Employers don’t actually want employees. That’s why they don’t have them. At least that’s what you should believe if you are a capitalist. Because that’s how markets work. That’s what determines the prices of everything, including labor. Demand must meet supply and that doesn’t seem to be happening.
People aren’t lazy. They simply aren’t getting offers attractive enough to get them to work. If you believe that workers are lazy, you have rejected capitalism. What you have chosen instead is authoritarianism — you want to force people to work. Markets? You don’t believe in them.
Then there’s the whole litany of excuses and explanations, invented out of ignorance and ideology. Like the explanation that people want more job satisfaction, but paying more money isn’t necessary. Or that unemployment benefits are too generous and that’s what keeps people away from the many job openings. Which makes no sense because those benefits have ended and the Great Resignation hasn’t reversed. Or COVID is keeping people from jobs, as if Zoom and remote jobs never existed.
I don’t know what caused the Great Resignation either. Maybe people realized they don’t want to spend their whole lives working for a boss, taking orders, spending all their time making money for other people, getting low salaries and insufficient benefits. They don’t want to miss out on life itself, which is their TIME and that wasting most of it in service to other people is simply no life at all.
Is it workers who feel entitled? Or is it employers? I believe that so-called capitalists don’t believe in markets at all. They believe in their right to cheap labor. They want obedience. But the people who do all of the actual work don’t want to do it anymore.
What happens now? We shall see.
