Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

Re:Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone? by RobertKerans on Saturday July 31, 2021 @11:47AM (#28019142)

> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

I get why you've said this, but I'm not sure this kind of flippant remark is helpful -- what exactly isn't rocket science? Is it the actual act of training a truck driver? Is it the act of writing down the things needed to get more truck drivers?

Actual process is non-trivial, expensive (you need to persuade people to leave their families), time consuming and involves a chain of other non-trivial time-consuming tasks that currently doesn't really exist (or is at least regionally bottlenecked).

Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

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Re:Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone? by lovich on Saturday July 31, 2021 @08:14PM (#28022572)

> Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

Isn’t the whole idea behind the benefit a free/freeish market provides that it is the most efficient system for allocating resources?

Mind you efficient != resilient

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Re:Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone? by RobertKerans on Sunday August 01, 2021 @11:11AM (#28026816)

I'm slightly leery of that. But to be fair to the markets here, gov policy + protracted negotiations + lack of concrete information + conflicting guidelines surely made it impossible for a market to actually function properly.

(to be fair to the gov, not sure how they could have operated differently without advising everything the remain side was warning against. Which would have worked I guess, but would have also been bizarre and probably tanked the economy [more])

So based in that, how can it efficiently allocate resources? Given time, sure, maybe in theory. Which is great unless you're a. a business that has actual costs now or b. a real person that needs to eat and pay rent now.

With above in mind, I don't think it's about resilience. Maybe that ultra-simplified answer works! But it seems a pat free market 101 answer -- ignore the context, market will fix it.

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