by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Great swaths of the American workforce are already on strike or slipping away from the dead-end treadmill.
America’s labor shortage is complex and doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic expectations favored by media talking heads. The Wall Street cheerleaders extol the virtues of “getting America back to work” which is Wall-Street-speak for getting back to exploiting workers to maximize corporate profits.
Long-term demographics have combined with cultural changes and Covid-Lockdown epiphanies to completely re-order America’s labor force beneath the superficial surface of “re-opening.” No one post can do justice to such a complex topic, so I’ll touch on a few of the many inter-connected (and often mutually reinforcing) dynamics.