Lack of people to work should be the norm. Getting enough humans to work should be the bottleneck of the system to force treating them well and optimize everything around them.<p>The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
<i>“It’s on TV when the city is negotiating with the city manager to give them a 3 percent raise,” said National League of Cities CEO Clarence E. Anthony, describing a “fishbowl effect” that doesn’t exist for most private-employer wage negotiations. “People call in, saying, ‘Why do they deserve an increase? They’re public servants!’”</i><p><i>Governments have offered modest raises that (mostly) haven’t kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, they’ve devoted large chunks of their budget surpluses to tax cuts.</i><p>I dug up the lede from where it was buried.
Lots of comments saying more immigration is the answer. Perhaps historically that has helped. But it’s a worrying position, and here’s why:<p>1) implicitly you are saying that lots of public sector jobs are so bad they can/should only be done by “others” that move “here” to do them for us.<p>2) who will do the crappy jobs where the immigrants came from?<p>Getting immigrants to do exclusively jobs that locals won’t do feels like a bandaid to me. Does anyone else worry about this?
Same here in the UK with local council (government) and NHS (healthcare) jobs.<p>The system is basically in a zombie state since Covid-19, a sizeable portion of staff either left those areas because of redundancy, overworked or stressed, died from Covid or went and found a better job elsewhere.<p>These institutions have become atrophied (weakened) but not given a chance to replenish.<p>No-one has done anything to address it. Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it, there is an apathy in these institutions, brought around by crippling bureaucracy. This apathy translates into poor recruitment and external sentiment by the public, "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay".<p>Going to be a hard and unforgiving winter for the poorest and most vulnerable this year who need public services in the UK.<p>Anecdotally - a friend in North of Spain says a similar issue as well.
My wife is looking to change jobs in the midwest of the US. When we search, however, the majority of openings are less than full time and have no health insurance benefits.<p>And she is a public employee and looking to stay in the public sector.
One of my jobs is public sector. Our project has maybe half the roles filled. A project that was supposed to take 6 months didn't even have a line of code written in those first months for want of some technical roles to be filled. And those more senior roles are still to be filled. But we are charging ahead anyway to give the idea of progress.<p>People complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
Yawn.<p>Raise pay, train on the job, hire competent managers that fire people who do nothing, improve working conditions. (For example, public universities are filled with administrators who don’t do anything useful at all)<p>It’s not a “crisis” it’s just competitive pressure. There’s nothing quite like people not needing your shitty jobs to improve conditions.
Shortage of jobs that pay and treat people with respect.<p>Employers have enjoyed exploiting workers for much too long and now they feel entitled.<p>Productivity has greatly increased. Pay and respect have not.
I suspect this can be generalized beyond the public sector.<p>How organizations work has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. (yes, you can see exceptions in any workplace, but the overarching trends are clear on a multi-decade scale.)<p>As with any change, there’s a spectrum of early adopters to laggards.<p>Public services are generally going to be in the laggard category by virtue of being old and bureaucratic. However, there are lots of other established companies and industries that are laggards as well and they must be feeling the exact same pain.<p>The boomer generation grew up in a world where the old model was the norm. On average, they would be most comfortable in that style of company. This becomes self-perpetuating as the world changes around the organization: the current staff reinforces the culture and keeps it resistant to change. Doubly-so by virtue of the mutual loyalty in those positions.<p>And now, the baby boomers are retiring and none of the new workforce is accustomed to the legacy org model and the tradeoffs it requires (are you interest 40% lower salary for a pension? You only have to stay for 20 years).<p>I predict it’ll be up to the organizations to adapt to the times. Management experience in “modern” companies will be in hot demand over the next decade or so.
It's okay. It's not the end of the world. Many organizations eventually need to die. In the private sector, companies just collapse. In the public sector because we will prop them up no matter what, we'll need to take some short term pain as we defund the department.
People are saying that states and cities just need to raise wages, but that's not always possible...<p>>...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1295391401463750661" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/12953914014637506...</a><p>Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them?<p>Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low.<p><a href="https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-government/" rel="nofollow">https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-governme...</a>
The root of the problem is lack of market forces. When a union organizes against company owners for better salaries and benefits, they have to leave something on the table for the business owners who will otherwise just close their doors and open some other type of business, maybe even elsewhere.<p>With public workers, they are organizing indirectly against tax payers. Tax payers can't close their doors - they have to pay their taxes. Although I've had my eye out for many years, I've never come across a good solution that would make this relationship work as well as unions versus business owners.<p>Libertarians hold off. The answer is not privatization. Some public services (e.g. NHS) are far more cost efficient and match the quality of private competition. Having used both NHS and the US system, I'll avoid the mess and gamble of the US system pretty much anytime it is convenient.<p>And you can't privatize national defense for what I hope are obvious reasons.<p>So how can you preserve the factors offered by public services and then somehow determine fair wages? That question doesn't seem to have an obvious answer. The best I've come up with myself is to allow the private sector to compete with public services and then simply match the free market wages.
Do those jobs really pay less when you take into account pension benefits? Pension benefits are worth a LOT and continue to increase in value as people are living longer.
We’ve got plenty here in Spain would be happy to ship you a couple hundred thousand might help our budgets and reduce red tape at the same time over here.
My hot take is that, at least in my corner of the world (Quebec, Canada), a lot of this is exacerbated by exceptionally restrictive immigration controls which artificially limit movement.<p>The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.
This is only going to get worse. Just look at a demographic graph, as Boomers retire and Zoomers delay entering the workforce expect a shortfall of millions of people to fill existing white collar jobs, the trades have already been decimated.
How many of these shortages were caused by the unconscienable "vaccine" mandates? Biden said the pandemic is over, but the administrative/bureaucratic controls remain in place, keeping people out of jobs in the federal and state sectors. Considering we've known for 2+ years these mRNA shots don't prevent transmission or infection, it's truly absurd that this was used to deny people jobs.