Le Baron
Unbiased advice at reasonable rates
It simply is true, so repeating it is just repetition of a truth. If you don't care for that, it's just bad luck for you. My 'view' is based upon fact, not some guy wandering around town seeing vacancies in a job centre window. The official unemployment figures for people of working age 'available' for work are largely UNCHANGED over a 10 year period (excluding the pandemic which is unusual circumstances and made it higher). In fact they are about equal to 1970. So if Tom, Dick and Harry could muster a workforce over the last 10 years what happened? The loss of ex-EU workers is real, but as I clearly said before that represented an adjunct to the domestic labour force which is artificially kept in relatively high unemployment as a buffer and also because countries prefer to hire people they don't need to train and educate themselves.Keep repeating that doesn't make it true. There is a serious labour shortage in the UK and in the care and health sectors this was the case even prior to the pandemic. There is an ageing population and a real shortage of younger people willing to do these jobs and you are deluding yourself if you think that pay is the only driver for this.
Some movement in that will help but only to the point that it doesn't prevent those jobs even appearing or make the cost of living deteriorate beyond the scope of the pay increases. The poorest paid are the first to feel those and the least able to sustain them. Giving additional pay that is immediately usurped by the cost of living increases is net loss.
You have an over-simplified view of this, it's always a balance between the availability, suitability and cost of labour if you want sustainable growth of an economy and adequate public services.
Increasing real wages vs nominal wages is not a net loss (and is not even necessarily done by direct nominal wage increases). Government has a huge capacity to influence the cost of living. Free-marketeer devotees will never understand this important fact.