I’m trying to count up all the times I’ve been to meetings where people talked at length about workforce shortages. It’s been a lot, I can tell you that much right now.
You kinda’ hear the same stuff over and over again. There’s a lot of theories about why certain people don’t want to work certain jobs — especially millennials. But all these executives and directors and presidents just can’t seem to figure it out.
Here’s the root cause of the ongoing workforce shortage — because younger people these days value time over money.
Yeah, it would be a lot easier to just say they’re a buncha’ lazy, entitled bums, wouldn’t it? Apparently, you’re not hanging around the same 30-somethings I am. Work consumes every aspect of their lives. They’re not just working 60 or 80 hours a week — heaven help us, some of them work even more than that — they’re working WITHOUT overtime pay or extra compensation from their employers.
They’re investing all of that time and effort and energy because a.) a lot of them don’t have kids, b.) a lot of them don’t have spouses and c.) a lot of them don’t have mortgages. More or less, they’ve GOT the extra time to work … even if it means unpaid labor.
Remember the yuppies back in the 1980s? All these spry, young guys who worked around the clock and wore expensive leisure suits and probably did a lot of recreational cocaine? Well, we’ve got a modern day equivalent to that in the elder millennial professional class (EMPCs, for short). Only they’re not making beaucoup bucks, they can’t afford anything pricier than what’s on sale at Ross Dress For Less and instead of the Colombian booger sugar, they’re probably rattled out of the gourd on black market Adderall and Ritalin 24/7.
The whole “work from home” thing has completely obliterated that iron wall that we used to call a “work/life balance.” To the EMPC, life is simply what happens auxiliary to work and not the other way around. They’ll work for six hours straight, take two hours off, then work another four hours, then take an hour off, then work some more until 2 or 3 in the morning.
These people have been keeping the post-COVID economy fluttering like a hummingbird almost single-handedly. The inherent tragedy/absurdity within that kernel of truth, though, is that despite all of their ceaseless work and tireless commitment to whatever professional overlord cuts their checks — they’re not getting any richer. Inflationary increases keep putting trifling little things like “home ownership” and “children” financially out of reach and wages still haven’t managed to keep pace with cost of living metrics.
It’s a bizarre, almost Freudian social complex. They work and work and work for the bare minimal personal gain for … what, exactly? Maybe it’s guilt, or some sort of misplaced sense of personal obligation. But they keep doing it, anyway.
Really, they could make way more money as truck drivers or plumbers or factory workers at one of these newfangled green energy plants. But they don’t want to work those jobs, because the allure of money simply doesn’t appeal to them the same way it appeals to older generations. There’s this dire need for self-purpose, and let’s face it — in most lines of work, 99% of all of the positions are expendable. It doesn’t matter WHO is doing the job, just as long as someone is doing it well enough.
So if working yourself into an early coronary is enough to make yourself “indispensable” for some sort of office job that probably involves a lot of Zoom meetings and Excel spread sheets, so be it.
I bring this up because all of the 20-somethings are seeing what all of the 30-somethings are doing right now and simply put, they know better. If you’re not going to make a true living wage no matter how hard you work or how many hours you put in, what’s the point?
The 20-somethings are more than content making less money than the 30-somethings, because it affords them something the EMPCs don’t have — actual time to live their lives. For Gen Z and whatever you call the generation after ‘em, “full time” and “part time” are antiquated economic concepts. With Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and all of these other micro-jobs, it’s more or less becoming “whenever you feel like jobs.” And as much as all these industries and multibillion-dollar corporations don’t want to admit it — sooner much rather than later, they’re going to have to follow suit.
In that, the workforce shortage solution is glaringly apparent: Pay employees more money for less hours of work — a sort of “opposite day” economic model that I’m sure is a hard pill for many, MANY businesses to swallow.
But the proverbial genie is already out of the bottle. And the very survival of your industry might just hinge on how quickly — and how effectively — you can make the migration.