💼 Axios AM: Workers needed — everywhere

🍳 Good Sunday morning! Erica Pandey is your host — reach her at [email protected].

• Smart Brevity™ count: 1,365 words ... 5 mins. Edited by Donica Phifer.

Wherever you look, America is facing acute worker shortages in some of its vital occupations — teachers, bus drivers, cops, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, surveyors, pilots, air traffic controllers and more.

• Some of the highest-stakes workplaces — hospitals and prisons — are also badly short-staffed.

Why it matters: Understaffing in these industries goes beyond inconvenience, with dire potential consequences for public health and safety, Axios' Emily Peck reports.

🧠 What's happening: The causes are demographic, economic and social.

1. Americans are getting older, meaning fewer younger people of working age.
2. Add the tight labor market — unemployment in the U.S. is very low — and there simply aren't enough workers in the U.S. to meet demand.
3. Plus Americans opted out of government jobs after the COVID shock, even as the private sector rebounded.

🔎 Between the lines: Some of these high-stakes shortages are about wages.

• Government jobs, including teaching and law enforcement, typically can't raise pay high enough to compete with businesses.
• Some of them are about working conditions: Employers trying to fill in-person, high-stress roles are competing with jobs that offer more flexibility, including remote work.
• And some of them are about skills: There are only so many people with a ton of expertise creating AI programs, for example. That's the problem in nursing, too.

Read on below about the most dire shortages.

Here are a few of the danger zones, via the Axios experts:

🤖 A lack of qualified workers in AI and manufacturing threatens to slow productivity and growth in areas where the U.S. is otherwise poised for huge leaps.

• That's a problem not just for companies in those sectors, but for the broader economy.
• More professionals are needed in deep learning, natural language processing and robotic process automation, the Financial Times reports.

🧸 Parents are feeling the labor squeeze on multiple fronts:

• Schools nationwide are understaffed, crying for more teachers, bus drivers and social workers.
• Child care: Parents often either can't find it or can't afford it. That can cause them to stay on the sidelines of the labor force — making the worker shortage that much worse.

✈️ A shortage of air traffic controllers is contributing to an increase in near-miss collisions, the New York Times reports.

• "While there have been no major U.S. plane crashes in more than a decade," The Times notes, "potentially dangerous incidents are occurring far more frequently than almost anyone realizes — a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress."

🚓 Police departments have faced mass early retirements, fueled by plummeting morale.

• Prisons have the same issue: 21% of correctional officer positions were unstaffed in federal prisons last fall, according to administration data. A staffing shortage throughout the Bureau of Prisons is increasing inmate violence, and leading to more health problems for prisoners.

🔨 Fortunate enough to be planning construction or remodeling? Good luck. Many younger workers have shunned the building trades of their parents.

• "As existing housing stock ages and demand rises for repairs and upgrades, we need to get more young people into the business — fast," writes Thumbtack, the home-repair search firm.
• An encouraging sign: High-school shop class, after waning for 30 years amid the zest for college prep, is making a comeback.

Go deeper below on the outlook for workers.

For workers, this isn't a crisis. A tight labor market means higher pay, better benefits and more congenial employers, Axios' Emily Peck writes.

• If not for the tight labor market, UPS likely wouldn't have given such a generous contract to union workers — with some drivers earning $170,000 a year in pay and benefits by the end of the five-year contract.

🥊 Reality check: Plenty of employers have figured out ways to adjust to this new normal — particularly retailers and restaurants.

• They've raised pay significantly — or are relying more on automation, including self-checkout.

The bottom line: Demographic reality means labor shortages are likely with us for the foreseeable future.

• Three things could change that: a surge in immigration ... a surprise flood of sidelined women into the workforce ... or a recession that drives down demand for employees.

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Above: A person holds an image of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as they listen to speakers during the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., yesterday.

Yolanda King, the 15-year-old granddaughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., roused marchers with remarks delivered from the same spot her grandfather gave the "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963, AP notes.

As thousands gathered in Washington, D.C., yesterday, for the anniversary of the historic civil rights march, a masked white gunman shot and killed three Black people at a store in Jacksonville, Florida.

• The attack was motivated by racism and hatred, local officials said.

The victims, two men and one woman, were gunned down at a Dollar General store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Jacksonville, AP reports.

• The shooter was carrying a firearm with a painted swastika and issued racist statements before the shooting. He killed himself at the scene.

Shortly before he went to Dollar General, the shooter was spotted on the nearby campus of Edward Waters University, a historically Black institution, and a campus security officer asked him to leave.

• Get the latest.

Over a dozen of former President Trump's close allies face growing legal bills when he's least able to help — and they're turning to desperate measures to raise money for their fights, Axios' Erin Doherty writes.

Why it matters: Trump's co-defendants in the Fulton County case each need legal teams that could cost well into the six figures.

• "I don't see anyone's fee less than $250,000-500,000" unless they strike a plea deal with prosecutors, Cornell Law School adjunct professor Randy Zelin told Axios.

Ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani faces "financial difficulties," his attorneys wrote in a filing earlier this month in a civil defamation case.

• After Giuliani personally implored the former president to pay legal bills, Trump is now scheduled to attend a $100,000 per person fundraiser for Giuliani at his club in Bedminster, N.J., per The New York Times.

Some co-defendants are turning to crowdfunding.

• Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer, posted on "X" that she "was reliably informed Trump isn't funding any of us who are indicted."
• As of Friday afternoon, she had received more than $161,000 in donations, according to a GiveSendGo page.

Cathy Latham, another co-defendant who is a former Republican Party chair of Coffee County, Georgia, wrote on a crowdfunding page that she is a "retired public school teacher living on a teacher's pension."

🥊 Chaser: The mug shot gave Trump's campaign its best 24 hours of fundraising yet — $4.18 million on Friday, and $7.1 million through last night. More from Axios' Bark Ravid.

• Go deeper.

Bob Barker, the legendary host of "The Price Is Right" and a prolific presence on American daytime television for half a century, died yesterday at 99.

• Barker won 14 Daytime Emmy Awards as host of the popular game show and four as executive producer, The New York Times reports. In 1999, he won a lifetime achievement Emmy.

He was also a longtime advocate for animal rights, quitting as host of the Miss America and Miss USA pageants because they handed out fur coats as prizes and protesting for better treatment of animals on movie sets.

There's a peculiar new brunch drink on the market from Eggo and Tennessee's Sugarlands Distilling, The Washington Post reports.

• The concoction is supposed to taste like "toasted Eggo waffles, sweet maple syrup and rich butter, with a hint of smoky bacon."
• The twist? It's quite boozy — at 20% ABV.

The companies released a series of cocktails to try with their new "Brunch in a Jar" liquor, including a particularly strange one called "Morning Chaos" which adds in even more breakfast elements, The Post notes.

• It calls for the Eggo liquor to be mixed with spiced chai syrup, pineapple juice, blood-orange juice and rum.

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