The lack of workers is recently affecting many sectors. In some cases, such as restaurants or transport, the problem seems to lie in the poor working conditions offered to their jobs. In others, such as technology, the drawback is different: there is a lack of professionals with sufficient training and experience to to cover all the qualified positions created by the sector.
To these current problems, the president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, has just added a third party that, although it is not yet as strong as those already mentioned, will be in the medium and, above all, in the long term: the increasingly lower rates of fertility in western countries.
A widespread problem
In an interview collected by Reuters, Smith explained that the United States had been incorporating some five million people into the labor market per year when they reached the legal age to work since 1950, but that as of 2016 that figure began to decrease and by 2020 it was only It was three million, according to data that he himself has compiled from the United Nations. The president of Microsoft added that this, in addition, it is not a problem unique to your countrybut affects most of the West, Japan and China.
This downward trend, according to Smith, would help explain the growing shortage of labor, both skilled and unskilled, because there simply aren’t as many people reaching legal working age and entering the labor market as jobs are being created or created. are vacant.
Although Smith’s explanation is somewhat simplistic, and the factors that affect labor shortages are multiple and complex, the truth is that in the medium and long term the decreasing number of births may end up becoming one of the main problems to find workers for a simple numerical question: the number of professionals who retire will be greater than the number of incorporations to the labor market.
The situation in Spain
In Spain, of course, the figures are not at all encouraging. At Magnet we have already commented on several occasions on the low birth rates in our country, and you only have to take a look at the historical series of the National Institute of Statistics (INE) to clearly see the problem, since since 2008, the year in which reached the maximum number of births since they were counted, 519,779, the number has not stopped falling to 341,315 in 2020, the last year for which data is available.
The 2020 figure is, in fact, the lowest since there are records in the INE, that is, since 1992. The previous lowest figure was in 1995, with 363,469 births, although between that year and the start of the pandemic there is a notable difference, and that is that in 1995 Spain had just over 39.5 million inhabitants and in 2020 that figure far exceeded 47 million. In other words, we are almost eight million more Spaniards, and we have 22,000 fewer children per year.
Until the crisis that woke us up from the delusions of abundance, that of 2008, the economic euphoria had also been felt in the country’s birth rate. And it is that from 1995 to 2008 the annual births went from 363,469 to 519,779. These figures indicate that, at least for the rest of the decade, the demographic issue should not be a problem for the labor market, which will continue to suffer from the aforementioned lack of qualifications and poor working conditions for finding professionals.
Trouble in 2030
However, by 2030 the lower number of incorporations into the labor market of people who reach the legal age to work (16 years in Spain) could begin to be a serious problem, especially because It does not seem that the downward trend in the birth rate is going to subside. Why? Because the economic situation will continue to discourage motherhood.
And it is that the main reason why many Spanish women of childbearing age decide not to have children, or not to have more, is economic. The growing job insecurity, the difficulties in becoming independent from their parents and the high temporary nature of youth work are the main reasons that discourage motherhood and fatherhood in our country, according to a study by the Social Observatory of the La Caixa Foundation.
Therefore, as the economic situation does not seem to improve in the short and medium term, the birth rate does not seem to improve either, so the problem of the lack of labor could be a important handicap for Spanish society from 2030.
Image | Arvin Mogheyse