the.com/labor pool
The talent swamp employers fish from, then complain there's no fish.
means The total supply of people available and qualified to work, from which employers draw their hires.
from A straightforward 20th-century compound: 'labor' (work, or those who do it, from Latin 'labor' meaning toil or hardship) plus 'pool' in its sense of a shared reserve or collective resource — the same metaphor as 'car pool' or 'typing pool,' where individuals are pooled together as an interchangeable, dippable resource rather than named persons.
- not a pool
- nobody's relaxing, everyone's treading water
- shrinks visibly
- aging populations drain it faster than it refills
- economists love it
- treats humans as liquid, fungible, poolable resource
- size matters
- larger pool usually means lower wages offered