Labor Shortages: Air Traffic Controllers

We’ve been warning about the growing crisis with a shortage of labor across the United States primarily caused by 10,000+ boomers retiring every day. We’ve written about the pilot shortage here but now the new concern is a shortage of air traffic controllers. From Fox Business:

Airlines for America, a trade group representing major airlines including United, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest, sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg requesting a meeting with the Federal Aviation Administration to discuss staffing of air traffic controllers for the July 4th holiday and summer travel season. 

Fox Business

To truly understand the ’60 million boomer’ problem consider the following, the largest cities in the United States (source: moving.com):

1. New York, New York – 8,467,513
2. Los Angeles, California – 3,849,297
3. Chicago, Illinois – 2,696,555
4. Houston, Texas – 2,288,250
5. Phoenix, Arizona – 1,624,569
6. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 1,576,251
7. San Antonio, Texas – 1,451,853
8. San Diego, California – 1,381,611
9. Dallas, Texas – 1,288,457
10. San Jose, California – 983,489

Adding up all the people in this cities will only get you to about 25.6 million people! You would need to count the population twice and then add 9 million more (another New York) to get to the number of boomers that will hit retirement age 65+ in 2030 over the next 8 years. Imagine if all the people in these cities announced they were all retiring all at the same time!

The labor force loses 2 to 3 million boomers every year and only about 1 million graduate from high school each year so there is a 1 to 2 million person gap. The problem doesn’t end there though because retired boomers will still want goods and services but won’t be working to provide any of the goods or service they will be demanding so there will be further shortages and supply chain constraints in the production, transport and distribution of goods and services.

And there is little anyone can do to fix this problem because no one can conjure up millions of people out of nowhere unless millions of new immigrants are allowed to enter the United States.

The right thing to do is to prepare for a future of slow service and shortages of goods and services. There are many tactics to use and we’ll post some ideas in a future post but it is safe to say that money often buys options and priority so it’s best to have plenty of it.

In the meantime, stay tuned and stay solvent…