How I Searched

Since Uncle Ken is too busy to read the whole article, here are two additional quotes from it:

 " A very popular strategy, especially among blue-collar employers, was to expand the target recruitment demographic, which partly explains why we have seen a large increase in the share of minorities in many types of jobs."

"The US workforce is becoming more diverse, with the share of women in 

several blue-collar occupations rising dramatically in recent years."

I already posted one quote, the one about the aging of the work force and, for some reason, Uncle Ken didn't have a problem with that one. 

As I said, the thing that got me going on this kick was a segment on the TV news.  It referred anybody who wanted more information to its website, upnorthlive.com.  When I got there, I searched the site under "labor shortage" and came up with the article for which I posted the first link.  Since that article was pretty limited to the restaurant business, I then searched Bing, which is the default search engine on my computer, under "labor shortage" in an attempt to broaden my scope.  The first two options that Bing gave me were "labor shortage USA" and "labor shortage UK", and I chose USA.  The first hit was the article for which I posted the second link.  I had no ax to grind at this point, I was just looking for information.  

Sinclair is the parent company of at least two of our local TV stations, one being an ABC affiliate and one being an NBC affiliate.  I have heard their people on both stations refer to the other one as "our sister station".  They also commonly display content from other sister stations from diverse locations.  From this I get the impression that Sinclair is indeed a pretty big outfit.  I have no evidence that they use their power to tell their reporters what to say and not say, but of course its possible.  Our local newspaper is also owned by a big conglomerate, I believe it's Gannet.  Does this mean that I shouldn't believe anything that I see on the TV news or read in our local paper or from anybody associated with  big business?  Who else, then, is more qualified to comment on our current national labor shortage?

It has occurred to me that part of our problem was that Uncle Ken was focused on the unemployment rate of women and minorities, which is not what I was talking about.  I was talking about new hires, people who have recently been hired for what might be the first job they ever held.  It is quite possible that the percentage of women and minorities in both groups might be increasing.