Things are Bad When the Army is Your Backup Workforce

When cammies replace scrubs at your local hospital.

The past few months have seen much talk about product shortages due to the labor shortage (a misnomer is ever there was one) and the supply chain debacle. Horror stories from grocery stores and photos of unstocked shelves have been making the rounds on the more alarmist websites.

While there is some truth that stores aren’t getting 100% of what they ordered on time, that might just be a sign that retailers (and by proxy, consumers) had outlandish demands that just-in-time logistics were only able to meet by creating huge externalities that didn’t show up on a corporate balance sheet, such as air and water pollution, slave labor, vast material waste, etc.

However, the labor and supply crunches are starting to have the type of catastrophic impact we fear in a few critical areas, to the point where governments are considering bring in the army to help alleviate the pressure.

And anytime the military comes in to help with a domestic issue, you know things are bad.

England’s Petrol Woes

Across the country, English gasoline stations are running out of fuel, with a majority of them completely sold out.

The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents almost 5,500 independent outlets, said about two-thirds of its members were reporting that they had sold out their fuel, with the rest “partly dry and running out soon.”

I’m not sure about you, but I would be worried if only 1 out of every 3 gas stations in my area suddenly didn’t have any gas. If I were to catch wind of that news, you can bet that my wife and I would be next in line to fill up our tanks and top off our lawnmower gas containers.

Which is exactly what happened in Britain. Panic buying is just accelerating the problem, sucking the tanks dry in record time. Some people put the lack of fuel squarely on the shoulders of panic buying, but they really shouldn’t.

Roland McKibbin, a self-employed electrician in London, said he had had to cancel jobs because he couldn’t get gas.

“I rely on fuel to travel to jobs, no fuel means I can’t drive, which means I can’t get to jobs with my tools,” he said. “So, basically, the panic-buying idiots have lost me income, and directly taken food off the table for my wife and 5-year-old son, because I can’t wire people’s houses from home, unfortunately.”

But the problem isn’t that the country doesn’t have any gas. The real problem is that England doesn’t have any truck drivers. Some of the reasons are being felt by everyone (e.g. the pandemic), but some of the reasons are self-inflicted.

The haulage industry says the U.K. is short as many as 100,000 truckers, due to a perfect storm of factors including the coronavirus pandemic, an aging workforce and an exodus of foreign workers following Britain’s departure from the European Union last year.

Post-Brexit immigration rules mean EU citizens can no longer live and work visa-free in Britain, as they could when the U.K. was a member of the bloc.

So what’s a country to do when it has all the gas it needs, but it’s all stuck at the terminals and the refineries?

For starters, they’ll start by allowing and additional 5,000 visas for truck divers from neighboring countries. But if you think that 5,000 is a small number to combat a shortage of 100,000 drivers, you are not alone.

And the UK goverment knows it.

Their next step? Bring in the army.

Petrol Retailers Association chairman Brian Madderson said training had been taking place “in the background” for military personnel to drive tankers.

The government said it had “no plans at the moment” to deploy troops, but was making preparations just in case.

Not a good sign.

New York Hospitals in Shambles

Something similar is happening in the state of New York but for entirely different reasons.

New York does not have to deal with the shoddy politics and economics of Brexit. Instead, it need to deal with wholesale idiocy of its healthcare workers refusing the COVID vaccine.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is considering employing the National Guard and out-of-state medical workers to fill hospital staffing shortages with tens of thousands of workers possibly losing their jobs for not meeting a Monday deadline for mandated COVID-19 vaccination.

Hochul said the state was also looking at using National Guard officers with medical training to keep hospitals and other medical facilities adequately staffed. Some 16% of the state’s 450,000 hospital staff, or roughly 72,000 workers, have not been fully vaccinated, the governor’s office said.

The excerpt above was from an article written on Sunday, September 26. My article is being published on Monday, September 27. There is no way that 72,000 people will be fully vaccinated in 1 day, so people are absolutely going to lose their jobs.

A miracle may occur for these workers, similar to that of the New York school teachers, who received a temporary injunction against their vaccine mandate. But I doubt that will happen in the short timeline available.

To fill the gap created by unvaccinated workers, the state will turn to the National Guard.

This is a nightmare on several fronts, as the fired employees don’t receive unemployment, there will still be thousands of unfilled vacancies, and the National Guard will be occupied by this self-made emergency and not available for other disasters.

The Takeaway

I don’t mean to be alarmist here, but things aren’t going well when the military is your primary backup to solving domestic economic problems.

England screwed itself with the terms of Brexit.

America screwed itself with vaccine misinformation.

And now we’re both paying the piper.

National and international economies are not kiddie rides; they are roller coasters of epic proportions. Everything seems smooth on the ride up, but then the plunge comes and all hell breaks loose.

Just in case a similar situation comes to you, be sure to have your gas tanks topped off and your vaccines (COVID or otherwise) up to date.

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