No farm workers means that food rots on the vine. We'd love to glibly tell you that Parkinson's Law is always applicable; that whatever actually gets done is the work; that a labor shortage exists only  in the minds of its proponents. In Michigan, crops that are picked late fetch 1/3 of the price of fresher crops. Florida's shortages are tied to the construction industry.

The labor shortage involves a complicated set of interlocking causes and consequences. For the most part, the impact is reduced service levels, not closures or complete failure. In good engineering, there is a design practice called "graceful degradation".

Fault-tolerance or graceful degradation is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the severity of the failure, as compared to a naively-designed system in which even a small failure can cause total breakdown. Fault-tolerance is particularly sought-after in high-availability or life-critical systems. (Wikipedia)

The economy is fault tolerant. It is unlikely that shifting demographics will cause panic in the streets. Instead, people will change what they do (Witness Colorado's intention to use inmates to replace migrant workers)

A significant part of the underlying demographics is the aging of the workforce. The causes are well known: better health care, smaller family sizes. The consequences are becoming manifest: declining age bias, deferral of retirement, shifting norms about older workers.

(Checkout RetirementJobs. They are leading a broad charge to change the workplace and make it more age friendly. Their Age Friendly Certification Program is a start on the process of using the workforce we have for the work that needs to get done.)

We will be dealing with the consequences of the labor shortage for the next several decades. Improving life expectancies around the planet coupled with rapidly declining birth rates make for a different world than we are currently imagining. The net result will be longer work lives, more variety ion occupation in a single career and the end of retirement as we currently know it. (Phased Retirement is gaining credence.)

Tomorrow: Job Board Explosion

• What It Was Like
• What Happened I
• What Happened II
• What Happened III
• What Happened IV
• What Happened V
• What Happened VI
• Where It's Going I
• Where It's Going II
• What's Going On I: Recruiting
• What's Going On II: People
• What's Going On III: Older People

John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.
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