On-Demand Labor Can Fill Your Workforce Shortage

The Real Reason Warehouses Can’t Solve the Shift Problem

Everybody in distribution and manufacturing knows the workforce shortage numbers.

Seventy-four percent of employers in transport, logistics and automotive report talent shortages, according to Manpower. Transportation and warehousing logged 162,000 voluntary quits in March alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Thirty-six percent of workers miss shifts due to pain or exhaustion, data from Modern Materials Handling show.

The usual explanations follow: uncompetitive pay, dirty restrooms and depressing break rooms. Fix that and the workers will come.

Those problems are real. But labor shortages go beyond that.

The deeper issue is that the American workforce has been quietly re-architecting itself for 70 years. And most employers haven’t noticed.

From One Paycheck to Two – and Then Something Else Entirely

In the 1950s, the American family ran on a single income. The husband worked. The wife ran the household.

True, only about 60% of children actually lived in that “ideal” structure – which means 40% didn’t. But most employers built their workforce models around that clear cultural expectation.

By the 1970s, rising costs and the women’s rights movement changed the equation. Women entered the workforce in large numbers, and dual-income households grew.

Today, roughly 60% of married couples both work. Average household income in dual-earner families runs around $100,000 annually. That sounds comfortable until you add the 20 hours a week those families spend coordinating childcare.

During COVID and after the pandemic, remote work scrambled the model further. According to the latest Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, roughly 25% of all paid workdays in the U.S. are now worked from home.

That number has held steady for the past two years. We’re not going back to pre-2020. And that’s a big reason the workforce shortage in warehousing and manufacturing keeps getting worse.

The Family Has Become the Scheduling Department

The SWAA data reveals what most workforce analysts gloss over. The gap between how much employees want to work from home and what employers plan to offer has hovered around half a day per week for years.

Employees want more flexibility than they’re getting. That kind of tension doesn’t disappear. It finds an outlet.

Increasingly, that outlet is gig work. About 9% of adults now perform short-term tasks – rideshare, delivery, odd jobs – as part of their income mix.

That’s the workforce shortage hiding in plain sight.

Women more often cite family obligations as a reason they don’t hold traditional jobs. But over the decades, men have taken on more caregiving roles. “Mr. Mom” arrangements are not remarkable anymore.

That is a workforce with a strategic view, not a lazy one.

Families now make deliberate decisions about who works where, when and how – optimizing for childcare coverage, flexibility and income stability all at once. Birth rates are at historic lows partly because couples wait until they can afford – in time and money – to have children.

Work must fit inside that calculation. Or workers find something that does.

The SWAA Data Tells a Different Story

The SWAA breakdown is worth sitting with for a moment. Among full-time employees over the past year, 62% worked fully on-site, 26% were in hybrid arrangements and 12% were fully remote. College-educated workers – the ones with the most options – work from home on roughly 30% of their paid days.

Those with graduate degrees: 31%. Those with a high school diploma or less: 19%.

That last number matters most for warehousing and manufacturing.

Even workers who cannot work remotely – the people stacking pallets, running assembly lines, driving trucks – are watching their peers and spouses gain flexibility. They want some version of it too. That falls squarely into my third bucket of reinventing work, a framework I’ve been pushing on executives for years.

These workers don’t necessarily want to clock in from a laptop at a coffee shop. But they do want more control over their schedule. They want the ability to say yes to a shift on Tuesday and no to one on Thursday, because Thursday is a school day and the other parent is traveling.

That’s why companies have been calling us. Full-time, fixed-schedule employment doesn’t provide those flexible schedules. On-demand labor does. And on-demand labor can fill that workforce shortage hole.

The Workforce Shortage Has a Family-Shaped Hole in It

Most manufacturing and logistics workforce planners think they have a supply problem – not enough bodies in the labor market. Therefore, you must attract more bodies with higher wages and better conditions.

Those things help. But they don’t solve the deeper, structural problem. The jobs on offer don’t match the lives workers actually live.

On-demand labor solves this because workers can say yes when they can and pass when they can’t – without losing the relationship with the employer. Workers who can give you 30 hours this week but only 12 next week aren’t unreliable. They’re managing a family. Give them a model that accommodates that, and you get motivated, skilled workers who show up.

The fill rates and turnover numbers we have seen with our on-demand labor partners bear that out.

Your Labor Strategy Is Built for 1985

Nicer break rooms won’t solve the workforce shortage in warehousing, distribution and manufacturing. The demographic shifts and behavioral changes have been building for decades. That means your long-term labor strategy must adapt.

Start by mapping your actual labor variability. Do you need 200 workers on Monday and 80 on Wednesday? Do volumes spike the first Friday of every month? If your demand fluctuates – and it almost certainly does – you already subsidize idle labor on slow days and scramble on busy ones.

On-demand labor lets you match workforce to workload. Tompkins Ventures can match you with partners who bring vetted, trained workers, not warm bodies you have to teach from scratch. All with app-based technology that gives you real-time visibility into fill rates and performance.

I’d love to hear how you’re navigating the workforce shortage in your operations. Drop me a line and let’s talk through what on-demand labor could do for your enterprise.

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