Back in April of 2023 we wrote, “Labor Shortages: Wisconsin” and we decided to check in on how the state was doing with labor shortages.
We came across this article entitled, “Severe labor shortage: Business Leaders Unite To Advocate For Immigrant Work Permits.” Here is a quote from the article:
“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that even if we managed to get unemployment down to 0%, there would still be over 3 million open jobs across the country needing to be filled,” O’Neill said.
He pointed out that in Wisconsin alone, there are only 54 workers for every 100 open jobs, illustrating the severe workforce deficit.
source: Milwaukee Independent
In our original article from a year ago, we focused on healthcare and the growing shortages of nurses, doctors and hospital workers, so how’ that going now?
From WPR.org:
She said the retirement of employees in the Baby Boomer generation represents a much bigger problem for the industry.
“We still have several components of our health care workforce where 1 in 5 or more — for LPNs it’s 1 in 4 — are gonna hit retirement soon,” she said.
Zenk told lawmakers that the health care industry has to find ways to grow the workforce faster to make up for retirements, a challenge facing other industries in the state.
source: WPR.org
As we wrote back in 2023 and now, the problem is the same, It’s the Boomers stupid! Every day, week, month and year that passes, the demographic noose gets tighter. No one in any administration seems to offer any solution and the free market’s reaction will only result in bidding wars for the best talent.
Where do we go from here? We don’t have the answer but if growing bird flu explodes into a national pandemic we suspect the nation will be in real trouble from a health care perspective.
Our focus is on how we can maximize investment returns from this chaos. We’ll research this topic some more so stay tuned, stay profitable and stay solvent.