Ya, I agree that there is some stubbornness among employers to raise wages and that more jobs than typical are remaining unfilled as they hope to find someone at their $12 price point rather than just ponying up $14 (or whatever). Probably this is due to the unusually large recession we had. The fact is that employers could get away without raising wages for a really long time. No big surprise if it takes them a while to catch on that the end of that line is neigh.
But ya, mostly slack. Another 2 years or so. Maybe a bit more. The 2020 census could put the nail in the coffin. A shit ton of people get hired for those things.
> they hope to find someone at their $12 price point rather than just ponying up $14 (or whatever)
One of the issues is that it isn't just ponying up an extra $2/hr.
If a company already has, say, 10 employees at the $12/hr price point, they won't be too thrilled about a peer coming in at $14/hr. Most likely, in the short to medium term, they will have to be bumped to $14/hr, too.
So rather than being an extra $2/hr, it's actually an extra $2/hr + (10 * $2/hr) = $22/hr.
In some cases maybe that's the trigger point where it makes it worthwhile to buy the products overseas (free shipping!) and deal with the uncertainty of when you'll receive it.
The current system sometimes seems designed to fail.
There's a lot of options other than simply offshoring.
Consider externalizing costs, almost no one has a servant pump gasoline for them, I would imagine you have to be very old for "self service gas station" vs "full service gas station" to mean anything to most Americans.
Another option is political corruption, I'll donate $ to your re-election campaign if you create a property tax free zone for my business.
The point is still valid in the states that aren't New Jersey or Oregon. In Nebraska, Washington, California, Iowa, Ohio and Kansas, all the places I have lived in or worked in my memory I have seen no gas station attendants.
This is largely because the cost and labor of operating the pump has been externalized by pushing onto the car operator.
Retail business do this with cash registers. How many of these jobs will simply disappear? What else can be fully automated?
The counter-point to this is that if people remain unemployed due to unwillingness to accept available jobs at the available pay...at what point do they have to re-examine their own market value?
If a significant portion of the population has a market value lower than the cost for them to have a reasonable quality of life isn't that some kind of fundamental failure condition for society/humanity?
Corporate profits are up a bit as a % of revenue. Similar labor's share of national income is down a bit. A lot of businesses could afford to pay a bit more.
Just a bit though. There hasn't been some sort of sea change like a lot of people seem to think.
That could easily happen due to consolidation and averaging over sectors. In some sectors with high barriers to entry giants earn a lot, in other sectors, it's trench warfare with competition and <1% profit margins.
It's underway. And maybe it's a good plan, but you don't want to take that step, so you go out of business and your competitors fill in your place. (Consolidation is good for business, not so good for workers.)
But ya, mostly slack. Another 2 years or so. Maybe a bit more. The 2020 census could put the nail in the coffin. A shit ton of people get hired for those things.