I wish people would stop saying this. It's pedantic and doesn't reflect what's happening. There are 5 million fewer people working today than before the pandemic. It's an actual shortage.
If you raise wages and get employees from your competitor, then you’ve moved the labor shortage to another company but it still exists.
The only way raising wages helps with a labor shortage is if you hire from a pool of people either currently unemployed or people working in a field with a labor surplus. For the latter, I don’t know what fields have a labor surplus right now and it’s uncommon for people to be skilled enough to do two completely different skilled labor jobs that are worth equal pay that this can be an option for the company.
For the second group, hiring the unemployed, $10 an hour is already significantly more than $0. So if you think raising it more would make a difference, you need to explain what $11 an hour would do that $10 doesn’t.
For instance, some people can’t work because the cost of daycare exceeds the income they’d bring in. Raising wages could change that formula… though I’ve also heard from daycare operators that they are dealing with a labor shortage. If they raise wages then they raise daycare costs then other companies need to raise their wages even more.
Some people can’t work because school is doing remote learning. These people can’t work no matter what the wages offered are.
That fundamentally is because of the increasing value of capital over labour and the supremacy of efficient monopolists over the small businessmen. Simply small businesses cannot make good business models where their workers are getting paid twenty bucks. It's about the expansion of the welfare state to fill the gap where these small businesses are failing, we have seen the expansion of pseudo universal basic income programs to fill the gaps that small businesses could not fill.
The problem is not a labor shortage, we've figured out the labor shortage, we have more labor than you can shake stick at. The bigger and more fundamental issue is the concentration of power in big monopolists and the increasing irrelevance of small businesses which can only hope to ensure enough of the population is impoverished and enough of the welfare state goes through them that people will come crawling back to their jobs mopping up the bathroom at a wing shack for poverty wages. Yet the writing is on the wall that the "labor shortage" will be resolved by having these businesses close down, and then when there are no open job postings, just like that the "labor shortage" will disappear being revealed as nothing more than the propaganda of a faltering social class.
We will then be forced to deal with the real problem which is the fact that labor can't produce enough surplus output to provide for themselves. The terrifying reality of this automated world, accelerated by a global pandemic. There is no pedantry going on here, because pedantry refers to people nitpicking minor details, calling this a "labor shortage" is COMPLETELY missing the point.
No, there's a shortage.