Birth rates. Pension ages. Increasing ill-health. Migration. A host of issues are increasingly seen through the prism of a shortage of the workers we need.
The way to motivate staff is to treat each of them as an individual, with flexibile conditions and a pay offer to reward success and hard work.
Allowing Matt Hancock to jet off to imaginary South Korean firms – or to eat very real kangaroo testicles down in Oz – is the price one pays for half-decent representatives.
By holding firm, the Government should make clear to striking teachers it is not only their own time they are wasting but that of a generation of pupils who have already lost too much.
There is next to no support among its ranks in the Commons for more immigration, liberalising planning law and improving access to European markets.
These changes would be resisted by the trade unions – understandably as it would render them pretty irrelevant. But their members would be empowered.
We will see whether that number grows or falls if the dispute is still unresolved at the end of January – the month in which pressures on the NHS are often at their most intense.
Where there is need, front line staff like doctors and nurses are underpaid, relative to what they should receive, and where there isn’t, a whole host of people are well paid.
There is a limit to what can fairly and sensibly be achieved by raising other taxes and cutting public spending – especially when it comes to pay.
Some Tory members would see such a development as nothing less than an establishment coup: as a conspiracy of bad actors working together to win revenge for Brexit.
At PMQs, he demanded the Government meet with the RMT. But what would the current Shadow Cabinet do in such a meeting?
In future, the economy may run into inflation bottlenecks earlier in economic recoveries than before, thus constraining growth.
A key economic problem during the 1980s was union power. Now it is weak incentives to move and retrain.
If the war lasts a few years at most, the Chancellor can take the hit. If it’s a new normal that lasts for decades, the outlook is grim.
It needs to pull the help it has already provided into an account that shows the scale of the adjustment we are going through.