There are a number of caveats to this. I appreciate that. But it is actually quite funny seeing this occur, across the "West", pretty much in most developed countries now, not just in the "Anglosphere"...
It's partially a consequence of 'Rona, and the government policies that various countries went for, in response to that. It's partially because of vaccine mandates. It's partly because, so we're told, a bunch of Boomers used 'Rona as the final push they needed, I guess, to retire, and get out. As a result of all that, though? Massive labour shortages, almost everywhere you look.
Media orgs and governments never admit this, but one of the only reasons that this situation can possibly exist is that young people are, increasingly, hugely overqualified, and are unwilling to take positions that they feel are somehow "beneath" them, or basically anything that they might consider "working class" or "unskilled"...
Previous to now, you also had employers not hiring people, because they were "overqualified" (amusingly, had that problem myself. Not anymore, lol), but now, most are seemingly so desperate that this excuse has gone out the window...
In essence though, in much of the world - the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, NZ, Germany, et al, society has spent the last 30-40 years telling young people that the only way to succeed is to: get a degree, probably get another degree, become a "professional" and fuck and/or backstab your way "to the top"...
No wonder young people have become so deluded as to think that manual labour, manufacturing, agriculture, whatever, is all beneath them. Especially when, in Australia at least, you still need to get qualifications, in order to do pretty much any of those jobs...
This was never sustainable. Nor were the ever-increasing levels of "student debt", across much of the West. Yet only now is it seemingly really coming home to roost, and still, it's pretty unlikely you will see anyone with power or influence admitting to any of this...
Personally, I can't wait until the day that this entire (economic, societal, political) house of cards comes crashing down.
I don't entirely think we are a society of overpaid blobs. I think we just have a swath of overpaid bureaucratic parasites from the Social Justice Racket, weighing down the economy.
The reason we have to pay trade skills as much as they get is because of the shortage on tradesmen, and the oversupply of bureaucrats. However, those jobs, indeed: those industries, do exist.
Take our oil industry as a comparison. Nobody who works on an oil rig is just lazily or happily doing nothing all day, even the management. Part of how Trump got us to being energy independent is because we expanded the amount of offshore oil drilling we had very dramatically. While I'm sure the oil companies would love for Petroleum Engineers to be paid less that $150,000 /year starting salary, they do have people that can do it. At that wage, they can get the people they need.
Most of the time, that's really what most of these major companies mean by "labor shortage", they really mean "labor shortage at this wage". Most of the truly massive corporations would rather import 30 million people a year in the hope that some random number of those will end up working in their industry, rather than raising wages by $5 /hr, and the government agrees with them.
We wouldn't have to worry about cheap labor in America if Globalists hadn't decided that Communist Slave Labor systems should be the manufacturing source for all world commodities.