https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomer-retirement-surge-spark-forever-labor-shortage-jobs-workers-2023-5
But the boomers, unlike their parents, didn't have many babies themselves. The pill and the legalization of abortion sent fertility rates cratering — from 3.7 babies per woman in 1960 to 1.8 babies a decade and a half later. For a few decades, an influx of women and immigrants into the workforce kept the labor pool expanding. But by 2000, the rising supply of female workers reached its peak. And after Donald Trump took office, immigration took a nosedive. That meant there were no new workers left to hire, just as the first of the baby boomers were starting to retire.
Then COVID-19 put the labor shortage into hyperdrive. Immigration came to a standstill, the boomer retirement wave began in earnest, and millions of younger boomers decided to tap into the stock boom and retire early.
The Congressional Budget Office projects the potential labor force to expand by a mere 3.6% between 2022 and 2031 — one-eighth of the pace in the 1970s. Over the following decade, that growth is projected to slow even more, to 2.9%. That means employers face decades of an essentially stagnant labor pool.
But here's the thing about this new age of labor scarcity: Employers aren't going to take it lying down. The labor shortage makes workers more expensive, and that's not a price companies are willing to pay.
That means the Forever Labor Shortage will be more an ongoing battle than an enduring peace. Power never changes hands without a struggle. Millions of workers are going to benefit from the new demographic shift — but the greater the reward to employees, the greater the backlash from employers will be.
Have these people SEEN A HOSPITAL BILL BEFORE?
Hospital costs are around 18-19k just to have a rugrat, not even including the bare minimum costs of raising one to legal adulthood.
God forbid you don't have a wealthy family of ghouls who can pay for you to spend time with your baby in its most critical stages of development, and you gotta go back to work and have to get a babysitter
God forbid you want to actually feed your baby healthy nutritious food that's prohibitively expensive and takes time to prepare, that isn't stuffed with poison because of our lack of industrial health standards means we can allow "safe" levels of lead in baby food
God forbid you want your baby to be socialized among it's baby peers and not grow up in alienation because the atomized community system leaves only the parents and the kid as the desired family unit except the parents have to spend most of their time at work and the only time that baby can spend time with peers is at the prohibitively expensive fucking daycare system
yeah they don't seem to have considered looking after parents and supporting childrearing as a potential solution here.
only evil solutions please
Some countries will straight up give you money while you're raising your kids. Not a lot of money mind you but it's better than crying about how there's no new drones to replace the current ones while charging more than you'll ever earn to raise a drone
Libya used to give new parents a house. Before we brought back slavery there
:horror:
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The whole thing is pure cope. No mention of covid death or disability, child care costs, or a bunch of other things.
But but but what about our :powercry-1: "way of life"
The differences in 1960 and 1975 in American life are also so extreme that the introduction of the pill and abortion should not really be looked at as significant factors. If you look at a graph 1960 is the peak year of the baby boom. The fertility rate in 1930 was around what it is today. The main reason for this is widespread inequality. 1940-1960 we’re the best years of Americas social safety net. That’s why people had kids. Economists are brainwashed
The pain of missed milestones and not affording kids for many has been a pressure point that has been really well exploited by the far-right. Only socialism has the solutions of course but people seem to love a vicious race to the bottom.
I'd say it's because we don't have a concrete public presence. Because the socialist movement has become terminally online, only terminally online people know about it
if you have a concrete public presence you eventually get shot by the pigs
Okay, and? That kind of stuff comes with the job.
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No, people come and go but the movement remains. Much like how the working class is atomized and isolated from each other in a hell of hyperindividualism, so to did the socialist movement detached from the working class and in turn become atomized into hundreds of sects with hundreds line of thoughts on worthless theories and isolated away from concrete reality that would normally separate the wheat from the chaff.