I don't know that I've heard it at all in the media. Haven't been paying much attention to the talking heads. This is my own personal opinion.
I'm in manufacturing and construction. With that, I do a lot of buying of supplies so I'm in contact with people from all sorts of industries (lumber, windows, doors, adhesives, metal plates, rebar, concrete, heavy equipment, etc)
I don't know what the unemployment rate truly is vs what is being reported, but I can tell you this with 100% certainty - there isn't a single company that I deal with that isn't struggling to find workers. And I'm not talking about "We need to hire another person". I'm talking about truss shops trying to find 40 people and getting ZERO applications. Most of my business calls - which are usually just about product procurement - quickly turn to a discussion of employee staffing. It is a huge, wide-spread problem both here in the States and up in Canada.
But on the business side, we are all busier than ever because the housing market is crazy right now. Most construction companies are busier than they've ever been, but the supply is a major problem because there aren't enough workers to feed the machines. I talked to a supplier in Minnesota yesterday, and he's about 150 trucks of OSB behind on orders and if he doesn't get product soon he will be completely out next week. That will result in hundreds of jobsites that will come to a screeching halt.
I don't really care about the politics behind minimum wage and extra unemployment dollars or Covid stimulus money - but I've been talking about the labor shortage for a long time now - and it's only gotten worse as we've "progressed" through the pandemnic.
Prices across the board are WAY up because supply is crunched and demand is through the roof because the end user still has money to spend - sooner or later something's gotta give. This isn't sustainable. It's already a bad situation - but it's going to get way, way worse before too long.
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