Have you been trying to find employees lately? Have you noticed that it’s almost impossible to find candidates? Well, that’s because there are currently more job openings than there are workers available in the U.S.Â
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How Bad Is It?
According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, as of the end of January, 2019, the U.S. had 7.6 million job openings, but only 6.5 million people who were looking for work. This was the 11th straight month where this condition occurred.
Notice though, that isn’t the same thing as there being only 6.5 million people available to work. Far from it. There are well over 100 million people not in the labor force who could, in fact, take a job, if the offer was right.
Employers Have Been Complaining About a Shortage of STEM Workers
For years, employers have been complaining about a shortage of workers with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degrees, even as wages for these workers have stagnated or even declined, in many cases, to minimum wage levels or lower.
This labor shortage has now spread to nearly every industry, with construction and the trades, agriculture and hotel and restaurant workers being in short supply.
Here’s a Secret to Fixing Shortages
Like all markets, the labor market responds to price signals. That’s why some small signs of rising wages have started to appear, here and there. With an available labor supply difference of 1.1 million, and an additional supply of 1.4 million ‘marginally attached’ workers available, employers need to sweeten the deal. But how much?
Understand What You Must Pay
Yes, it is true that for many if not most people, wages are only part of the deal. But it’s hard to pay bills with back-rubs, catered meals, and free transportation. That’s why we we’ve developed a simple calculation that can be used by all workers to determine what wage they have to make to take a job. It’s the same type of calculation a business makes when it is pricing it products and services – Break-Even. We’re calling it a worker’s personal break-even rate, and we’ve even built a simple calculator so a worker can easily determine what rate they must make to per hour to pay their bills.
Any employer can use this as well to determine what they will have to pay someone for their position to make sense. All you really need to do is estimate what it will take for someone to live within a reasonable distance of your place of business. Everybody either has a house payment, pays rent, or has an imputed rent value (if their house is paid for, what it would cost to rent it), as well as: Food, Utilities, Transportation, Insurance, School. If you estimate these, you can easily guess at what someone will need in order to take your job.
Fixing the Labor Shortage Requires Just 2 Things
We believe that there is plenty of labor and plenty of work. It is just a question of having the right Supply where the Demand is.
Mapertunity makes this happen by:
- Making the Labor Supply visible
- Making the Job Demand visible
We then use GIS (Geographical Information Systems), advanced search techniques based on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning (ML) combined with simple price calculators, to align Supply and Demand.
