A producerist approach to labour shortages

If global warming is the great bogeyman of left-liberals, then the conservative equivalent seems to be slowing birth rates and population decline. If discussion on many mainstream conservative blogs is anything to go, the West is close to collapse due to its low birth rates and must let in increasing numbers of non-western immigrants in the interests of economic survival.

Sure declining birth rates are a major concern but you don't come across quite the same level of panic on ethno-nationalist sites, since ethno-nationalists don't tend to support free market capitalism with its market populist system of labour allocations.

For communitarians and nationalists, the market is a tool to serve the people, not an end in itself. If low birth rates really are imperiling western civilisation, then we need to consider intervening in the free market to ensure that scarcer labour supplies are directed away from non-essential service-industry activities, and towards areas which are essential to long-term economic sustainability.

Many people certainly have short memories, less than 15 years ago, the English-speaking West was grapling with high unemployment caused by massive de-industrialisation. The main concern back then was figuring out what over qualified university graduates and ex-industrial workers were going to do, and many ended up in low-wage service industry jobs or dubious post-modern occupations like counseling and public relations.

Today, we know longer have to worry about creating occupations and in theory can focus on directly labour to where it is most needed. However, in the meantime most conservatives and right liberals seem to have forgotten that we have large numbers of workers engaged in low productivity service jobs and that we are continuing to train more workers for such occupations.

Here in New Zealand for example, we have an excessively large retail sector for the size of our economy, and it would be advantageous if the government encouraged more workers into other sectors by restricting applications for new mega stores and shopping malls.

There are also some sectors of the service economy with negative social pathologies which we can consider shutting down altogether or at least severely restricting. If we have a serious labour shortage then prostitution should be made illegal, and gambling should be tightly restricted.

There is also a good case for restricting planning applications for fast food restaurants which encourage obesity and ill-health, as well as diverting labour from other, more productive fields like manufacturing and horticulture.

The liberal right will argue that the government shouldn't interfere in the economy to direct workers into particular industries, however we already do this anyway through selective funding of public education and there's nothing particularly radical about trying to manipulate the labour supply in the interests of economic sustainablity. Indeed, most East Asian countries already follow a relatively producerist approach to training and education, with little public funding for service industry based training.

Through the tertiary education system the government has considerable power to affect the future labour supply and there is plenty of fat to trim: entry can be restricted to sports, recreation, liberal arts and generic business courses while incentives to encourage students to take practical and technical courses which address key labour shortages can be further increased.

The relative success of Labour's Modern Apprenticeships initative show's how quickly things can be improved where there is political will and proper liaison with the private sector. One of the strengths of using a corporatist/producerist approach to help deal with labour shortages is that it can have a significant impact in a short space of time.

While it will take 30 years for a baby-boom to have any impact on the labour supply, an aggressive program to direct labour towards essential services and export industries could bear serious fruit in 5-10 years.