That's the basic law of economics when the supply of a good or service is constant. There's been some discussion of late about the scarcity of print workers and the need for many thousands of them. One of the clues as to whether or not there is true demand for or a shortage of workers is the change in wage levels that the marketplace offers. If wages are up, there is greater demand for workers; and if wages are down, there is obviously not. Wages are the prices set by the interaction of workers and employers in a marketplace for long-term work. Higher wages attract workers who had previously been outside the industry; lower wages inside one industry send discouraged workers elsewhere.

　　The level of wages is, of course, subject to many factors. Technology and productivity don't always have the effect of decreasing total wages. Because these factors can create specialists in new jobs (for example, when ad agencies hire specialists in "search marketing," an area that did not exist three years ago), these jobs are highly paid until the skill becomes more prevalent. Technology also standardizes jobs, such as when a task becomes automated. A good example is Adobe Photoshop, where many of its menu items are invoked instantly when not that long ago those tasks were executed by skilled craftworkers billed out at $50 or more an hour... in the 1980s. Those 1980 color separations that would have cost a thousand dollars are now done by workers whose desktop color scanners cost one-third of the price of a single set of separations.

　　Printers have long complained about not being able to find qualified workers, much like they have complained about industry prices and industry capacity. When they claim to not be able to find qualified workers, what they refer to is "workers with the skills I need at a price I believe I can afford to pay." The emphasis is on the "afford to pay" part. Printers are not in the marketplace looking for workers at any price; if they were, wage levels would be in a perpetual upward trend. Indeed, there are many alternatives to workers who can't be found. An obvious one is to buy some kind of capital equipment or software that performs the needed tasks or allows already-employed workers to do them (such as when designers do their own color scanning). Also, many tasks can be outsourced, such as asking a commercial photographer to supply files in needed digital formats. Designers can also take pictures themselves using a digital camera.

　　The printing industry has a long tradition of relatively efficient use of labor. There have always been craftspeople and trade services. In New York City, for example, there were many buildings in the Varick Street area that had typesetters, printers, binders, finishers, collators, separators, platemakers, brokers-all in the same building. I have often joked that the Internet had its beginnings as a freight elevator in these kinds of buildings. That's how materials and labor moved between practitioners in a cost- and skill-effective manner at the time, because physical proximity was very important at a time when there was no such thing as digital files or digital communications.

　　Another thing we know is that profits are so tight, it is not affordable to hire labor that isn't fully utilized over long periods of time. Therefore, use of trade services is still a way that the industry gets more economic use of its skills and its capital equipment.

　　There's an old saw about what an "incestuous" industry this is. This means that workers freely go from company to company, staying in the industry, just changing employers. Many of those job changes are forced because so many printing companies exit and enter the business or change their corporate structures in some way. Overall, the Commerce Department data reflect a rough average of 3,000 closures and 2,000 openings a year for more than a decade. Most of these are closing one business down and opening at the same address as something else. This is a common pattern for small business for a variety of reasons.

　　Industry labor flows adapt to this environment which often distort much of the change-tracking mechanisms. A worker who leaves a company to fill an opening at another company does nothing to change the industry's total employment, or the total job openings. Yet the hiring company feels that it has filled a position while the exited company has an obvious position needing filling. This may show up as two distinct job openings when collecting data from the field, though it involves the movement of just one worker from one company to another. Net numbers after these changes are the only ones that really matter.

　　It must also be remembered that there are other markets in which print workers can sell their skills. Just as trade typographers exited the industry, workers who would have landed there found livelihoods in desktop publishing or graphic design. Many new media firms have sought print workers because their skills were transferable and the print workflow trained them well for handling complex jobs and tight deadlines.

　　The chart below (pattern look familiar?) is the thousands of commercial printing workers from 1994 to 2005 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While I have a great love, and some might suggest a skill, for survey-based research, I always prefer data collected under penalty of arrest and possible imprisonment. That is, these data are based on the submissions of Social Security and Medicare taxes. I selected the December employment data for each year; I could have picked any month, and the pattern would have been about the same. If there is a shortage of workers, clearly there would have been no decline in employment. It would have remained level. Yet we find that this chart closely resembles the chart of shipments data. Yes, the number of employees is related to the amount that the industry ships. Therefore as shipments decline, the number of workers decline.

　　Assuming there are worker shortages, wages should rise to attract new workers or retain existing workers. The chart below, based on BLS data as well, shows the hourly wages of production workers; it has been adjusted to 2005 dollars using the CPI. I selected the years 1996, 2003 and 2005 for comparison purposes. The beginning year was easy: it was the first year of wage data available when the switch was made from the old Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system to the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS). I chose 2003 because it was a short time ago and comparison would indicate recent changes. I also had publishing industry data available for those years.
Everything increased in the 1996 to 2005 period, except for "support activities for printing" which is where we find trade shops. In that period, prepress trade shops were declining significantly. None of these increases are worth writing home about. Even the high-flying business of ISPs, search portals, and data processing only went up 3.4%, a sign of how ubiquitous and automated those businesses have become. Printing segments that were more specialized did better. Specialized work usually pays more as an economic rule (brain surgeons always make more money than general practitioners). Commercial litho workers' hourly wages did not even break the 1% mark.

　　The biggest change in earnings was for graphic design workers. Their hourly pay increased by almost 36% after adjusting for inflation. The printing industry has about nine times as many workers than graphic design. The number of graphic design production workers is only up about 10% since 1996. This would imply that there were shortages in this employment area.

　　For the period 2003 to 2005, publishing has had increases in hourly wages while those in all printing categories declined. Graphic designers were up more than 9% for this period, indicating that, if anything, there remains a shortage of design workers, which is probably the reason why publishing production wages went up as they compete for those skills. Graphic design work also lends itself to freelancing, especially with today's tools and connectivity, and keeping workers "gruntled" is a way of keeping them from entering the freelance world.

　　What's so special about graphic design? Look at the tools they have and the tasks they do. They're prepress workers, web designers, site builders, photographic retouchers, layout artists, typesetters, and so much more. So many craft tasks are now programmed into their workstations that it is easy to forget that much of what they do required time-consuming efforts of long-trained craftworkers.

　　The new era of multichannel communications changes the demand for and supply of labor. Today, multiple skills are essential for a sustainable and economically rewarding career. Declining markets mean reduced wages, which propel workers to other positions in other growing markets. These multiple skills create flexibility, adaptability, and resilience for workers and the businesses that employ them.

　　There's another factor at work here (pardon the pun). Printing education is often equipment-specific or process focused. Design education is content-creation or content-deployment focused, with students trained in many different media. Markets have always paid more for ideas than they have for task completion, especially repetitive tasks that can be programmed. Creative ideas can't. Tomorrow's workers need both capabilities to navigate yet unimagined opportunities in a highly competitive global marketplace for skills, but content creation will almost always be better-rewarded.