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This chapter provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for evaluating employer demand for migrant labour in high‐income countries. It discusses four key issues that, the chapter argues, are fundamental to the analysis of shortages, immigration, and public policy: (i) the characteristics, dimensions, and determinants of employer demand for labour (What are employers looking for?); (ii) characteristics of and segmentations in labour supply (Who does what?); (iii) employers' recruitment practices and use of migrant labour (How and whom do employers recruit?); and (iv) immigration and alternative responses to perceived staff shortages (A need for migrant labour?). The chapter suggests that in many sectors increasing employer demand for migrant workers can, to a significant degree, be explained by ‘system effects’ that ‘produce’ certain types of domestic labour shortages. System effects arise from the institutional and regulatory frameworks of the labour market and from wider public policies (e.g. welfare and social policies), many of which are not ostensibly to do with the labour market. These interact with a dynamic social context where job status and the gendered nature of work are important factors. Most of these system effects are outside the control of individual employers and workers and are heavily (but not exclusively) influenced by the state.

This chapter discusses research and policy approaches to assessing labour shortages and the implications for immigration policy in the UK and the US, with a particular focus on the potential lessons of the UK's Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) for current debates about immigration reform in the US. The MAC's approach to assessing labour shortages and the review of particular British labour markets employing or requesting migrants highlight the importance of obtaining and reviewing both top‐down and bottom‐up data on labour supply and demand, and of considering the alternatives to migrant workers in response to perceived labour shortages in specific sectors and occupations. These are the two key insights of the current British model for US debates about labour shortages and immigration reform.

This chapter begins by outlining the economic and demographic realities facing employers, and spells out how these change the ‘retirement promise’. The effects of several factors on older workers' retirement patterns are quantified, including early retirement incentives in DB plans, retiree medical coverage, and various work/life benefits including phased retirement and eldercare programs. The potential increase in older workers' labour force participation from changing these benefit offerings are estimated. It is argued that these will only marginally offset expected gaps between labour supply and demand in the coming decade.

This chapter introduces the key issues discussed in Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration, and Public Policy. The chapter sets the discussion of immigration and labour shortages in the context of the broader debates about labour immigration debates and public policy during economic growth and crisis.

This chapter discusses the rise of unemployment in South Africa in the late apartheid era. It examines existing data about unemployment, identifying the major causes of its growth in the mid- to late 1970s. It describes how high and open unemployment became apparent from the early 1970s onwards because of labour shortage. The chapter also explores some quantitative and qualitative studies that analyze trends in unemployment and underemployment.

This chapter addresses the farm labor shortages, mechanization, and food costs. It explains different pictures of demand adjustments envisioned by economists and farmers and describes how labor-saving mechanization occurs in agriculture.

This chapter focuses on the potential workers—including the elderly and disabled, men and women, Mexicans and blacks, and white furloughed male soldiers—who were considered by the government and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company as possible solutions to the serious labor shortage suffered by the mines and smelters in Montana when the United States entered World War II. It explores issues of race and masculinity, as each of these groups of potential workers posed a threat to the racial or masculine status of home front men. Male copper workers responded to this threat by drawing on the values at the heart of working-class masculinity.

This chapter examines two conventional explanations for the ethnic succession involving Hispanics and African Americans in the poultry industry in the South: first, Hispanics filled vacancies and second, Hispanics supplemented the existing workforce. The assertion that recent immigrants took the jobs nobody wanted implies that labor market vacancies existed because native labor turned away from undesirable, dangerous, and poorly compensated jobs. These job vacancies were filled by available Hispanic workers. The second explanation, that immigrants supplemented the existing labor force, focuses on new labor shortages and argues that the need for labor expanded as industry expanded. In other words, Hispanics were hired to supplement the existing labor force. The chapter offers arguments and data challenging both theories, and instead attribute ethnic succession to labor displacement, an industry solution to labor-management conflict.

