{"id":66966,"date":"2024-03-12T07:10:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T12:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66966"},"modified":"2024-03-12T07:10:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T12:10:03","slug":"getting-vacancies-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66966","title":{"rendered":"Getting vacancies wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Getting vacancies wrong<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Like everything else that was shut down in 2020 and 2021, Britain\u2019s job market was broken.\u00a0 As businesses attempted to reopen, they were faced with a massive labour shortage.\u00a0 Lorry drivers, for example, had all but disappeared.\u00a0 Skilled construction workers were also in short supply.\u00a0 But the biggest shortages were in traditionally low-paid sectors such as social care, retail, and hospitality.<\/p>\n

One consequence of this \u201cvacancy crisis,\u201d was that it fed into a misguided neoliberal analysis of the sharp rises in prices following lockdown.\u00a0 A proportion of the price increases\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0\u201cmonetary inflation\u201d \u2013 the result of people spending the excess currency creation used to fund business support and workers\u2019 furlough payments during lockdown.\u00a0 But the majority of the price rises were simply the manifestation of a global economy attempting to incorporate and overcome broken supply chains.\u00a0 Nevertheless, economists, journalists, and politicians began regurgitating the myths of the 1970s, and especially the fabled \u201cwage-price spiral\u201d in which higher wages would force prices to rise even further.<\/p>\n

In those sectors of the economy where skilled workers were in short supply, wages did rise.\u00a0 But the\u00a0majority<\/em>\u00a0of vacancies were \u2013 and are \u2013 in low-skilled sectors where pay has remained depressed.\u00a0 According to\u00a0Office for National Statistics<\/em>\u00a0data<\/a>, 814,000 of the total 932,000 current vacancies are in traditionally low-paid services; 401,000 in retail, hospitality and social care.\u00a0 Nor is that low-pay merely a choice by business owners.\u00a0 Rather, it is the result of decades of neoliberal austerity which has forced retail, hospitality, and social care businesses to be among the leanest and most cost-conscious in the economy.\u00a0 Prior to the pandemic, this had the benefit (although not for the workers) of keeping those services cheap \u2013 a core purpose of neoliberalism.\u00a0 But it also meant that, faced by labour shortages for the first time in decades, these businesses simply couldn\u2019t afford higher pay because they were already cut to the bone.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getting vacancies wrong Like everything else that was shut down in 2020 and 2021, Britain\u2019s job market was broken.\u00a0 As businesses attempted to reopen, they were faced with a massive labour shortage.\u00a0 Lorry drivers, for example, had all but disappeared.\u00a0 Skilled construction workers were also in short supply.\u00a0 But the biggest shortages were in traditionally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[150,31147,2889,32016,13351,34167,31360,34166],"class_list":["post-66966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-demographics","tag-labour-shortage","tag-price-inflation","tag-skilled-workers","tag-tim-watkins","tag-vacancy-crisis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66967,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66966\/revisions\/66967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}