“MIGRATION to affluent countries is at record highs,” The Wall Street Journal reported in May, “and some nations short of workers are overcoming political opposition to open their borders even wider, hoping to fill jobs and ease inflation. Government actions to attract foreign nationals for skilled and unskilled jobs have spread from Germany to Japan and include countries with longtime immigration restrictions and some with a populist antipathy to streams of foreign workers.”
The U.S., however, “remains an outlier. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have arrived through back channels, but the country isn’t openly welcoming more legal workers, despite the tight labor market. That hesitancy carries economic costs, including persistent worker shortages and wage inflation, according to economists and some U.S. officials.”
Last month, Newsweek reported that “America’s labor shortage continues, with the available workforce across the country remaining below levels recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic, and some states, most notably North Dakota and South Dakota, hit especially hard.” U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Chief Economist Curtis Dubay told Newsweek: “There are now 3.6 million more job openings than unemployed workers. The worker shortage continues to be a major challenge for employers.”
We’re talking about the U.S., with a population of over 300 million, the world’s largest economy and, consequently, high wage rates.
Citing data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Newsweek said:
“North Dakota and South Dakota have 35 available workers for every 100 job opportunities, with respectively 30,000 and 31,000 job openings, and 8,466 and 8,864 unemployed people.
“Nebraska and Maryland have 40 available workers for every 100 jobs, with respectively 63,000 and 204,000 job vacancies, and 20,458 and 65,353 unemployed.
“New Hampshire has 41 available workers for every 100 jobs, with 41,000 job openings and 13,466 unemployed people.
“Montana…has 46 available workers for every 100 jobs, with 37,000 job openings and 13,802 unemployed people.”
Emily Peck, author of Axios Markets, noted that “More and more Americans are getting too old to work. Why it matters: Even if the job market cools off from its current hotness, that could mean labor shortages will be with us for the long term.” She said “declining fertility rates, and increasing life expectancy, is expected to lead to a drop in working-age populations across all G20 countries, according to projections cited in a recent report from Moody’s Investors Service. Korea, Germany and the U.S. are expected to see the sharpest declines over the next decade, Moody’s states.”
Roy Maurer of the Society for Human Resource Management quoted Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Indeed, as saying: “Demographic shifts and aging populations mean countries like the U.S. will experience an ongoing shortage of workers and hiring will remain challenging for years. Without sustained immigration or a focus on attracting workers on the sidelines of the labor force, these countries simply won’t have enough workers to fill long-term demand for years to come.”
In a commentary posted on the Route Fifty website, Fabian Sandoval said the reduction in the labor force has affected some industries more than others. These include:
• Transportation — truck drivers, warehouse personnel, couriers, skilled technicians and public transit workers.
• Accommodation and food — hotel housekeeping staff, front desk clerks, restaurant staff.
• Healthcare — “AMN Healthcare, which provides staff to hospitals and other health-care facilities, recently found that 85% of the facilities they surveyed are still experiencing a shortage of allied health-care professionals.”
• Retail trade — “Retailers are already running fairly lean,” a Deloitte consultant charged with examining the retail sector noted. “How can retailers deliver the customer service promised and do it in a cost-effective manner with even fewer people? When customers are unhappy in the store, they go home and order it online.”
And then there’s the U.S. construction industry.
According to a headline of the Financial Times, “Joe Biden’s planned US building boom imperilled by labour shortage. Half a million more construction workers needed as public money floods into infrastructure and clean energy.”
Anirban Basu, chief economist at the Associated Builders and Contractors, said: “It would be difficult to identify a period during which the construction labour market was more constrained than it is now. Demand for construction workers is sky high… This is the era of the mega project.”
“We’re putting millions and millions of dollars into infrastructure without anybody to install it,” said Ed Brady, chief executive of the Home Builders Institute, a non-profit organisation that promotes construction training. “A shovel-ready project with nobody to operate the shovel is worthless.”
“Despite increasing wages,” the Financial Times said, “80 per cent of construction companies say they are struggling to hire workers, according to a survey by the Associated General Contractors of America last month.”
To meet labor demand, The Financial Times said construction bosses are pushing for immigration reform, but it is an issue “unlikely to gain traction in a divided Washington.”
“One problem, according to Brian Turmail, a spokesperson for the AGC, is a contradictory attitude towards building jobs in the US. ‘We just don’t want our own children to work in construction and we don’t want anyone from outside of the country to work in construction.’ ”
The title of an article Arielle Harvey wrote for Taradigm in June: “Where Are All the Workers? The Construction Industry’s Dire Labor Shortage.”
“According to the Associated General Contractors of America and Autodesk, 78% of construction companies are having difficulty hiring workers for roles like bricklayers, drywall installers, pipelayers, carpenters, sheet metal workers, and plumbers. It doesn’t help that the U.S. is short almost 6.5 million homes, and desperately needs the labor for housing projects.”
She said one of “the biggest challenges with the construction worker shortage is that in order to get more skilled workers, we have to have more people to train them. This is tricky because the U.S. is also facing a teacher shortage. And as noted by NPR: ‘it can be tough convincing laborers to leave their jobs for lower pay.’ That is, convincing skilled construction workers making upwards of $85,000 a year to train students for about $50,000 is not easy.” My italics.
According to an article in Builder, Harvey said, “among 18-25 years old, only 3% said they wanted to work in construction. This is despite the fact that many construction jobs offer high job security (especially in the current market), competitive pay, and opportunities for career advancement. Some of this may be due to a stigma around construction work as well as the stress of physical labor….”
The National Center for Construction Education and Research said the labor shortage’s effects include project delays, lack of quality control, safety issues and rising costs.
Today, some Guam businesses are trying to recruit workers on Saipan — and U.S. businesses are recruiting on Guam.
Meanwhile, a significant number of legally hired foreign workers in the CNMI are required by the “touchback” rule to “exit” the islands for “30 days,” which in reality can take up to seven months. It is a rule devised by faraway politicians and bureaucrats who, apparently, are too busy to look up GAO reports and Census data pertaining to the NMI, and learn about the local workforce training programs and the prevailing wage rates for the Commonwealth.
The CNMI is not asking for more foreign workers. Just permission from our federal overlords to allow the workers already here to continue doing the vital work they were hired to do — the very same workers hired through the federal process and paid the federally required wages. That is all.
Even Congressman Kilili’s “touchback” bill is merely proposing a three-year delay and not the outright scrapping of a rule that no sensible business entity or non-government organization would impose on itself.
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