High-Speed Internet Boom Hits Low-Tech Snag: A Labor Shortage

Pay them more. There is no labor shortage, simply a shortage of workers unwilling to accept jobs at this compensation. The complaint put forth in the piece is "we cannot compress the wages of these folks because there is no labor surplus to leverage." This arrives eventually due to working age cohort demographic compression (citations below), we're still in early days though.

The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30/trump-imm... | https://archive.today/DranI - January 30th, 2026

Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)

HN Search: labor shortage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month)