1/ Some thoughts on the cost of labor, vaccine status, etc. But before I do, this isn’t a thread about vaccines pro or con, whether people should get them, or whether the government has the power to force it, etc. I and my entire family chose to be fully vaccinated. You do you.
2/ There’s a shortage of labor in the country. There’s pressure on wages. There’s also a large number of adults who won’t ever get a vaccine, for whatever reason. Doesn’t really matter. It’s undeniable that they exist and it’s a sizable number.
3/ There’s also a proportion of the population who don’t yet have access to a vaccine, although one would presume the subset of people who actually want a vaccine and haven’t yet received their jabs shrinks with each passing day.
4/ There’s also an undeniable move afoot to pivot from encouragement to enforcement/mandating that people get their shots. The rhetoric is rising daily. The implied threat is without proof of vaccination, you might not be able to work, go to school, hang out at a bar, etc.
5/ So, let’s think about that for a bit. An extreme thought experiment. Let’s assume we partition the population by vaccination status and decree that the unvaccinated can’t work. No vaccine passport? No job. Simple enough.
6/ Labor has a price. I assume it is inelastic, to a point. If we disqualify a substantial portion of the labor force, what’s the vaccinated worker able to fetch in the market? We already have more job openings than the total number of people looking for work…
7/ What happens when we knock 20% or 30% of the labor supply offline? The price demanded by (aka the value of) “vaccinated labor” goes WAY up. Perhaps unsustainably so. Almost certainly unsustainably so. It’s an interesting thing to ponder. <fin>
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