Inflation is up, unemployment is down.  This year there have been tons of stories about shortages and supply chains, and invariably a call has arisen from business owners: they’d like to hire more people but no one wants to work.  

When I see stories on local restaurants and businesses closing, inevitably I see an owner blaming their failures on no one wanting to work.  They had a good and profitable business going on, then after the pandemic suddenly no one wanted to work anymore.  This meant they couldn’t hire employees and so couldn’t do anything at all to make money and thus were forced to close down.  This is a dumb argument for many reason’s but to just pick one: labor has a market just like any other service. There is a supply and a demand for labor.  If you are demanding labor while the supply is constricted, the price you pay for labor will go up, and if you refuse to pay that price then you will go without, just as if I refuse to pay more for a Pepsi I can’t get one.  The price you pay for labor is the wage or salary so if you can’t get people to work for you then you need to increase the wage or salary you are offering.  No one is going to work for less than the market rate and so if you can’t afford the market rate of labor then I’m sorry but you’re going to go out of business just as if you couldn’t afford the market rate of rent or supplies or anything else a business needs.  People want to work, but no one wants to work for you if you’re not willing to pay them.

This “no one wants to work” nonsense got spread around a lot as the price of labor increased and many businesses found themselves unprofitable.  It was easier for owners to blame the moral failing of society than to admit that they weren’t good enough to turn a profit in a high wage environment.  But while this nonsense was rightly criticized by many, it reminded me of a similar economic trope that I don’t see get much criticism.

I’ve been reading “The Rise and Fall of Nations” by Ruchir Sharma.  What stood out to me was his discussion of immigration where he used a very popular left-of-center talking point that “immigrants do the jobs natives don’t want to do.”  He justified this with several anecdotes, but to me this smacks of the same false narrative as “people don’t want to work”.  It’s not that natives don’t want to do those jobs, it’s that those jobs are unwilling to pay a higher cost for labor and so usually receive special carve outs and exceptions allowing them to pay less.  This in turn makes the jobs unattractive to natives who have other options, and when the job creators whine to the government saying “no one wants to work!” the government responds with selected programs to allow the importation of cheaper workers.

Just look at agriculture in America.  In Massachusetts the minimum wage is $14.25, but it’s just $8.00 for farm workers!  Farm workers are also except from overtime pay and some OSHA requirements alongside the NLRA and many state laws.  The law has excepted farm workers from a majority of the protections and benefits afforded to other workers, so why would anyone work on a farm?  Why work on a Massachusetts farm for $8.00 an hour with no overtime, no safety, and no protection when you could make $14.25 an hour working for Walmart.  So instead these jobs go to immigrants, especially immigrants on special visas which only allow them to work on farms!  There’s no fear of your workers leaving for a better job if your government forbids them from doing so!  So let’s be honest, are these jobs that natives don’t want to do?  Or are they jobs that natives refuse to do because they have low pay, low benefits, low safety, and there are plenty of better options available.  

Farm employers say that it has to be this way: they can’t raise wages or they’d go out of business, or prices would rise, or America’s food economy would be destroyed by cheap imports.  This is the same excuse the “no one wants to work” crowd gives for refusing to raise wages, and is strikes me as the same 19th century nonsense that people used to use to argue against the minimum wage and every single worker’s rights law for generations.  Which is why it’s so infuriating that many left-of-center voices believe in the “jobs natives don’t want to do” narrative, even while they rightly point out that “no one wants to work” is a false narrative.  If farm jobs were as good as Walmart jobs we’d see far more Americans take them.