[FoxBusness] RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapushettes said 'a lot of different factors' are to blame for difficult market in a Fox News Digital exclusive
An "alarming" new study on the future of the labor market puts a spotlight on the lack of employees and a rise in workplace litigation this year.
"The report talks about how 2024, we believe, is going to be one of the most challenging years in the labor market in our lifetime," RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapuchettes said in a Fox News Digital exclusive.
"There's a lot of different factors that are driving that. We see population decline. We see baby boomers retiring. We see a Gen Z workforce that is coming in and not doing productive things in the workplace… The thing that I think is the most alarming fact, though, in the entire report, and one of our big findings was the amount of litigation that's happening in the American workplace today."
RedBalloon's report "2024: The Toughest Labor Market," released Monday, breaks down the factors contributing to the challenging road ahead, but also provides employees with a possible solution.
"To summarize the situation employers face: there are less people overall, fewer working-aged people willing to work, more retirements, a higher number of jobseekers with mental health challenges, and an explosion in labor-related lawsuits against employers," the report says.
One of the predominate factors is the evolving employable demographic. The study notes a decline in population growth is paired with an increasing number of boomers retiring, leaving the labor force to rely on more millennials and Gen Z.
The study observed, however, that there are seven million working-aged men who should be "leading in the labor market" but are unemployed or not actively looking for employment, leaving a "huge hole."
placeholder
"[Working-age men] should be leading in the labor market," Crapuchettes said. "They should be helping the Gen Zers… Working age men, 25 to 65, those are people who should be engaged in labor market and leading in their economies, in their businesses, in their communities. And unfortunately, we're seeing that a lot of them are not engaged in the labor market."
Gen Z workers present new issues for employers.
"Part of that is they've grown up on social media. Forbes believes that the average Gen Z spends four hours a day on social media, and that just gives you a distorted view of reality. And then many of them have gone off to university and also gotten a distorted view of reality, because those universities are not focused on meritocracy in the way that you really have… to be successful in the workplace," Crapuchettes argued.
The study explained the Gen Z labor force is increasingly defined by job hopping, mental health challenges and voluntary sidelining.
A March 2024 survey by RedBalloon found that of business owners in the study, 68% said Gen Zers are the "least reliable" employees and 64% said Gen Zers are likely to cause division and toxicity in the workplace.
|