The upsurge in auto production near the end of the Korean War continued well into the New Year, which surpassed mid-1950 as the best approximation of a postwar boom. The end of government wartime controls on industrial materials created free market conditions that automakers had long coveted, and Detroit auto plants experienced an acute labor shortage in early 1953. Tens of thousands of migrants from outside Michigan headed to Detroit for auto jobs. Even during the boom, however, black men, all women, and middle-aged applicants experienced employment discrimination. By the end of 1953, autoworkers again found themselves in precarious circumstances as the auto market slackened and layoffs increased.

This chapter discusses how the 2008 global economic crisis affected China's economy. First, there was the attempt to rebalance the economic structure by reducing dependence on massive investment rates and exports, raising consumption demand relative to GDP, and thus reversing the non-egalitarian nature of Chinese growth. Second, there was the financial crisis itself, and the move to counter it via massive expansion of investment and credit. Finally, there was the impending exhaustion of the large fund of surplus labour whose absorption into industry has been a prime enabler of China's rapid growth for three decades. It is argued that the tension between the stimulus programme and the rebalancing objective made the outcome uncertain, but rising labour shortage and wages may make it easier for the centre to rebalance. As the Lewis model of unlimited labour is exhausted, development is expected to shift to the lower-cost interior.

In the fall of 1942, the town of Black Eagle in Montana faced a serious labor shortage amidst World War II. Instead of sending black soldiers as they did in Butte, federal authorities decided to recruit women to address the Black Eagle labor problem, beginning in the spring of 1943. This chapter examines the implications of the presence of soldiers and airmen at Gore Field and the Great Falls Army Air Base near Black Eagle as well as the recruitment of women to perform previously male-only jobs at the town's smelter. Black Eagle's smeltermen did not oppose the move, but avoided the perceived threat posed by the introduction of workers of color and largely maintained the local immigrant gender order by relying on their close relationship with management, thus ensuring that only certain types of women were hired. Comparisons to local servicemen allowed the smeltermen to assert equivalency to certain facets of military masculinity.

This chapter challenges the notions that ethnic succession was driven by “vacancy” and “shortage” and explains why both explanations are incomplete. It argues that such explanations do not address those nonmarket agents and elements that also led to perceived job vacancies or labor shortages. The chapter begins with an overview of the restructuring of the meat and poultry industries and the onset of mass production and goes on to discuss government support for the industry, including tax exemptions. It then examines Taylorism involving the reorganization of both production and labor in poultry factories, along with the emergence of a new labor-management conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s due in part to the rise of labor activity in the South. This conflict, it asserts, was the main reason for the ethnic succession in the poultry industry. It also considers the rise of new unions and social movements in the poultry industry.

This chapter discusses how slave impressment in late 1862 and throughout 1863 disrupted a profitable market for hired agricultural slaves in both Virginia and North Carolina. Slave impressment exacerbated labor shortages prompted by enlistment and conscription; it also exacerbated conflicts over who should contribute most heavily to the war effort.

The differences in the stages of development have influenced the rate at which countries go through their demographic transitions resulting in youth bulges and surplus labour in developing countries and population ageing and labour shortages in the developed parts. The demographic transition influences growth and development and in turn the rate of development affects emigration from and immigration into a country. A spatial factor mobility programme to logically ensure the mobility of the surplus young population based on the demand for and the supply of labour and skills will be necessary to address the problem. There needs to be a global view of demography rather than a local view. The effects of the demographic and migration transitions suggest that mobility is a natural solution to the structural problems created by the demographic transition at a global level. Migration is a positive sum game.

The U.S. welfare system developed later and was always more decentralized than its European counterparts. The federal political system in the United States, which grants much more policy discretion to states, explains some of this difference. Until the mechanization of cotton cultivation in the South, large-scale agricultural interests in that region had the economic incentive and the political ability to prevent the expansion of the welfare state in ways that would interfere with prevailing race or labor relations. This chapter describes the development of federal welfare policy and shows how various interest groups, particularly changing economic interests in the South, have influenced the forms of public assistance seen in modern programs. It first discusses the contractual mix in Southern agriculture and the rationale for paternalism and then looks at the politics of paternalism from Reconstruction to the New Deal. It also examines New Deal welfare policies and the role of the South, the threat of labor shortages during World War II, and welfare expansion in the 1960s.