Reporters have become so conditioned to the narrative that the economy right now is defined by labor shortages that when American Airlines announced Monday that it would be canceling hundreds of flights in July, CNN leaped to make it about that: "American Airlines canceling hundreds of flights through mid-July in part due to labor shortages," the headline read, despite the fact that the airline’s explanation was not mostly about labor shortages. CNN wasn't the only one, either.
“The first few weeks of June have brought unprecedented weather to our largest hubs, heavily impacting our operation and causing delays, canceled flights and disruptions to crew member schedules and our customers' plans,” an airline spokesperson told CNN. “That, combined with the labor shortages some of our vendors are contending with and the incredibly quick ramp up of customer demand, has led us to build in additional resilience and certainty to our operation by adjusting a fraction of our scheduled flying through mid-July.”
So weather causing disruptions including to crew member schedules plus spiking customer demand plus, yes, labor shortages in the statement turned into “labor shortages” in the headline. In fact, later reporting that looked a little more deeply found, American is facing one specific kind of labor shortage: training backlogs for pilots, due both to furloughs and layoffs over the past 15 months and due to the airline retiring some planes, leading the people who piloted those to need training on different planes. Add in weather delays that push already tight schedules to the breaking point, and, well, something breaks.
But mention “labor shortages” these days and it’s a shortcut to the whole ball of Republican messaging around expanded unemployment benefits, which dozens of Republican governors along with other lawmakers and right-wing pundits have insisted are letting people stay home comfortably rather than going out and looking for work. There’s a ready-made narrative there (made by Republicans), and plenty of reporters will just slot stories right into it.
Beyond specialized roles like pilots, there are three major reasons people aren’t going back to the workforce: Some people—as many as four million of them—remain scared of contracting COVID-19 on the job. Caregiving responsibilities have kept some women—around 1.4 million of them—from returning to work. And more than twice as many people as expected have retired during the pandemic.
Companies struggling to find enough workers, though, aren’t just contending with the fact that some people are still not back in the labor force, or never will be back. They’re dealing with something that really scares many employers when it comes to their workers: competition.
”It’s been challenging to find workers,” the CEO of ColorHub, a printing company, told The Wall Street Journal. “It used to be you could interview several people and go a couple of weeks without making an offer. Now if you don’t give someone a job on the spot, you might not get them.”
Well, what do you know. It’s not working out as well to treat people like their time doesn’t matter.
“We realized we had to scale up our wages to be more attractive to workers,” the manager of a Dot Foods distribution center said. “We saw 90% of our hires already were employed elsewhere.”
In other words, these businesses are struggling to hire workers not because of unemployment benefits but because of competition from other businesses. But the labor-shortage-because-unemployment-benefits coverage rolls on and on.
As Republican-controlled states cut off unemployment aid to millions of people, maybe people who have good reason to be afraid for their health or that of their family members will go back to work. Maybe some women will put their kids in child care situations they haven’t thought were acceptable and look for work because it’s that or face eviction or food insecurity. But the evidence is that businesses will still face challenges finding the cheap, undemanding workers they assumed would be theirs. Maybe then reporters will stop credulously running with Republican anti-worker talking points?
“The first few weeks of June have brought unprecedented weather to our largest hubs, heavily impacting our operation and causing delays, canceled flights and disruptions to crew member schedules and our customers' plans,” an airline spokesperson told CNN. “That, combined with the labor shortages some of our vendors are contending with and the incredibly quick ramp up of customer demand, has led us to build in additional resilience and certainty to our operation by adjusting a fraction of our scheduled flying through mid-July.”
So weather causing disruptions including to crew member schedules plus spiking customer demand plus, yes, labor shortages in the statement turned into “labor shortages” in the headline. In fact, later reporting that looked a little more deeply found, American is facing one specific kind of labor shortage: training backlogs for pilots, due both to furloughs and layoffs over the past 15 months and due to the airline retiring some planes, leading the people who piloted those to need training on different planes. Add in weather delays that push already tight schedules to the breaking point, and, well, something breaks.
But mention “labor shortages” these days and it’s a shortcut to the whole ball of Republican messaging around expanded unemployment benefits, which dozens of Republican governors along with other lawmakers and right-wing pundits have insisted are letting people stay home comfortably rather than going out and looking for work. There’s a ready-made narrative there (made by Republicans), and plenty of reporters will just slot stories right into it.
Beyond specialized roles like pilots, there are three major reasons people aren’t going back to the workforce: Some people—as many as four million of them—remain scared of contracting COVID-19 on the job. Caregiving responsibilities have kept some women—around 1.4 million of them—from returning to work. And more than twice as many people as expected have retired during the pandemic.
Companies struggling to find enough workers, though, aren’t just contending with the fact that some people are still not back in the labor force, or never will be back. They’re dealing with something that really scares many employers when it comes to their workers: competition.
”It’s been challenging to find workers,” the CEO of ColorHub, a printing company, told The Wall Street Journal. “It used to be you could interview several people and go a couple of weeks without making an offer. Now if you don’t give someone a job on the spot, you might not get them.”
Well, what do you know. It’s not working out as well to treat people like their time doesn’t matter.
“We realized we had to scale up our wages to be more attractive to workers,” the manager of a Dot Foods distribution center said. “We saw 90% of our hires already were employed elsewhere.”
In other words, these businesses are struggling to hire workers not because of unemployment benefits but because of competition from other businesses. But the labor-shortage-because-unemployment-benefits coverage rolls on and on.
As Republican-controlled states cut off unemployment aid to millions of people, maybe people who have good reason to be afraid for their health or that of their family members will go back to work. Maybe some women will put their kids in child care situations they haven’t thought were acceptable and look for work because it’s that or face eviction or food insecurity. But the evidence is that businesses will still face challenges finding the cheap, undemanding workers they assumed would be theirs. Maybe then reporters will stop credulously running with Republican anti-worker talking points?