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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Which is only bad for capitalists. The shortage will increase wages for workers.
There are many issues like the downtrodden infrastructure, shortages in the medical sector or in the public administration. Already today some things take ages. There are many everyday tasks that become more difficult, especially for workers that cannot freely distribute their time to get that doctors appointment or daycare for their children. Also, there is risk of inflation eating up the higher wages. That depends on how much productivity can be raised but a loss of almost 15 percent in output will be hard to offset.
I have difficulty seeing this situation as a win for anybody.
Edit: for some individuals that will obviously be a win but for the society as a whole it will not.
Capitalist do not pay taxes and therefore pay for infrastructure, the medical sector or public administration. Workers do. So higher wages, are going to improve that.
Also fewer people means less demand for housing and basically the same supply. So prices will fall. That means people will be able to move to the places with the best infrastructure.
Oh and daycare for children is something, which is a fix for this. A kindergarten can take care of say 10children per employee, which allows basically ten parents to work in the meantime. That is a massive leverage.
The wages of the workers will adjust because they are what the Capitalists need. The workers cannot distribute time because they are not valued enough. With more workers the situation will get worse, not better.
Wages will certainly not go up enough to combat everything else going to shit.
Who cares about a higher salary when you cannot get any healthcare? What's the use of more money when the infrastructure is turning to dust?
Higher wages pay for that health care. When wages increase spending moves from business owners who buy yachts to workers who can buy healthcare. So less people build boats and more people treat patients.
No, not only bad for capitalists. There already is a shortage in healthcare workers (not just nurses but also doctors, technicians, emergency personnel etc), teachers, social workers etc. That is bad for all of us as healthcare and education are essential to all of us and the weakest in our society are hit hard by there being too few social workers. Unfortunately, that is the part capitalists don't care about.
What if the Capitalists care about it and wanted it to be like this? The healthcare system will be privatized and workers will be dependend on their employer like in the USA.
But that is a whole other discussion and has nothing to do with labour shortage.
With labour shortage wages should increase which can pay for bigger homes and bigger cars which allows families to have more children which ends the shortage.
If the health of workers and their family depend on the employer, wages can be kept low.
And who builds those homes? Labour shortage is already a factor that drives up prices for new buildings. There are too few craftspeople and building projects rise in costs (not saying it's the only factor, but it is one and not the least important). That's what I mean when I say that labour shortage is not only bad for capitalist. You need labourers to get shit done. Less workers, less shit gets done, more people do not get access to shit. Got it?
From that perspective all the workers should meet in one place.
Coincidentally that place is earth and we move the products of work around globally.
Germany would need much fewer new buildings if the population of Germany would not be growing. Likewise the number of employed people is increasing and yet there are not enough workers to build housing.
If costs rise and workers are not compensated accordingly then the market for workers is oversaturated, despite what everybody says.
The shortage in 10 years can be used to sort things out. Then, when things run smoothly, workers from all over the world can be invited to share a good life, instead of now being used to offload the worst working conditions onto them so that everything can stay the same.
You are so far separated from people's reality, I cannot see further discussion as any sort of fruitful. Have fun in your weird ivory tower.
I won't push you any further but please tell me which facts I have got wrong.
Let's start here:
This shows you're thinking onedimensional. People move into cities, cities are already overpopulated, so we need housing in the cities even if our population was shrinking. Also, we don't just need any kind of housing, we need affordable housing, especially for lower income groups. Also, just because the number of employed people is rising doesn't mean the number of people in relevant fields is rising. Plus, you are actually wrong if you think the number of people employed was rising - we are facing a sharp drop off of people in the workforce because the boomer generation is about to retire or are already retiring.
Isn't that because the public sector refuses to compete with the private in wages? If social workers would be better paid than factory workers, then it would be a shortage of factory workers, not social ones, right?
Pressing all wages down does not feel like the right solution to the problem of public servants not being paid enough for someone to take the job.
Refuses, or is forced?
A thing we see over here in America sometimes is the same group, or even the same man, having control over both public and private options of a given service. The public option is stripped of funding and only operates at minimum wage, while the private option has 5x the funding and hires industry experts. This then easily paves the way for "the public option is trash and doesn't work, we need to privatize this entire industry". Suddenly your post office is owned by an individual and you're paying a weekly post subscription.
Be very, very cautious and suspicious of private options attempting to supplant public ones. It's a key tactic that our homegrown American fascists like to use and it's upsettingly effective on the general public.
Yes and no. For some jobs in the public sector, that might be true. But teachers, healthcare workers and social workers usually have a more philanthropic motivation. Some jobs can even be quite well paid, like teacher and doctor. However, most people leaving those fields don't do it due to the money but because other working conditions. Shift times, workload in relation to personnel numbers, that kind of stuff. Not that money was no factor, a huge point often is unpaid overtime, but not necessarily the most important and far from the only reason.
And even if wages were the only or the major reason: that wasn't my point. The point is that a significant labour shortage does not only mean that companies have to offer benefits and more money, it also means that people don't get services that are sometimes necessary. Or there might be product shortages in critical fields. Stuff like that. And that might drive up prices.
