Don't Eat The Labor Shortage Narrative?

Jeffrey P. Snider comments in Hawkish and the Retail Sales Shortage... 

If there is a question about a labor shortage, wage growth would definitively settle the matter. And wages have definitively settled it, just not in the way the majority would like. - Jeffrey P Snider

Yet media narrative would have it that there are labor shortages in Iowa, Florida, Maine and Texas.

"if it was a real shortage [labor] predicated on economic (small “e”) conditions, it would have hit the news only when it started and then would have been completely overshadowed by subsequent pieces written only to describe the exploding wage growth resulting from it.  

The mainstream always interprets “hard to find workers” as a shortage situation, when that is only one possible interpretation. Since the price of labor over the past decade has barely risen, it isn’t, can’t be, the most likely one.

Instead, there is an unspoken stipulation that is never explicitly stipulated. Businesses are surely finding it difficult to hire good workers at the rate they today want to pay. Obviously, that rate is insufficient so as to clear market demand for supply. Why don’t they pay that market-clearing rate?

Yet, In all these years of "recovery," neither Mr. Snider nor myself have ever seen subsequent pieces detailing exploding much less any wage growth. Instead we only hear of labor shortages with excuses of seasonality, demographics, and the zombie apocalypse of heroin and opioid abuse.  There is a solution for that.

"The Wall Street Journal reports, breathlessly, how companies are snapping up teenagers to deal with the LABOR SHORTAGE!!! Teen’s median pay is half that of older adults, and they typically don’t demand perks such as health-care benefits or retirement contributions. 

Desperate companies either way; either they really are having such a hard time finding any workers that they’ll take them right out of high school or unfinished in college; or, their cash flow and profit situations dictate they take even more extreme measures to avoid paying the market-clearing rate. Economic boom; or continued depression being described as one."

That last sentence, we know the evidence and hard facts clearly point to the truth being the latter.  Teenagers? Can they marginalize labor any further? If only the child labor laws could be rescinded?  Legalized slave labor in Asia?  Done. How about an incarcerated workforce?  Done, cheap, stable, compliant and a corporate worlds ideal work force. 

Indeed, despite all the horrible reality, media narrative would have it that there's a labor shortage. Our rejoinder, they can't find what in Iowa, Florida, Maine and Texas?

First, they would have to know "labor shortage" or their ass from a hole in the ground. Second, we keep hearing this is just a gentle warm rain we've been having for several decades?  Indeed, Frank Zappa was right and eventually, it all runs downhill.