The skills gap narrative consistently serves employer interests by attributing the inadequacy of wages to the inadequacy of workers.
What the Skills Gap Claims
The skills gap narrative — the claim that a significant mismatch between the skills workers have and the skills employers need is responsible for unemployment, wage stagnation, and economic underperformance — is one of the most pervasive and most politically consequential framings in contemporary labour market discourse. It attributes the inadequacy of workers' economic outcomes to the inadequacy of workers' skills rather than to the inadequacy of wages, the structure of labour market institutions, or the decisions of employers about how to organise work. In a genuine skills gap, wages for scarce skills should rise as employers compete for the limited supply. Persistent low wages in sectors that claim skills shortages are more consistent with employers unwilling to pay the market-clearing wage than with a genuine shortage of those skills.
The skills gap is real in some labour markets and exaggerated in most. Where it is exaggerated, it serves as a politically convenient explanation for wage inadequacy that attributes the inadequacy to workers rather than to the labour market institutions and employer decisions that actually produce it.
Discussion