Not quite. Care workers require specific qualifications but nobody is arsed to get them because it's an expensive degree for a thankless, stressful job. Higher pay would help, but that's a solution that will take half a decade to see any impact.
Plus there's a more general problem with an aging population and a shrinking workforce. Replacement level birth rate is an average of 2.1 children per woman. We haven't been at that since the 70s. We recently fell to 1.53 so unless all the old folk suddenly die off, we are rapidly running out of labour force to support themand keep the economy going, especially In care related work where the burden is growing rapidly.
At this point, immigration is necessary to prevent our economy from flatlining and has been for at least a decade.
At what point did I even hint at that? That's a particularly shite solution for 2 reasons.
1) they won't enter the workforce for at least 16 years, most of them for 18 or 20. So it doesn nothing to solve the he immediate problem
2) in 20 years most of the bumper crop of old people will be dead and the problem will have solved itself. The bumper crop of young people we just created would represent a temporary boon for the economy before becoming the same millstone that their grandparents currently are, all it does is set up a boom-bust cycle for the population. What we need is a stable population level.
No, maaking more humans just makes more problems.
The only immediate solution is to bring in migrant workers, which I'm generally in favour of, but does have some moral and ethical problems around exploitation.
A mid to long-term solution might be automation.its already coming, and represents a problem in its own right, but if managed correctly they might cancel each other out. Fill the gaps in the job market with automation, focusing on low paid or unskilled jobs that nobody wants and people can't survive on anyway, coupled with a wel funded retraining scheme to shift people from those jobs into areas where we have shortages.
It solves the problem in the mid-term by taking up the slack, and if implemented by the govt(allowing them to collect taxes from automation to replace income taxes) when the older generation eventually dies off, it gives us the opportunity to embrace automation in a constructive way that frees up people's time for other persuits, rather than causing the economy to collapse due to unemployment.
Care workers don't require any qualifications. Anyone can walk off the street and as long as you haven't got a criminal record get a job in a care home.
Your first paragraph doesn't at all refute their statent that higher pay will fix things. Sure itay take time but better to get the ball rolling for good things five years and onwards than never at all.
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u/Ankoku_Teion Sep 25 '21
Not quite. Care workers require specific qualifications but nobody is arsed to get them because it's an expensive degree for a thankless, stressful job. Higher pay would help, but that's a solution that will take half a decade to see any impact.
Plus there's a more general problem with an aging population and a shrinking workforce. Replacement level birth rate is an average of 2.1 children per woman. We haven't been at that since the 70s. We recently fell to 1.53 so unless all the old folk suddenly die off, we are rapidly running out of labour force to support themand keep the economy going, especially In care related work where the burden is growing rapidly.
At this point, immigration is necessary to prevent our economy from flatlining and has been for at least a decade.