BLS JOLTS: 10.6 Million Open Jobs

The BLS released the Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) for November and it shows a whopping 10.6 million open jobs. We can attest that the great resignation is still ongoing because some of our team have full time jobs and all have reported that some co-workers have already resigned their posts either for retirement or found a new job. The total departures so far as of Tuesday is at least 6 employees across three different companies.

In related news, drivers were stranded on I-95 for over 24 hours yesterday and some of the drivers were commenting that there were no police or snowplows coming through during that period of time to help alleviate the problem. Just a few days ago we wrote that there would be chaos with city/state services because of the labor shortage and so here we are today.

We also wrote yesterday about shortages in health care and suspect if there is another spike mutation or some other health care catastrophe we will all be in serious trouble across the United States.

We aren’t trying to be alarmist here but there is a very serious problem with 10,000 boomers retiring every day and not being replaced by younger generations. In a normal year, about 1.5 million boomers retire each year, the past “covid” year 2020, there were 3.2 million boomers that retired and almost all don’t intend on returning to work.

All of these issues are a preview of what is to come toward the latter half of the 20’s in the USA. We expect high wage inflation as businesses compete for fewer and fewer labor resources. We expect service oriented businesses will struggle to meet demand. We expect goods availability to steadily decline as a shortage of truckers, retail workers and other intermediaries aren’t available because they are working for deeper pocket corporations.

There are some possible solutions such as increasing immigration but the political climate in the USA will make that very difficult. It won’t be until there is a major production and distribution crisis that action will be taken. In the meantime, there will be companies that are preparing and adjusting their business strategies that will be profitable. We will be investing in those companies.

Stay tuned and stay solvent.