented, and it seems that many fewer of them major in anthropology with no idea how they plan to make a living.
Hence, the shortage. Our starting wage has risen from $13.50 an hour to $22.00, with more generous provisions for travel time to projects and the like, and we still have trouble finding people. Like bakeries in Vermont, we're paying good techs $25 an hour. As a result we're scheduling more projects to be done with smaller crews (often two techs) over longer time frames.
The drying up of the field tech pipeline means fewer people getting into archaeology and deciding to get the crucial master's degree, which translates into a growing shortage of junior archaeologists. Their wages have also climbed, and the shortage means that some mid-level jobs that used to be filled by more experienced people are now filled by newly-minted MAs. I had an interesting experience a few years ago when a new state regulator told me she was excited to read the report I had submitted for review "because I've never read a CRM report all the way through before."
I am not discounting the challenges here; there is a lot of stuff in our world that only gets done because we can pay people miserable wages to do it. Taking care of the elderly is the most obvious, and the most likely to become a severe economic and social challenge.
But imagine a world in which no one is economically exploited, because everyone has the leverage to demand a decent wage, and everyone can afford to quit and go elsewhere if their bosses abuse them. To me that isn't a crisis, it's a fantastic opportunity.
But imagine a world in which no one is economically exploited, because everyone has the leverage to demand a decent wage, and everyone can afford to quit and go elsewhere if their bosses abuse them. To me that isn't a crisis, it's a fantastic opportunity.
ReplyDeleteWell, sure - because you're not a corporate executive who expects ludicrously high compensation, nor are you a shareholder who demands ever greater ROI and the impossibility of perpetual growth.
The people making the decisions at the top are all doing very well - corporations keep setting and breaking new all-time profit records, year after year. Companies aren't struggling, but workers are. The fix, of course, is to stop shoveling so much of those record profits into the hands of CEOs and shareholders who contribute virtually nothing of actual value to the company, and instead conduct "profit sharing" in the form of actually paying the workers enough to live well.
But that would mean the corporate executives would have to settle for slightly less ludicrous compensation, and the shareholders would have to settle for slightly less ROI, and when you view the problem from their point of view, it truly does seem like a crisis to these people because any solution where they have to live with less (but still quite vast) riches is completely unacceptable, and must be avoided at all costs.
As you yourself noted, companies will literally just make do with fewer workers, scale back production, and increase time tables, rather than actually pay people what they're worth (and what would still allow the people at the top to live in absurd riches).
It is a severe case of that old cultural sickness: arrogance. And it will take people at the top being humbled for anything to change. But the problem is, they have built a system in which they are insulated from the very harm their own decisions create - when a company loses money, it gets taken from the people at the bottom first (in the same way that when a company makes money, it gets given to the people at the top first).
Only once they have squeezed every drop of blood they can from the stone, and there's nothing else left to take from the bottom, will they finally start to feel the pain themselves at the top. And by then, when it's impossible for them to force others to sacrifice on their behalf anymore, it's usually too late to fix the problems and companies come tumbling down in pieces - and they often drag the economy down with them.
Of course, that's when the government steps in, declares a company "too big to fail", and bails out all the executives and shareholders while throwing the actual workers to the wolves. And the cycle simply repeats, and nothing ever changes.