A Workers' Market

Union-shop steward, emerging from a meeting with management to face a group of workers: "Brothers, we've got it made. From now on, we will work only on Wednesdays."

Irritated voice from the crowd: "You mean EVERY Wednesday?"

This story is making the rounds in Western Europe--and a lot of businessmen choke a little as they laugh. Though things have not really reached that stage, the joke symbolizes the changing mood and manner of labor in many of the free world's industrial nations. In prospering northern Europe, in Australia and even in Japan, most of whose economies for centuries have been based on an abundance of cheap and diligent workers, labor shortages are now the rule. Being so sought after, the workers have grown as finicky as French chefs about everything from drafts in the warehouse to the menu in company-subsidized cafeterias.

Sake for Carpenters. Last week mail sorters in Brussels staged a wildcat strike to protest the Belgian postal authorities' insistence that they occasionally work overtime and that they forgo the traditional extra leaves on top of summer vacation. Travelers on a British European Airways flight departing London Airport for Paris sat impatiently aboard their plane for a full hour one recent morning while porters took a coffee break before loading the baggage. In Ireland a three-week-old strike of gravediggers, who demanded longer vacations, is forcing mourners to bury their own dead. In Australia, 100 Queensland packinghouse workers struck for three days because, they cornplained, the beef carcasses were "too hard" to bone; they forced the company to let its meat thaw longer. In West Germany, smart Hausfrauen no longer complain if a German cleaning woman fails to appear on the job; they get to work themselves and woo her back with flowers. In Tokyo, maids quit at 5:30 p.m. to attend night school, and carpenters, who now stop for two tea breaks a day instead of one, expect a free bottle of piping-hot sake when work ends.

Demand for skilled and often for unskilled workers outstrips the supply in Britain (unemployment rate: 1.3%), and in The Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Japan (all .9%), and in West Germany (.5%). The squeeze is tightest in West Germany, which has 683,000 vacant jobs for 106,000 persons on the unemployment rolls. The shortage would be even worse if Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal were not continuing to export labor; of northern Europe's 4,000,000 foreign workers, 24% are in Germany. Even so, wage boosts this year in Germany (8%) and England (61%) have leaped ahead of productivity increases and are a major factor in those two nations' inflationary spirals.

Poachers in the Mines. Employers fret about all this, but they have their hands full just competing for help. Because labor has become more precious than goods, German manufacturers wink at pilferage that costs them an estimated $1 billion a year. Dutch housebuilders commonly pay their men "black salaries"--10% to 20% above the legal limit--or lose them; last year 18 small Dutch textile mills closed for lack of workers. Belgian coal companies, which fly in weekly planeloads of Turkish miners, cry that Dutch and German labor poachers steal their recruits almost as fast as they arrive.

Barring a worldwide recession, labor shortages in these highly industrialized areas seem likely to increase, probably for a decade, despite automation. Western Europe's labor force is growing only half as fast as that of the U.S., and rising industrialization in southern Europe is expected to curb the flow of job seekers across international borders. In fact, before long, the tide may even reverse a bit. Industries around Milan and Turin have begun buying ads in Dutch and German newspapers offering good jobs at home to trained workers. This, of course, irks the Dutch and Germans, who paid for the workers' training--and know that they will be increasingly difficult to replace.

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