>When I hear employer employers are having "trouble filling positions" I immediately add the words, "for what they want to pay" to the sentence. Keep bumping up the rate and eventually you'll have people falling over themselves to get those jobs. Create outreach programs to get to kids while they're still in high school; offer free training; etc. The job can't support that wage? (shrug) maybe it's not that important. Or maybe they need to work on other incentives (flex time, not expecting everyone to work 50+ hour work weeks, etc.).
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>Taking my example of welders, http://www.careersinwelding.com/salary_information.php shows that many of them make good money. No, $50,000 per year is not going to make you a millionaire, but it is certainly a livable wage.

Yes, but if they're having trouble filling those jobs they are obviously failing to entice people to take them. That means they either aren't paying enough, or people don't know about the jobs, or people that know about them don't have the skills, etc. In any case, they're failing. One dial to turn is pay. Another is quality of life. There are tons of things they can adjust to fix their situation. Hell, they could recruit employees from the unemployed that live within a specific radius around the business, offer free training w/McDonald's wages during the training period + offer to pick them up/drop them off if they didn't have a car. After training ramp the pay up to 70% of the "normal" wage until training was covered, then up to normal wages to keep them from jumping ship.

Just like they have to sell a product to a customer they have to sell the job to the employee (in cases like that where it's not a "buyers market").

I know how to weld (well, I'm not great at it but I could get better). I'd never be interested in doing it as a living. Having said that, if they started offering $175K a year with a 32 hour work week + full benefits I just might be tempted <g> Capitalism works both ways (not always solely for the benefit of the company doing the hiring).