Irish Staff Difficult to Find Inspite of Job Crisis

According to a recent new report, Irish businesses are finding it difficult to recruit local staff, inspite of the slump in job market. Marcus White, a hotelier from Lisdoonvarna, in County Clare, said he has had to recruit 180 seasonal workers from overseas, as there were not enough qualified people here. Marcus White, who runs four hotels in Clare, three in Donegal and one in Kerry, said, "There are simply not enough qualified workers here in Clare; they have all emigrated or gone elsewhere”. Vacancies exist everywhere, from hotel management to restaurant and bedroom staff. Mr. White said, "I can't just take someone in off the street and say: 'Here, start serving the bar.' They need to have the experience or training. There are no young people left in Clare with these skills”.

 

There is no shortage of workers, only a shortage of wages.

 

Given labour mobility, its often irrational to offer training. You pay the costs and then they up sticks to the big smoke. Unless it can be tied to a hardcore contract or its specific to a firm's activities, best to just moan about reliance on external labour sources!

 

With minimum wage, even OJT is too expensive.

 

I train myself - but then as an engineer, there are a lot of on-line classes from MIT and Berkley.

For things like tending bar, where skill is required, but hard to get from a book, internships work, if you have someone to be the mentor.

 

The UK, which went through a period of extreme labour flexibility (with the elimination of minimum wage protection, concerted attack on union rights and significant deregulation), demonstrated the naivety of your position. That merely encouraged a skewing of resources towards low skilled labour and an over-reliance on product with a feeble income elasticity of demand

 

Then business must have been very profitable, if they were paying far below what people were worth.

The US gets around minimum wage with illegal immigrants.

 

Short term profiteering at the expense of long term growth, as demonstrated by my reference to income elasticity of demand

For training demands to be catered for we only need the use of the sub-minimum wage (with that used to pander to the notion that youngsters will trade training opportunities for short term reduction in wages)

 

Why only short term?

Once they are employed and trained, what is the incentive to increase their wages? It may cost more to train another, but if everyone pays low, there is nowhere for the trained person to go. A bit of a threat to replace them should keep them right in line.

 

That's the nature of the beast. Labour market flexibility encourages opportunistic behaviour, with the damage much more long term orientated (e.g. the difficulties associated with producing more skilled labour force are intensified). The developed country with arguably the most flexible labour market has also a skewed production base, with skill shortages discouraging change.

The market.

 

The threat of all-out strikes. Once they're paid only peanuts, workers have nothing to lose.

 

Strikes are typically the result of information problems (and the opportunistic behaviour that can also create) or an attempt to shift decision-making within the available set of options. They're not particularly good at eliminating underpayment. Indeed, unions can inflame such underpayment through the reinforcement of wage norms

 

Strikes never benefit anyone, and they're not intended to. They just teach the bosses who's master, which needs doing very often if they're not to get too big for their britches.

 

Clearly not true, else strikes would provide a means to eliminate underpayment. They're much more involved than that

 

I don't follow your logic there. There are two separate things, money and respect. Bosses have to be kicked frequently, or they get above themselves and treat people like slaves. It costs, but it is well worth it.

 

Do you have a link?

 

It refers to the evidence: i.e. unions reinforce a status quo (and we're left with trying to understand the rationale behind it). There isn't any notion of 'teach who's master' as that would suggest, at least to me, payment according to worth

 

If there were payment according to worth there wouldn't be any bosses. What I was arguing was that strikes are seldom mainly about money, though in the right circumstances they can do wonders for our pay.

 

That's a nonsense. Given the importance of the visible hand, hierarchy and efficient compensation isn't mutually exclusive.

Strikes are about a break-down typically generated by information problems. It isn't what you suggested

 

One wonders from whence this mystical intrinsic economic value of labor comes.

 

Strikes are generated by bullying, and I don't understand your first sentence.

 

The first sentence destroyed your comment. The visible hand refers to the use of management as a replacement of the allocative role of the market (i.e. the invisible hand). There's no reason that the result cannot be payment according to worth. We'd just need capitalism replaced with more rational property rights

 

I am naive because of short term effects. The market always reacts to changes.

After that short termoil, the market recovers (all by itself, no gooberment programs?).

Opportunism shifts from the employer that hired cheap to the one that hired trained. There should be some extreme example of that....

In the 1860's, slavery was losing favor in the US, because paid employees outperformed slave labor by more that the cost of their wages. Employers greed was rewarded by higher wages.​

 

Nope, you show no understanding. The market is forced to react to circumstance, such as a supply shock that creates an increase in wages. It doesn't necessarily, however, react according to allocative efficiency criteria. We see that, for example, with the markets consistency with mass unemployment. We also see it with the skewing of labour demand such that skills investments do not occur. You continue to be horrendously utopian such that you ignore economic reality

Until you bother to understand labour economics you're continue to be sub-Daily Mail hack in these issues