The post-pandemic is presenting a strange and worrying phenomenon: more unemployed, more jobs but also more vacancies.
Something paradoxical that affects both Europe and the United States.
The Coronavirus has brought a rapid halt to employment but now, with the recovery appearing strong, there is a lack of manpower.
In the United States, the phenomenon has been present for months so that President Joe Biden has urged entrepreneurs to pay workers more.
Post-pandemic work: so much demand and little supply
In Europe, faced with a rebound in the economy, the problem seems to concern some sectors, primarily transport and catering.
In Spain, with over 3 million unemployed, there is a shortage of workers, and this really seems a paradox. According to Adecco, an international player in the search for professional profiles, the reason lies in the fact that there is a lack of figures with adequate professional training. The importance of training is a message on which Spanish and non-Spanish employers insist, also concerned by the fact that, in addition to the difficulty of finding labor, the European support funds have not yet arrived.
There is also a further concern that also affects the entire West, a beginning of inflation unknown for many years.
Lenders are not emphasizing the problem but if the pressure for employment continues and results in wage increases, inflation could become a problem.
In Spain, for example, the recovery has already caused a sharp rise in labor costs.
In Portugal, the post-pandemic brought the labor market back to pre-Covid-19 levels, with 6.7% unemployment. The highest employment level of the decade was recorded in the second quarter: 4.81 million workers.
Work in the post-pandemic: a lot of demand and little supply
But the Portuguese market has two major handicaps: a lack of workers in the burgeoning residential and tourism real estate sector and a lack of professional qualifications, especially for profiles related to technology, digitization, digital commerce, healthcare and logistics.
Unfortunately, the country continues to be one of the countries with the highest school failure rate in Europe.
The reality of Portuguese work was very well expressed by the words of Prime Minister Jean Castex “the number one problem” of the post-pandemic recovery is that our companies want to hire, there is an unprecedented level of job creation, but there are not always adequate workers to fill them. “
The same lack of workers is being seen in France.
A survey by the association of business leaders confirmed that 71% of SMEs have at least one vacancy. And in the last month, one of the most important recruitment sites “Pole Emploi” has an overdraft offer of over a million places.
ln Germany, the lack of skilled labor has become a serious problem. Annette Widmann-Mauz, Secretary of State for Integration argues that there is, at the moment, a desperate need to attract foreign workers. Before the summer, there were nearly 300,000 vacancies.
The sectors most affected: assistance, health, construction and new technologies. 77% of vacancies are aimed at professionals and academics and this speaks volumes about the gap between demand and professional training. Another major problem is the aging of the population and the difficulty of attracting personnel from abroad.
Even Italy from this point of view is not doing well. Apart from the aging of the population, the low birth rate and the citizenship income that certainly did not favor the rush to work, there are 2.3 million unemployed, with 1.8% of jobs vacant. It is the highest level since 2016, the year in which the time series began.
Work in the post-pandemic: a lot of demand and little supply
In the summer season, restaurants could not find cooks and waiters, as has been the case in many segments of the tourism sector. And the problem is becoming structural. It also affects high-tech professions that could help the country break out of a historic technology gap. Companies fail to find 30% of IT and physicists they need, 28% of mechanical workers and 46% of production technicians . Among the causes: lack of career guidance, early school leaving and low salaries.
In the Netherlands, government subsidies prevented thousands of layoffs, but caused another crisis: in the second quarter, vacancies exceeded those of the unemployed and for every 106 job vacancies there was an average of 100 unemployed. The sectors most affected: services, trade and health.
The British government, on this front in serious difficulty, has just given the green light to the granting of 800 temporary visas for EU butchers. The National Association of Pig Breeders has raised the alarm precisely because of the lack of qualified operators in slaughterhouses. And the same happens with truckers, the ultimate cause of the lack of fuel in the country’s service stations or on the half-empty shelves of many supermarkets. Similar problem also with construction workers, waiters or fruit and vegetable pickers.
Labor shortages will force employers to invest once and for all in more capital goods, more professional training and better salaries.
In the United States, the labor shortage looks set to last for a long time.
A report by the Department of Labor found a record 9.3 million jobs available in April, while only 266,000 people left the unemployment lists that month. August was a month marked by the slowdown, with job vacancies exceeding 10 million, according to the Labor Department, one million more than candidates.
Some companies have complained to the White House and Congress that they are having serious hiring difficulties, especially in low-paid part-time jobs. The heart of the problem, therefore, according to experts, is not so much the shortage of manpower, but the re-evaluation or reformulation of work, including the training of workers. Before the pandemic, automation and globalization had transformed the way of working and entrepreneurs had already sounded the alarm about the shortage of qualified figures.
The lack of manpower is particularly evident now, with numerous retail and related industries offering seasonal work ahead of the big shopping season, from Black Friday to Christmas.
Those who do not seem to have problems are the large companies of internet commerce. Amazon, first and foremost, announced in September that it plans to hire 125,000 workers in the United States to expand its logistics system.
The $ 18 an hour wage seems to justify Biden’s exhortation to pay more.