Or that the workers left are even more exploited and get heavier workloads.
That's still a funding issue, still a money issue. If teachers were better paid, there would be many more teachers, reducing staffing strain.
There are a ton of bullshit jobs going around the economy. Maybe a small company of five people doesn't need a secretary for the boss.
Prices are always set at what the market will bear, it's behaving in a quasi-monopolistic way and that has been quite obvious for the past few years. In Croatia, a consumer strike took prices back to levels seen a year before in multiple supermarkets, yet the supermarkets didn't go into the red because of it.
And that does not take into account the fact that housing is the biggest inflationary pressure in Europe right now, and it is completely decoupled from immigration, or at the very least, it's inversely attached, more immigration drives up housing prices.
Look, I get it that in an idealistic way, more business would be great if a rising tide lifts all boats, but since more people won't mean more competition on the supply side, it won't keep prices low, only depress wages. I mean do you honestly think immigrants are going to found a business competing with the 2-3 car conglomerates that own everything? Same with tech, same with everything really.
It's only a money issue if you think that just throwing enough money at it it will eventually solve an issue. Teachers and doctors do not earn badly in Germany. The minimum salary for a teacher (verbeamtet) I could find was 4756.83€/month. And Beamte in Germany are exempt from social security contributions, have better job security, higher pensions, better healthcare...
The rest of your comment has no relation to what I said though.
Nope, that's wrong.
Unfortunately yes. The workers have to make sure that wealth is spread globally and that immigrants are treated equally and are fully integrated into their social structures. Otherwise they are split and played out against each other.
Nah, the capitalists will continue to outsource what labour they can to cheaper countries. It's just the jobs that have to be done here that will be understaffed and overworked. Things like maintenance of infrastructure, public services, medical care... You know, stuff the capitalists don't actually depend on, because the things they need will take priority. Your internet may get worse and more expensive, but expensive isn't an issue for them and they'll just pay extra for premium treatment. Public healthcare might die, private healthcare might suffer too, but they'll just invent premium healthcare for themselves.
Hence all the talk of raising the working hours per week, raising the pension age, cutting unemployment benefits to force people to accept work even at worse conditions... At some point, even the pay can't save you from burnout, and ultimately you need the job just as much, so your leverage won't nearly be as strong. Hell, who knows, maybe Strike Busting will become a whole service industry of desperate suckers.
It might reach a point of collapse, who knows. Maybe they'll see it coming and make concessions to avoid it, but they'll be the bare minimum.
Maybe they won't, and will simply be the last to suffer, but that's hardly any consolation for the rest of us.
Or maybe they're already planning for how to take advantage of the chaos and undo a few centuries of civil progress to force us all back into serfdom.
Capped rent is serfdom. We cannot move anymore without increasing rent.
All your points, that's capitalist fearmongering to flood the market with workers.
The way to increase wages is to limit available workers. That's how markets work.
The capitalists need the workers so the value of work will rise to cover all expenses. Society will not collapse or smaller countries would have collapsed by now.
Rent to private landlords is exploitation anyways. Anything beyond necessities (utilities, maintenance budget etc.) is just someone else getting rich off of your labour.
Capped rent trapping you in a specific place is just the cherry on top. But I agree with you: Rent caps aren't the solution to that problem.
No, they're an attempt to point out the actual problem, namely: the capitalists and their greed.
If more workers in wealthier countries was good for the capitalists, they wouldn't be throwing their support behind conservative, xenophobic candidates so enthusiastically.
On the contrary: They want those workers to remain in cheaper countries, because they can pay them less there.
Drawing a line between us and the other workers won't tackle that issue. The "fuck you, I got mine" mentality is the reason we're in this shit. Solidarity and the will to systematic change is the way out.
The workers are available anyways. They're just available elsewhere.
Besides, the supply-demand dynamic doesn't hold in shortages of critical goods, for example a shortage of doctors and nurses. At some point, no amount of payment is going to get you treatment if there aren't enough people to treat you.
We already see the public healthcare system struggling in Germany: Between a shortage of doctors and rising costs of running their office, more and more doctors only accept privately insured patients. If all the ones on mandatory insurance get paid more, the prices for private insurance will just rise as well.
At some point, limiting workers won't limit the work that needs doing, it will just increase the amount each worker does, until they have nothing more to give.
The workers also need the other workers, and they need them more than they need the capitalists. If there's someone to cut out of the system, it's the vampires.
Capitalists need Conservatives to prevent Socialists from integrating immigrants into society to prevent solidarity and socialism. Otherwise they wouldn't mind all workers to move.
Workers being available elsewhere doesn't help Capitalists because the higher ups are not there. Moving entire industries risks another China where the elite of the other country takes over.
The Capitalists will keep critical technology within the first world to push prices down with trade imbalances.
This creates the opportunity for workers to increase wages and to use that income to make a better world.
But of course, it will be used for entertainment and consumption.