A hidden threat to Trump’s economic agenda

Carlos Soto, owner of a floral service called Flowers From Our Heart, had an unexpected problem on the busiest day of the year: He had to turn down business on Valentine’s Day because he couldn’t find enough workers to field all the orders he could have taken.

“A year or two ago, I’d put an ad on Craigslist and get 100 or 150 resumes for a few positions,” says Soto, whose Los Angeles-based service delivers flowers through a network of 30,000 local shops. “This year, I placed several ads and got very few people. I could have used another six people. I would have been able to take more orders.”

With the U.S. economy in its ninth year of expansion, employers are fretting about a problem that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, in the aftermath of mass layoffs and the Great Recession: a shortage of workers, from unskilled laborers needed to hammer nails to programmers and developers able to build complex software. The unemployment rate is a low 4.1% and probably headed below 4% at some point this year. The Labor Department says there are nearly 6 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. economy, close to a record high.  

Source: Yahoo News