Millions of jobs and a shortage of applicants. Welcome to the new economy

  • June 29, 2021
Millions of jobs and a shortage of applicants. Welcome to the new economy

CNN

There’s a problem at James Hook’s chicken farms, and it has nothing to do with poultry.

P.D. Hook, a hatchery that supplies one third of the chickens sold in the United Kingdom, should be humming along as the economy roars back to life. But the company is short about 40 farm workers, double the usual number of vacancies.
At the same time, there’s a severe deficit of truck drivers, making it difficult for P.D. Hook to transport its birds to the factories where they are cut, portioned and packed. And when the chickens do arrive, there’s a shortage of staff at the processing plants, too.
“It’s all come together at a time when everybody wants more of everything,” said Hook, the company’s managing director. “It’s a perfect storm.”
The troubles aren’t unique to P.D. Hook, its industry or the United Kingdom. Around the world, airlines, restaurants and hotels can’t fill open jobs, stymieing efforts to capitalize on resurgent consumer demand. Many workers that went home when the pandemic hit haven’t returned to shipyards, factories or construction sites, hitting production and stalling projects. Even Michelin-starred eateries and Wall Street banks say they can’t hire enough people to meet their needs.
In the United States, Republican lawmakers have blamed enhanced unemployment benefits for fueling the problem, while left-leaning economists propose a simple solution: pay higher wages. In the United Kingdom, lobby groups are urging Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to revise post-Brexit immigration rules so Europeans can fill vacancies, while Singapore and Australia’s leaders are under pressure to relax travel restrictions so migrant workers can return.
What’s increasingly clear is that after the coronavirus pandemic delivered an unprecedented shock to the global economy, putting tens of millions of people out of work and displacing many others, the job market will never be the same. Trained workers are stuck in the wrong places. Others have retired early, are skeptical about going back to work in the face of lingering health concerns, or are having difficulty securing reliable child care.
The economy emerging from the crisis also looks different from the one that preceded it. Demand is higher in some sectors and lower in others. Workers have left front-line jobs in some industries for roles that are less exposed to the coronavirus,won’t be affected by fresh lockdowns, or offer better work-life balance. In the United States, a record 4 million people quit their jobs in April, including 649,000 retail workers. A recent EY survey of more than 16,200 employees globally found that more than half would consider ditching their job after the pandemic if they weren’t offered enoughflexibility on where and when they work.
“This is a time of flux,” said Erica Groshen, who served as commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2013 to 2017. “[It’s] not so much that it’s an overall labor shortage, as a time of structural changes [for the economy].”

‘The challenges are huge’

Around the world, businesses are naming a similar concern: They need workers. They need them fast. And they can’t always find them.
The United States reported a record 9.3 million job openings in April. The United Kingdom saw advertised job vacancies spike 45% between the end of March and the middle of June, according to Adzuna, a job search engine. Research group IHS Markit reports that firms across the European Union are suffering staff shortages as business activity grows at the fastest pace in 15 years.
“There definitely is a job seeker shortage,” said Andrew Hunter, Adzuna’s co-founder. “You’ve got all these jobs in the market, but nobody really applying for them.”
The problem is particularly acute in the hospitality industry. Jack Kennedy, UK economist at job site Indeed, said that jobs postings in food preparation and services skyrocketed 507% between late February and early June, and that “candidate availability hasn’t kept up.”
Darden Restaurants (DRI), which owns the Olive Garden chain, Chipotle (CMG) and McDonald’s (MCD) are boosting wages in an attempt to attract new employees. Laura Harper-Hinton is trying a different approach to fill 150 vacancies. Her London restaurant chain Caravan has started offering referral bonuses to customers.
“The challenges are huge,” Harper-Hinton said.
It’s not just restaurants and cafés. The United Kingdom, for example, also needs tens of thousands more truck drivers, as well as butchers at meat processing plants and laborers at construction sites.
Read the full story in CNN
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