Employers cry skills shortage wolf

Employers continue to complain of massive skills shortages due to the closure of Australia’s international border to migrants:

Angela Thwaites runs a boutique nursing recruitment firm in Sydney. Even at the best of times, she might find herself one or two nurses shy of being able to fully meet demand…

At the heart of the problem, Thwaites says, is the closure of international borders. She estimates roughly 70 per cent of nursing staff in any typical hospital or aged care facility are our “international friends”.

“Our industry relies on skilled international workers. They were coming in by the truckloads in years gone by,” she said…

Australia’s reliance on migrant workers is certainly not exclusive to the nursing industry. According to recruitment experts, Australia is suffering from a shortage of critical skills…

The specifics of Australia’s skill shortages are laid bare in a list published by the National Skills Commission. Its most recently published list counts no less than 57 occupations of “national shortage with strong future demand”.

Many of these are in highly skilled, specialised sectors such as industry-specific engineers, accountants and auditors… cooks and bakers, gardeners are also on the list.

I completely destroyed the National Skills Commission’s farcical skills shortage list earlier this week, so I won’t rehash old ground. All I will say is that this list has been developed with heavy input from industry, which has a vested interest, with shortages determined by whether employers can easily source staff at prevailing rates of pay and conditions [my emphasis]:

Shortages exist when employers are unable to fill or have considerable difficulty filling vacancies for an occupation, or significant specialised skill needs within that occupation, at current levels of remuneration and conditions of employment, and in reasonably accessible locations.

In some instances, shortages may be apparent in particular specialisations within the occupation, but otherwise shortages are not apparent. In these instances, provided there is sufficient evidence, the occupation will still be considered in shortage.

Hence, there could be enough workers in the economy to fill these roles, but because employers are unwilling to offer higher wages that meet the market, shortages exist.

Thankfully, the article quoted above includes an important counter-argument from Gartner research & advisory vice president Aaron McEwan, who believes Australia has become far too reliant on migrant workers:

“Historically, we’ve been able to import talent relatively cheaply compared to other countries. Rather than retraining and upskilling our own workforce, we’ve taken the easy and cost-efficient approach of attracting both high and low-skilled individuals from overseas”…

“It’s become clear that our somewhat lazy attitude towards local talent development has come at a high price”…

“There is an abundance of skills and talent right here in Australia, but we aren’t looking in the right places,” he said. “The pandemic has also shifted the demand for different industries and has left a lot of skilled people in its wake.

“Organisations can be smarter about looking for transferrable skills in people left unemployed during lockdowns and border closures”…

“Now is a great opportunity to innovate, expand our thinking and wean ourselves off the addiction of importing talent to focus on the readily available workforce in our own backyard.

“But to do this, we will have to think beyond traditional employment models and quick fix solutions”.

Jim Stanford from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work agrees, arguing that Australia is not experiencing a shortage of workers, but a shortage of employers willing to train Australians and offer market rates of pay:

“It’s impossible to say we are running out of workers, then there are 2.7 million Australians who could be put to productive work,” he told Yahoo Finance.

The Government’s occupation employment forecasts for new jobs over the next five years finds that there are only two ‘high tech’ occupations among the top 12 list.

“Again, it is not a shortage of workers that is the problem here – it is a shortage of good jobs, especially in the private sector,” he said.

“Employer complaints about labour shortages are almost always a prelude to two long-standing demands from the business community: to re-open low-cost temporary migrant labour flows from other countries, and to cut back income supports (like JobSeeker) so that more workers will feel compelled to accept the low-wage jobs they are offering. Those demands should be rebuffed.

“There are lots of Australians around to do the work. We just need employers to change their practices, so that workers can be valued like the ‘scarce’ commodity they supposedly are.”

Spot on. Employers incessant calls for migrant workers is really code for ‘we want to pay workers less and don’t want to have to provide training’.

Sadly, the federal government and the National Skills Commission is complicit in the scam and has no interest in delivering full employment or decent wage growth.