Happy New Year!
It’s 2025, do you know where your labor shortages are this year? We started the year with some interesting news from three different industries.
Elevators
First, there is an elevator crisis in America caused by………you guessed it, labor shortages! From Axios:
The U.S. has about 1 million elevators, with Americans traveling about 2.55 billion miles a year altogether on elevators and escalators, according to trade association National Elevator Industry.
The big picture: America’s aging elevators are time-consuming and costly to fix.
- The workforce of technicians who know how to fix them is aging.
- And buildings with elevators in need of repair often need to wait ages for replacement parts due to arcane supply-chain issues.
The Axios article also states the impact which means millions of injuries as people take stairs when elevators aren’t working.
Tractors
Due to persistent labor shortages that will likely be exacerbated as soon as Trump takes office and beings deportations, farms are in a world of hurt when it comes to labor to do farm work. John Deere’s solution to the problem appears to be self-driving tractors. From Quartz:
John Deere also plans to release driverless tractors that can spray nut orchards with pesticides, growth regulators, and nutrients for the trees. It thinks those vehicles will have a particular benefit to the California nut farming industry, which has faced labor shortages.
John Deere already has some autonomous tractors in some farms and 10% of it’s income now comes from software subscriptions but there’s no free lunch, farmers that use these products will have to pay.
Plants
Florida was the first state to institute harsh anti-immigration laws and the impact of those laws are having a painful effect. From WUSF.org:
The Sunshine State’s nursery, greenhouse, landscape and garden industry generates more than $30 billion in output sales and provides more than 266,000 jobs statewide, according to a 2022 study by the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association and Farm Credit of Central Florida.
But the industry is going through a labor shortage due to multiple factors, including immigration policies, recent hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic.
…
Robots instead of people may soon be potting, fertilizing and watering plants, along with spraying weed and insect killers, thanks to a federal grant that aims to tackle the industry’s labor challenges.
We’ve been waiting for robots to solve our labor problems for 60+ years now since the first robots went into operation in 1981 but maybe this time it’s different.
There are still 10,000 boomers retiring every day and they will continue to do so through 2030 at which point all the boomers will be over 65 years of age. They will then be followed by Gen X into retirement as well and the labor shortages will only worsen.
Stay tuned, stay profitable and stay solvent…