The headline stated “$75,000 Bonus for Pharmacists” at Walgreens as a way to entice people to join the company. It’s August and while some companies, mostly in tech, have started layoffs, the broader labor market is still red hot and there are still labor shortages all across America.
We have taken a look at the labor shortage periodically and as we wrote in What’s Happening With Hourly Wages? T-Rex Will Eat First? society will be faced with tough choices moving forward. The largest companies with the deepest pocket will have first pick of the best candidates while everyone else will get labor scraps. There won’t be enough people to fill every job role out in society with the current demographic crisis.
Today we’re focusing on the latest labor shortages out in the market place and two news stories helped spotlight the issue for two industries. As we stated above, Walgreens is paying $75,000 bonuses in some markets to try to attract more pharmacists to the company. There have been shortages in pharmacists even before covid and the problem has only grown worse as America ages and require more and more medications for a variety of ailments.
On another spectrum, NPR is reporting that there is a severe shortage of insurance specialists across the industry largely caused by retirements and career changes. From NPR:
Retirements and people leaving the industry have driven the number of vacancies, said Jacobson. According to the latest industry survey, 14% of insurance companies reduced employment, but just 6% had planned to do so. Jacobson said that disparity backstops the retirement and industry exit figures. Across the entire finance and insurance sector, there are 367,000 jobs available, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — 20% more than in 2019 before the pandemic.
WGLT.org
So who will win? Honestly, it doesn’t matter because we’ll all be losers. Either we’ll have long lines at the pharmacy, poor customer experiences, and perhaps fatal mistakes or we’ll experience similar things with the insurance company. A mistake at the pharmacy might kill us and a mistake on an insurance policy may leave us broke. Either way, there will be tough choices and tough consequences ahead for everyone and we suspect higher prices. The best thing to do is to stay tuned, stay healthy and stay solvent…