Kicking The Can Down The Road

 

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What should happen when an employer is finding it hard to attract enough employees? They should be required by circumstance to work harder to find the right people, train the right people, or make their job more attractive to get the right people to apply.

This is part of the competition that is required for the job market to work effectively. This gives employees in certain fields more bargaining power for wages and job conditions. This can drive up wages for certain jobs that need to attract workers.

What happens if you can just rely on immigration? You can simply import in the workers you need, because there will always be people wanting to improve their life to come to a country like Australia (at least until all the welfare and social services run out that is). You don't need to address the reasons for why it is hard for you to get employees. You don't need to address the working conditions which makes it hard for you to keep employees. You can just short-circuit this process and draw from a much larger, artificial pool of employees and that means you do not need to work as hard to attract or train new employees.

What is worse, is that the larger pool of potential employees exists already in this nation, but many of them are on some form of welfare and don't feel the need to work. And so new immigrants paying tax are “needed” (in the eyes of the establishment) to support this large potential employee base. So, you end up with a situation where you have a deteriorating work culture amongst your citizenry and an increasing population, so the problem grows and grows and grows. You solve no issues, you just push them down the road and they build up over time.

There is enough people in Australia to fulfil all the jobs we have, there are many people not looking for work for lots of reasons: solve those problems and you'll have a better society. But instead employers, including the biggest employer the government, have no incentive to solve these issues, because they can just hire from overseas. Bus drives, cops, teachers all sorts of roles have been discussed in recent months as being able to be filled with immigrants. There are genuine social and practical reasons why people are not signing up for these roles, the government should be required to address this before using the short cut of immigration.