(03-22-2018, 01:05 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: Oh, and most of these jobs? They pay in the $20-25/hour range just at the opening levels. All of these fields are CLAMORING for warm bodies.
And let's not forget vocational trades. Welders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, masoners... These fields are also desperately short-handed, and that is the reason why people in these fields can command such outrageous prices for labor. Supply and demand, you know. It applies to man hours available as well.
The biggest reason I can see why those vocational trades aren't filled is because blue collar jobs aren't respectable, or at least not as respectable as other, white collar jobs. It's not a US exclusive problem; Western Europe has a considerable shortage in the same areas, and is currently drawing considerably on the expanded manpower pool of the EU by bringing in Polish, Bulgarian and other former Eastern Block countries that have joined the European Union.
Either the culture needs to change to consider them respectable again, so that more children are interested in those jobs and more likely to join those professions, or we need to figure out machinery that supports these jobs, which means effective loss of jobs by replacement with automation for greater work efficiency by hour worked.