“There are more people working than ever before” that is exactly what economists mean when they say there is a labor shortage, there are not many unemployed people. Higher wages alone won’t change that. It mostly just shifts around who is employed by whom. To actually build a larger work force you need not only higher wages, but making it easier for those who don’t work to do so like young people and those currently residing in other countries.
How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?
Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn’t even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I’d like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into “full time equivalent” for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into “unemployment equivalent” for inclusion in our statistics.
How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?
Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.
Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.
It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it’s being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.
Making nearly disposable clothes in short runs at high volume. Originally and still primarily an online phenomenon of quick knock-offs of “runway” designs, it is finding its way into retail outlets and can actually drive novelty (trends) separate from the normal fashion creation pipeline.
You can’t find these outlets on every street corner the way you can fast food, but pretty much every mall, department store, and supermarket will have something that comes out of the fast fashion pipeline.
In addition (my opinion), it seems to be driving a boom in clothing stores, most which seem to be speeding up their style turnover. It seems to me that the underlying model is bleeding over to other retail sectors like furniture.
Like fast food, it’s more about artificially created demand than true consumer demand. More and more, I see that what’s for sale is what someone wants you to buy rather than things you actively seek out.
“There are more people working than ever before” that is exactly what economists mean when they say there is a labor shortage, there are not many unemployed people. Higher wages alone won’t change that. It mostly just shifts around who is employed by whom. To actually build a larger work force you need not only higher wages, but making it easier for those who don’t work to do so like young people and those currently residing in other countries.
How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?
Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn’t even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I’d like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into “full time equivalent” for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into “unemployment equivalent” for inclusion in our statistics.
How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?
Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.
Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.
It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it’s being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.
What is fast fashion?
Making nearly disposable clothes in short runs at high volume. Originally and still primarily an online phenomenon of quick knock-offs of “runway” designs, it is finding its way into retail outlets and can actually drive novelty (trends) separate from the normal fashion creation pipeline.
Here is a pretty good article that includes a brief history: https://www.cnn.com/style/what-is-fast-fashion-sustainable-fashion/index.html
You can’t find these outlets on every street corner the way you can fast food, but pretty much every mall, department store, and supermarket will have something that comes out of the fast fashion pipeline.
In addition (my opinion), it seems to be driving a boom in clothing stores, most which seem to be speeding up their style turnover. It seems to me that the underlying model is bleeding over to other retail sectors like furniture.
Like fast food, it’s more about artificially created demand than true consumer demand. More and more, I see that what’s for sale is what someone wants you to buy rather than things you actively seek out.