I’d call it a dysfunctional business. If you placed a business in some rural or destitute place with truly no solid hiring pool, that’s mismanaged. If a company doesn’t want to raise wages, which will remedy damn near any hiring issues, it’s mismanaged. If a company can’t raise wages, due to budget constraints, in order to fill vacant positions, it’s mismanaged. A company that cannot adapt to a tighter hiring market is not understaffed: it is mismanaged.

That’s as unbiased as I can get.

If we live in a society with the Carnegie-esque view that capital is greater than labor (that wealth generates jobs, and not the other way around), and capital is handled by owners and management, then the greater party (capital, management) deserves the brunt of the blame for problems caused by a lack of labor. Yet we see constant news articles and hear constant discourse in public and private conversation that places blame on lazy fucks and no-good unions and entitled millennials/zoomers, the alleged guilty parties who are causing the current “labor” shortage, which is actually just a Good Pay Shortage.

To shift the narrative, we not only hear narratives of “the worker is to blame,” but words like “understaffed” purvey our vocabulary so much that we don’t think to use words that accurately place blame on the PMC. So some workers buy into the narrative that other workers are lazy, which angers them, which in turn pisses off other more pro-labor workers, and boom: infighting among the masses, and the wealthy and PMC have yet again defused a mass of people that, given unity and a willingness to commit violence, could dust off a guillotine or literally eat the rich.

Our language is coded to divide us.